EVALUATING THE IMPACTS OF CLIMATE INDUCED MIGRATION ON THE LIVELIHOODS OF THE LOCAL POOR MIGRANTS IN DISTRICT THARPARKAR, PAKISTAN”

Abstract

Severe droughts led to water scarcity in the Thar region. Thus, making conditions unfavourable for agriculture productivity, livestock and human survival., hence motivating the hunger-stricken population to migrate to other regions in the province in pursuit of food and water for themselves as well as for their livestock (Sattar, 2014). People often see migration as the only available coping strategy to avoid the austerity of drought situations. Despite the fact, that the seasonal migration or temporary migration is the persistent occurrence in Tharparkar, whether the migration is temporary or permanent was not assessed. Similarly, whether migration improved or further deteriorated the livelihoods of poor migrants were also neglected in previous studies. Therefore, to fill this gap, this thesis is entirely focused to evaluate the post-migration situation of the climate-induced migrants. Detailed closed-ended questionnaires were administered by expert enumerators to generate first-hand information from the climate-induced migrants within two tehsils Islamkot and Mithi of district Tharparkar. The overall results obtained in the research study shows a mix of different situations. Before migration, 99.4% of the total Households owned some form of the land but after migration, only 10.34% of the households reported that they have land. Similarly, 99.3% of the households before migration owned livestock but this figure reduced to 96.5% after migration. The Wilcoxon sign test (significance) p-value is less than 0.05 for the land and livestock, therefore, it is admissible to say that drought or climate induced migration had significantly affected the land ownership and livestock after migration. Conversely, while indicators for financial capital such as income and savings show a positive trend. For instance, before migration majority of the households (86%) earnings were less than 15000 PKR but after migration, households earning less than 15000 reduced to 51.7% while households earning between 16000-25000 and 26000-35000 simultaneously increased. Similarly, a number of households saving some proportion of monthly income also increased from 6.8% to 17.9% These changes were also clearly reflected in the P-value of the Wilcoxon sign rank test which is less than 0.05. Therefore, it is clear that the median difference between household income and savings before migration and after the migration is not equalled to zero. Therefore, it is admissible to say that climate-induced migration had significantly affected the financial capital of the migrants.