Climate Variability Induced Population Mobility: A case study on peasants’ mobility in Lombok Island, West Nusa Tenggara-Indonesia

The International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPPC) report in 1990 mentioned that climate change has serious impacts on human mobility. This generated awareness among scholars and policy makers on the negative impacts of this phenomenon on human life, particularly pushing them to move away their origins. However, climate change is not a single factor imposing population mobility. It is coupled with decreasing in economic sources, which in turn cause people to look for alternative economics sources in other areas. In agricultural areas, changing in hydrological cycle as an impact of climate change affects agricultural activities. Extreme drought or excessive rainfalls might damage food crop. This inflicts a financial loss upon those who are depended a living on agricultural production because the crop could not be harvested.

This paper discusses migration related to climate change among tobacco and cocoa peasants in Lombok Island, West Nusa Tenggara, a province in eastern Indonesia. The paper also describes the impact of hydrological cycle changing on the two commodities, which leads the farmers to migrate. Analysis of this paper will be based on data from study on the impact of climate change on population mobility conducted by the authors and team in Lombok Island.