Exploring the Relationship between Climate Change and Migration in Western China: a case study in Dulan Tibetan Autonomous County of Qinghai Province

The agricultural poverty alleviation and Development project in Ledu county, Qinghai province is not only the World Bank's Poverty Alleviation Project, but also one of the projects caused intense worldwide controversy. Mainly due to the local ethnic minority , especially the Tibetan population migration. From August 2012 to October 2012, a survey of local ethnic minority immigrants has finished . There are two objectives of this research, one is to analyze complicated relations between climate change and migration in the local area, and another one is explore the adaptive problems of ethnic minority after migrated. This study will through constructing innovative systematic assessment models based on two case study areas in Qinghai province. The research selects Ledu County as the migrant sending area, which is located in Haidong area, while the selected migration receiving area is Dulan County in Haixi area. The study area focuses on rural western China because this region has been identified as a hotspot where climate change will have its greatest effect on migration, and this study area has also been experiencing extreme poverty and ethnicity issues. The research combines existing methods with scenarios that determines the relationship between migration and environmental factors as a whole and climate change in particular.