Environmental Shocks and International Migration in Cambodia: Risk Diversification or Coping?

Increasingly, the field of migration has become interested in understanding the links between migration and environmental distress—to what extent these links exist, how they manifest, and what might mediate them. Using nationally representative data from the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey in 2009, this paper explores the impact of environmental shocks on international migration from Cambodia. First, the paper uses multi-level modeling to assess the extent to which village experiences of drought, flood, and crop failure in 2008 are associated with household incidence of international migration in the following year. The paper then explores how these patterns differ by household characteristics. In particular it considers how local environmental shocks interact with household experience of crop loss to better understand whether migration responses to environmental distress are related to direct income loss or are broader responses to increased vulnerability. By disaggregating the importance of environmental shocks among households who experience varying degrees of loss as a result, it contributes to a more complex understanding of how floods, drought, and crop loss at a village level interact with household-level characteristics to influence patterns of international migration.