Climate change and ecological migration: A study of villages in the province of Khuzestan, Iran

Abstract

Although the most extensive immigration flows among urban and rural settlements have so far been economic migrations, climate change has recently become a decisive factor for migration in many parts of the world with ecological migration becoming the dominant model in these demographic movements. Khuzestan province with a strategic position in southwest of Iran and with a 30% share of rural population is one of the provinces that has been affected by widespread climate change over the past two decades, experiencing massive population movements, especially in the rural areas. Studies have shown that the increasing trend of temperature and the decreasing trend of precipitation are the most important and most obvious outcomes of climate change that has provided a platform for population displacement in rural areas of Khuzestan. This enormous flow in the rural parts of the province has become a multi-level (local, regional, national and even international) challenge. The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the effects of climate change on demographic movements in the rural settlements of Khuzestan province. The study is descriptive-analytic and the information is extracted from the database of the Statistics Center of Iran. Statistical analysis has shown that the decline in the rates of rural population growth from −02 in 1986 to −4.6 in 2017 and the evacuation of more than 2,398 villages over 1986−2017 have been directly and indirectly related to the diverse effects of climate change.