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Raphael J. Nawrotzki, Fernando Riosmena, Lori M. Hunter, and Daniel M. Runfola

a small proportion (23%) of arable land in Mexico is irrigated (Carr, Lopez and Bilsborrow,
2009), making agricultural production highly dependent on rainfall. In addition, Mexico
experienced severe drought conditions during the study period (Stahle, Cook, Villanueva
Diaz et al., 2009). Under such conditions, an increase in rainfall was likely beneficial, re-
ducing households’ need to employ migration as an adaptation strategy (Feng &
Oppenheimer, 2012; Nawrotzki, Riosmena and Hunter, 2013).
Projections of future climate change suggest that, for Mexico, temperatures will in-
crease (Collins, Knutti, Arblaster et al., 2013) while precipitation will decline (Christensen,
Kanikicharla, Aldrian et al., 2013), potentially leading to an increase in frequency and se-
verity of droughts (Wehner, Easterling, Lawrimore et al., 2011). When livelihoods of ag-
riculturally-dependent households are impacted by adverse climate variability and change,
they may respond with an increase in migration rates (Black, Adger, Arnell et al., 2011a).
Our study suggests that such migrants will be predominantly undocumented. To reduce the
number of undocumented border crossings from Mexico, the U.S. government has sub-
stantially increased the budget for border control and fortification (Massey and Riosmena,
2010; Orrenius, 2004). However, an increase in border fortification has been shown to be
of limited success in deterring undocumented migrations (Massey and Riosmena, 2010).
Livelihood-based support programs to assist rural Mexicans in local climate change adap-
tation efforts may serve as a cost-efficient alternative to border control in decreasing the
number of climate related moves. Such programs may include agricultural extension ser-
vices to disseminate knowledge about the availability and use of drought resistant crop
varieties and alternative farming practices (Nawrotzki and Akeyo, 2009; Schroth,
Laderach, Dempewolf et al., 2009), subsidize the construction of irrigation systems
(Howden, Soussana, Tubiello et al., 2007), or assist households in finding non-agricultural
employment to reduce their dependency on climate-sensitive sectors (Macours, Premand
and Vakis, 2012).

Conflict of Interest and Funding

No conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The authors gratefully acknowledge
support from the Minnesota Population Center (5R24HD041023) and the University of
Colorado Population Center (R24 HD066613), funded through grants from the Eunice
Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
In addition, this work received support from the National Science Foundation funded Terra
Populus project (NSF Award ACI-0940818).
Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for helpful comments and sug-
gestions on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also express our gratitude to Gina Ru-
more for her careful editing and suggestions.
Ethics Statement

The analyses described in this paper were performed using secondary data obtained from
various publicly available sources as outlined in the Data and Methods section.

References

Abu M, Codjoe S N A and Sward J. (2014). Climate change and internal migration intentions in the
forest-savannah transition zone of Ghana. Population and Environment, 35(4): 341–364.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11111-013-0191-y

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