2021
Murray-Tortarolo, Guillermo N; Salgado, Mario Marínez
Drought as a driver of Mexico-US migration Journal Article
In: Climatic Change, vol. 164, no. 3-4, 2021.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: climate change, drought, Extreme climate events, food security, Migration
@article{MurrayTortarolo2021b,
title = {Drought as a driver of Mexico-US migration},
author = {Guillermo N Murray-Tortarolo and Mario Marínez Salgado},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03030-2},
doi = {10.1007/s10584-021-03030-2},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-01-01},
journal = {Climatic Change},
volume = {164},
number = {3-4},
publisher = {Springer Science and Business Media LLC},
abstract = {Emigration from Mexico to the USA represents one of the largest current socioeconomic phenomena in the world. Climate, and particularly drought, has been identified as a key driver of peak migratory flows between the two nations. However, current existing studies are constrained by a reduced spatial scale (e.g., a single community or municipality) or a short time-window (e.g. <10 years), which limits our long-term nationwide understanding of the climate-migration relationship. To tackle this, we employed high-resolution (municipal-level) and long-term databases (1970–2009), which included nation-level interviews, border patrol apprehensions, and high-resolution precipitation. Our results showed that the decadal and maximum migratory fluxes in these four decades corresponded to years with low precipitation. In particular, the migration of low-income rural farmers tripled during drought, representing as much as a third of all historical migration. It is very likely that rural people were pushed to leave their lands as the result of strongly diminished rainfed agriculture and pastureland production, their main livelihood. Our results suggest that policy oriented to reduce the negative impacts of drought (such as livestock drought insurances and the provisioning of drought-resistant seeds), particularly to marginal farmers in arid ecosystems, could be an effective way to reduce current and future migratory peaks between Mexico and the USA},
keywords = {climate change, drought, Extreme climate events, food security, Migration},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
2016
Murray-Tortarolo, Guillermo; Friedlingstein, Pierre; Sitch, Stephen; Seneviratne, Sonia I; Fletcher, Imogen; Mueller, Brigitte; Greve, Peter; Anav, Alessandro; Liu, Yi; Ahlström, Anders; Huntingford, Chris; Levis, Sam; Levy, Peter; Lomas, Mark; Poulter, Benjamin; Viovy, Nicholas; Zaehle, Sonke; Zeng, Ning
The dry season intensity as a key driver of NPP trends Journal Article
In: Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 43, no. 6, pp. 2632–2639, 2016, ISSN: 19448007.
Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: drought, dry season length, land carbon cycle
@article{Murray-Tortarolo2016a,
title = {The dry season intensity as a key driver of NPP trends},
author = {Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo and Pierre Friedlingstein and Stephen Sitch and Sonia I Seneviratne and Imogen Fletcher and Brigitte Mueller and Peter Greve and Alessandro Anav and Yi Liu and Anders Ahlström and Chris Huntingford and Sam Levis and Peter Levy and Mark Lomas and Benjamin Poulter and Nicholas Viovy and Sonke Zaehle and Ning Zeng},
doi = {10.1002/2016GL068240},
issn = {19448007},
year = {2016},
date = {2016-01-01},
journal = {Geophysical Research Letters},
volume = {43},
number = {6},
pages = {2632--2639},
abstract = {textcopyright2016. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. We analyze the impacts of changing dry season length and intensity on vegetation productivity and biomass. Our results show a wetness asymmetry in dry ecosystems, with dry seasons becoming drier and wet seasons becoming wetter, likely caused by climate change. The increasingly intense dry seasons were consistently correlated with a decreasing trend in net primary productivity (NPP) and biomass from different products and could potentially mean a reduction of 10-13% in NPP by 2100. We found that annual NPP in dry ecosystems is particularly sensitive to the intensity of the dry season, whereas an increase in precipitation during the wet season has a smaller effect. We conclude that changes in water availability over the dry season affect vegetation throughout the whole year, driving changes in regional NPP. Moreover, these results suggest that usage of seasonal water fluxes is necessary to improve our understanding of the link between water availability and the land carbon cycle.},
keywords = {drought, dry season length, land carbon cycle},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}