Seventeenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Shaped by natural as well as anthropogenic drivers, water scarcity represents a major threat to human safety. By slowly permeating territories and interacting with long-term structural processes, prolonged droughts impact human societies, deeply compromising their self-sustaining abilities and in return constituting a major stressor for their political, economic, and cultural structures as well as dynamics. In addition to the geographical distribution of drying trends being very uneven, the distribution of their effects is also characterized by severe patchiness. The differential impact of these casualties sees some communities as more exposed to socio-economic and environmental adversities than others. Rural communities whose livelihoods depend on water availability and land productivity are at the forefront of this crisis. The pervasiveness of these drying events may constitute an incentive for these groups to consider migration as a solution to cope with the progressive degradation of their territory of origin. Based on a multi-method assessment of human migration in response to water scarcity in the Province of Petorca, Central Chile, this research highlights the complexity of this relationship through the evidence emerged from semi-structured interviews and crossed analysis of demographic and environmental data. An indirect and multi-factorial link between the phenomena is identified. With this investigation, the author calls for further multi-disciplinary research and more robust theoretical understanding of the the socio environmental dynamics underpinning the nexus between environmental migration and water security worldwide.