Environmental Influences on Migration in Rural Ecuador Clark Gray 1 and Richard Bilsborrow 2 Paper for the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America 1 Duke University 2 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Introduction As the evidence for global environmental change has accumulated over the past decade, academics, policymakers, and the media have given more attention to the issue of “environmental refugees.” At issue is whether environmental change will displace large numbers of vulnerable people in the developing world, particularly from rural areas where livelihoods are particularly dependent on climate and natural resources. A widely-cited article (Myers 1997) estimated that more than 25 million people had been displaced by environmental factors by 1995. Similar narratives of widespread environmental displacement have since proliferated online and in the popular press (CARE 2009; New York Times 2009). Skeptics, however, have criticized these numbers as speculation (Black 2001, Hartmann 2010) and identified important disasters in which no significant out-migration occurred (Paul 2005). In fact, despite dozens of academic publications and several international conferences on the issue, well- documented cases of environmentally-induced migration are rare and largely limited to large-scale natural disasters (e.g., Hurricane Katrina: Groen & Polivka 2008). Still unclear are the consequences of smaller-scale but more pervasive forms of environmental change, such as drought, floods and soil degradation, limiting our ability to understand the scale and nature of human displacements under accelerating global environmental change. Fortunately, the combination of survey methods and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers a way forward. Modern survey methods make possible the collection of large-scale, representative data on migration, while satellite imagery and other sources have provided new measures of environmental conditions, and the use of GIS facilitates linkages between the two data sources, though notable methodological challenges remain (Fox et al. 2002). Several studies have combined these approaches to investigate tropical land use change (Walsh & Crews-Meyer 2002), but as yet few studies have examined environmental influences on migration. Exceptions include the ground-breaking study by Henry et al. (2004), and two studies by the first author (Gray 2009; Gray et al. 2009), described in detail below. As of yet, these studies have investigated only a subset of potentially important environmental factors in a few study areas. This paper uses original survey and spatial data from three study areas in rural Ecuador to investigate the influence of multiple environmental factors on internal and international migration. Data were collected through an innovative approach that combined a flexible sampling strategy, collection of event histories at multiple scales, and derivation of community-level biophysical characteristics using