Environmental Variability, Migration, and Rural Livelihoods Funded by NIH, National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development, $147,000 Lori Hunter and Stefan Leyk (University of Colorado at Boulder) Wayne Twine, Mark Collinson, Barend Erasmus (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
This project focuses on the influences of environmental change and variability i.e., changes in local vegetation cover (due to shifts in precipitation/temperature patterns) on migration decision-making and population redistribution in rural South Africa where communities are in heavy dependence on local natural resources. The study area is a health and demographic surveillance site, the Agincourt Health and Population Unit (AHPU). The goal of this research is to model the associations between socioeconomic and environmental processes and to investigate the variation of such relationships across the study area.