Economic or Environmental Migration? The Push Factors in Niger

This paper identifies the main environmental problems in Niger and detects their impact on migration at the national and international level. It mainly focuses on droughts, soil degradation, the shrinking of Lake Chad, the Niger River problems, deforestation, and sand intrusion, as important push factors that might influence the migration decision of the people of Niger. The paper addresses the question of whether their decision to migrate is influenced by purely economic or environmental problems and concludes that the economic factor represents the mechanism through which the environmental damage influences migration, introducing hereby the term "environmentally induced economic migration".