Resilience from Within: Social Networks as a Mitigator of Climate-induced Migration

Climate shocks frequently undermine livelihoods in agrarian economies, prompting households to adopt adverse coping strategies such as migration. Although social networks are recognised as informal insurance mechanisms, their role in mediating climate-induced migration remains underexplored. This study examines how social networks mediate the effect of flooding on migration decisions in Malawi, using the 2019/2020 Malawi Living Standards Measurement Survey and geospatial flood data. Employing causal mediation analysis, we address endogeneity using control function and Lewbel approaches and mitigate selection bias through Heckman correction, propensity score matching and Rosenbaum bound sensitivity tests. Baseline results show a significant mediation effect of 0.041 percentage points, corresponding to a 2.41% compensatory reduction in migration. The mediation effect is statistically significant only for low-intensity flooding (SPI ≥ 1) and among rural households, suggesting that social networks act as substitutive risk-coping mechanisms for relatively vulnerable populations. These findings imply that policy interventions should move beyond reliance on formal financial instruments and instead leverage existing social networks as cost-effective, community-based platforms for climate adaptation. By identifying an actionable pathway through which adaptive capacity can be strengthened, this research contributes directly to achieving SDG 13 on climate action.