Do extreme climate events affect population mobility? The moderating role of food security in prefecture-level China

Extreme climate events are intensifying worldwide, posing significant challenges to population mobility. Most existing studies on population mobility focus mainly on economic drivers, often overlooking how population mobility interacts with extreme climate events and governance factors. This study investigates the impact of extreme climate events on population mobility in China, with particular attention to the moderating role of food security at the prefecture level. This study adopted the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM), population mobility is conceptualized as a risk-coping strategy. Extreme climate events increase uncertainty and reduce population mobility, while food security mitigates these pressures and supports adaptive mobility. Using panel data from 177 Chinese prefecture-level cities for the years 2018-2023, we estimate the effects through two-way fixed effects models and conduct robustness with SYS-GMM estimators. The empirical results show that extreme climate events significantly reduce population mobility, while higher levels of food security moderate this negative relationship and enhance mobility. Heterogeneity analyses further reveal that these effects are conditioned by city scale, regional economic context, and elevation, with smaller cities, different economic regions, and high-altitude areas showing differentiated sensitivity to extreme climate events. The study contributes to debates on climate adaptation by highlighting the role of food systems in shaping demographic responses to environmental change. It also provides policy implications for strengthening food security to manage climate change events and population dynamics in China.