Examining Mediating Effect of Climate Change Worry Between Climate Change Anxiety and Divergent Migration: A Scale to Measure Climate-Induced Post-migration Anxiety and Stress

The agricultural sector is predominantly a climate-sensitive sector. Sadly, the extreme climatic variation in the recent years has forced farmers to migrate resulting in non-marginal cognitive adjustments due to economic losses, displacement and lack of adaptability to climate shocks in post-migration location. The current study aims at analysing the mediating role of climate change worry (CCW) between climate change anxiety (CCA) and divergent migration (DM) among farmers of cyclone-prone Ganjam district, Odisha. Further, this chapter intends to develop a novel single scale in order to map the extent of anxiety and stress among the migrated farmers in the post-migration phase. Based on the prior literature, this study has performed a path analysis keeping CCW as a mediator between CCA and DM. The hypothesis is tested using AMOS 23 on a data set of 552 farmers in pre-migration stage. Further, in developing 28-item Climate-Induced Post-Migration Anxiety-Stress (CIPMAS) scale, factor analysis including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis has been used to investigate the factorial structure, construct reliability, and model adequacy for a sample of additional 510 migrated farmers. The results indicate that CCW has a significant influence on CCA anxiety and DM. This study can provide micro-evidence of the contribution of CCA and CCW to farmer’s migration, which will benefit analyses of climate-induced migration in other developing nations with greater agricultural dependence. In addition, valuable interpretations derived from CIPMAS scale can help in policy implication for mapping farmer’s cognitive vulnerability to condense the extent of anxiety and worry in post-migration period.