Carina Goldbach

• Coastal regions are associated with large and growing concentrations of human populations, driven especially by economic growth and in-migration. This rapid coastal development contributes significantly to coastal degradation and, at the same time, leads to an increased exposure of a high number of people to increasing threats of coastal hazards, which holds especially true for the developing country context (Nicholls et al. 2007; Neumann et al. 2015). Therefore, this dissertation tries to shed some light on linkages between migration and coastal environments in two coastal regions in Ghana and Indonesia. More precisely, research 1 addresses the question whether coastal environmental threats are drivers of out-migrations from the two study regions, which experience serious coastal changes like shoreline erosion, land subsidence and recurring floods. A household survey with migrants and non-migrants has been conducted and measures of these rather gradual coastal changes—ranging from individual perceptions to expert categorizations—have been collected. Research 2 tries to explore which other factors are linked to migration decisions to understand how to anticipate migration flows in those regions. It especially focuses on individual time and risk preferences as they are theoretically very likely to influence individual migrations (and also the link between the environment and migration) but have not been much tested empirically. Research 3 addresses the question whether migrants differ from non-migrants in their behavior toward the coastal environment using two promising proxies for actual behavior. The first addresses underlying attitudes toward coastal environments, while the other one focuses on cooperative behavior in a common-pool resource experiment. All three researches combined do not only advance methodological aspects within the migration literature but also help to shed some light on migration issues in coastal regions.