**1. Introduction**

Environmental problems resulting from climate change have continued to generate negative impacts on climate-sensitive sectors of African economies. During the twentieth century, the continent faced climate change with a rise in temperature of 0.58°C, with some areas warming even faster than others [1]. Some estimates suggest annual mean surface air temperatures in Africa had risen about 1.5 times the predicted average global increase by 2009 [2, 3]. Despite frequent intense precipitation events, African annual average precipitation has decreased, likely bringing extended droughts. In conjunction with increased prevalence of climate change driven extreme precipitation events, some regions will be increasingly susceptible to both droughts and flooding [2, 4]. This alarming pace of climate change [5] has attracted attention from national and international environmental institutions [3, 6]. Adverse effects of

climate change on social and ecological systems include drought, decreased agricultural production, flooding, and hurricanes. These effects are likely to be pronounced in developing countries because their economies are overwhelmingly based on rain-fed agriculture [7–9].

To cope with adverse situations such as climate change, individuals and households adopt several strategies including urban-rural migration [10]. Several studies have recognized migration as one of the coping strategies to environmental factors [10, 11]. However, connections between migration and climate change are not well studied from a spatial perspective. Rural communities of east Africa's Tanzania are following diverse strategies to cope with the climate change impacts, and internal migration is among the many options for regional livelihood improvement. However, complex linkages between climatic factors and migration in Tanzania have been less thoroughly investigated, especially from a spatial perspective.

Therefore, this study assesses the relationship between climate drivers and migration in Tanzania by explicitly incorporating spatial analysis. We statistically described migration pattern responses to climate drivers, and empirically assessed climate driver-migration pattern relationships using regression and geospatial techniques. Through these efforts we tested the following hypotheses: spatial patterns of temperature and precipitation will be different for migrant and non-migrant households; and temperature and precipitation influence migrant more than non-migrant households.
