Rural-to-Urban Migration and Projection of Extreme Weather Events: A Case Study of Republic of Serbia

The second half of 20^th century is marked by mass migration from rural to urban areas worldwide as well as in Republic of Serbia. This trend continues in the 21^st century usually as a consequence of pull factors of urban areas (education and job opportunities, affordable healthcare system, comprehensive cultural content, etc.), but also of push factors of rural areas (hard and unstable work in the agricultural sector, poverty, lack of education and health system, etc.). Some of extreme climate events (e.g. droughts, floods) speed up the migration process. In this research, the data that show the increase of urban population and decrease of rural population from 1981 to 2022 are presented. Also, Copernicus Corine Land Cover data are used to present the change of land use from 1990 to 2018. The most densely populated municipalities and municipalities with the highest percentage of agricultural areas are extracted with the aim to consider how sever those communities will be affected by extreme weather events. Future climate projections data (two scenarios RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) are used to express the number of tropical days and nights, heath wave index, number of days with precipitation over 30mm, highest five days precipitation amount, consecutive dry days index and hydro-thermal coefficient. The purpose of this research is to determine did people migrate to urban areas that will be more affected by extreme weather events in 21^st century than the rural regions they moved from and how sever agricultural regions will be affected by droughts and floods as a consequence of lack and intensive precipitation. The data used in this research are downloaded from the Digital Climate Atlas of Serbia, Copernicus Land Monitoring Services and documents published by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. QGIS Open Software is used for data analyses.