Climate change is leading to more extreme weather events and with them, increasing numbers of climate migrants. In new research, Sabrina B. Arias and Christopher W. Blair examine the link between public support for climate migration policies and exposure to climate related natural disasters. Using surveys in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas fielded during 2022’s Hurricane Ian, they find that those who experienced the hurricane were more likely to rate climate migration as an important issue and have greater support for climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. They also find that these effects suffer from recency bias – six months after the hurricane, these effects on attitudes had decayed. 

As climate change makes extreme weather events more common, the number of climate migrants around the world is growing dramatically. Developing policy frameworks to resettle climate migrants is therefore vitally important – but we know little about how to mobilize public support for such measures. In new research, we find that experiencing a climate disaster – in this case a hurricane – increases short-term public support for developing climate migration policy, which suggests that policymaking windows will exist from time to time to advance this type of legislation.

Climate migrants, displacement, and public attitudes

Climate migrants are defined as individuals who leave their homes because of adverse changes in the environment that negatively affect their lives, including short-term climactic impacts – such as hurricanes – or slower-onset changes – like droughts. In the US alone, more than five million people have been displaced due to climate disasters since 2017. Globally, 12,000 people are displaced by climate disasters daily, and an estimated 1.5 billion people may be displaced from Global South countries by 2070.

Given the scale of climate migration, understanding how the public might respond to resettling climate migrants and adopting policy measures to respond to the challenge is an important question to understand. What more can we do to increase public support for climate migration policies? Attitudes toward climate migrants are quite different from other types of migrant groups – including economic migrants, who leave their homes seeking better prospects and opportunities, and refugees, who flee their communities because of the fear of persecution. It makes sense, then, to focus specifically on attitudes towards climate migrants rather than making assumptions based on existing evidence about attitudes towards economic migrants or refugees.

One likely channel is through direct exposure to the effects of climate change – in other words, through personal experiences with natural disasters. Experiencing a climate disaster transforms the abstract threat of climate change into a visible and immediate crisis. These experiences also encourage empathetic perspective-taking which mean that the individual can better relate to the experiences of migrants. For these reasons, we would expect that those who experience a climate disaster are more likely to support resettling climate migrants, adopting policy measures – such as tax increases – to help address these challenges, favoring broader climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, and increasing belief in the science of climate change. This kind of reaction would make sense in light of theories of “rational retrospection,” in which the public responds to external events in rational and predictable ways, updating their attitudes about policymakers, policies, and other relevant actors.

To understand this relationship, we directly examined the effects of exposure to natural disasters on climate migration attitudes. We fielded a weekly survey in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas between August 11 and October 28, 2022. During this time, Hurricane Ian – the deadliest storm in Florida since 1935, the deadliest US hurricane since Katrina in 2005, and the costliest disaster of 2022 – made landfall. By pairing our survey results with geotargeted climate data, we can estimate the causal effect of hurricane exposure on public attitudes. These affected respondents make up an important group to study in terms of the American electorate: the ten most affected counties (Figure 1) in our sample are home to 3.3 million swing voters in two electorally important states.

Figure 1 – Florida, Louisiana, and Texas counties affected by Hurricane Ian, 2022

Note: The dashed red line marks Hurricane Ian’s eyepath.

Personal experience influences empathy towards climate migrants

We find that individuals exposed to the effects of Hurricane Ian have greater support for climate migration policies, and that this exposure increases respondents’ likelihood of rating climate migration as an important issue. We find similar patterns in support for climate change adaptation and mitigation as well as belief in the science of climate change. These effects hold across important demographic differences including partisanship, gender, education, and age, contrasting other recent work that finds disasters only encouraging pro-climate behavior among Democrats. The pro-climate effects of Hurricane Ian were greatest for low-income respondents, who are at the greatest risk from climate change and hence face the greatest challenges, but who are also least able to afford to migrate and tend to face the greatest backlash from those who already live where they are displaced to.

In a follow-up study six months after the Hurricane Ian, however, we find that these effects had decayed, reflecting a “recency bias” in the information that the public views as important in formulating opinions. Thus, the policy window in which public support for climate migrants and climate policies is heightened is relatively brief.

“220930 Hurricane Ian-38” by U.S. Customs and Border Protection is United States government work 

Hurricane exposure affects political behavior, too

We also find that the effects of hurricane exposure mattered for political behavior, not just attitudes: affected individuals were more likely to vote in favor of a pro-climate ballot measure in Florida in an election on November 8, 2022, about five weeks after the Hurricane and one week after the end of our survey. Importantly, we can compare these results to a non-climate-related ballot measure, on which there was no statistical difference in voting between hurricane-affected and non-affected individuals.

Our findings suggest that there are policymaking pathways to develop disaster response and preparedness plans to mitigate the challenges of climate displacement, however, the opportune windows for advancing such initiatives are likely to be the periods immediately after major disasters. Advocates and policymakers will be able to attract support from across the aisle, but importantly should take inequalities into account by taking steps to protect those affected who are on low incomes. More work is needed to explore how these patterns would generalize to other contexts outside the American Southeast and to other types of disasters, as well as other types of policy outcomes such as the provision of post-disaster aid.

As the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and other types of climate disasters continue to rise, extending our understanding of these dynamics will be essential for fostering resilient and adaptive communities in the face of climate change.

• This article is based on the paper, ‘In the Eye of the Storm: Hurricanes, Climate Migration, and Climate Attitudes’, in American Political Science Review. 
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
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