Perceived deservingness shapes attitudes toward environmental migrants in rural Bangladesh.

Résumé

As climate change intensifies, internal migration due to extreme climate events is becoming increasingly common in the Global South. Yet, little is known about how rural host communities respond to incoming environmental migrants. Here, we study attitudes toward environmentally displaced people in northern Bangladesh, focusing on perceived deservingness, empathy through shared experience, and exploratory proxy indicators of prior migrant exposure/contact. Using a pre-registered face-to-face survey of 265 rural residents, including a forced-choice conjoint experiment, we assess how migrant characteristics (reason for migration, occupation, religion, distance to origin) affect host community attitudes. We find that migrants displaced by riverbank erosion are more likely to be accepted than economic migrants (by 21%-points,