Few contemporary crises have reshaped public policy as dramatically as the COVID-19 pandemic. In its shadow, policymakers have debated whether other pressing crises—including climate change—should be integrated into COVID-19 policy responses. Public support for such an approach is unclear: the COVID-19 crisis might eclipse public concern for other policy problems, or complementarities between COVID-19 and other issues could boost support for broad government interventions. In this research note, we use a conjoint experiment, panel study, and framing experiment to assess the substitutability or complementarity of COVID-19 and climate change among US and Canadian publics. We find no evidence that the COVID-19 crisis crowds out public concern about the climate crisis. Instead, we find that the publics in both countries prefer that their governments integrate climate action into COVID-19 responses. We also find evidence that analogizing climate change with COVID-19 may increase concern about climate change.

To what extent do the impacts of climate change affect the aspiration of individuals in highly vulnerable areas to migrate? Can climate adaptation policy weaken this relationship? While scholars of human mobility might expect displacement and migration to result from environmental push factors, including the consequences of global warming, we have little evidence of this, particularly among small island developing states (SIDS), some of the areas most severely exposed to climate change. To address this gap, we employ a novel large-scale public opinion survey with an embedded survey experiment for coastal and island publics in the South Pacific, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean. This unique large-N study is the first to sample from every small-island state and territory in the world. We present three findings. First, while offering hypothetical legal support for migration strengthens desire to migrate, providing hypothetical financial resources has the opposite effect, for individuals exposed and not exposed to both the impacts of climate change and adaptation efforts. Second, factors emphasized by economic and sociological theories of migration, for example asset ownership and networks, are powerful predictors of migration intent in this population. Third, the expectation of future climate impacts, more than prior experience with them, is moderately associated with the aspiration to migrate, regardless of exposure to any form of climate adaptation policy (coastal management, compensation, and emergency relief). These findings contribute to the growing literature on climate mobility, especially among populations most vulnerable to displacement by climate change.

Over the coming decades, millions of people around the world will be displaced by climate change. Despite the potential scale of this change in migration patterns, relatively little is known about public preferences toward these prospective migrants. Drawing on a large public opinion sample in ten countries representing the top carbon-emitters in both the Global North and South, this paper offers experimental evidence of the effects of linking these migrants’ displacement explicitly to climate change. I find that prospective migrants who have been forced from their homes due to climate change are seen as meriting admission more highly than economic migrants, and on par with migrants fleeing persecution, the only criterion currently included in most legal definitions of who qualifies for humanitarian admissions as refugees or asylees. I also test ways in which public opinion on climate migration is shaped by the interaction between the public’s immigration attitudes and their climate change opinions through the process of issue linkage. The findings in this study suggest that public opinion barriers to developing expanded and differentiated admissions streams for climate-displaced people may be lower that previously thought, a finding with live policy implications as governments consider how they will manage the migration effects of a rapidly changing climate.

Among President Biden’s first executive orders was to task an interdepartmental group of officials to report on the migration impacts of climate change, and how the United States’ humanitarian immigration system might manage increased flows of migrants displaced by climate change. Four years later, we live in a very different world, with President Trump elected to a second term on promises of severe restrictiveness, in an issue environment in which public preferences for restrictiveness (and the issue salience of immigration) are high. Nonetheless, climate change continues apace. What are the prospects for providing a targeted admissions pathway for this emerging class of migrants (an expansionary immigration policy) in an environment of restrictiveness? Using experimental data and innovative measurement techniques from a new survey of 3,095 American voters, I find that linking immigration and climate change—two issues over which voters hold independent preferences—can shift opinion in favour of expansionary immigration policy in the form of a targeted admissions program, while still allowing voters to maintain broadly restrictive preferences; in other words, an expansionary port in a restrictive storm. These effects are consistent across subgroups of respondents who vary on their political ideology, pro-climate and pro-immigrant preferences/attitudes, and even belief in climate change. These findings carry important policy implications both for policymakers and advocates seeking ways to provide protection and/or admission to this emerging class of migrants, and to those seeking policy instruments to address a migration driver that will only grow in its scale over the coming decades.

Many influential studies of public preferences on immigration employ a survey measure that asks the public whether they would prefer the number of immigrants be increased, decreased, or stay the same. How should we interpret this measure when study after study tells us that the public is largely innumerate when it comes to the number of migrants admitted annually. Drawing on experimental methods from the economics and marketing literature, I adapt and employ a number of incentive-compatible “willingness-to-pay” (WTP) preference elicitation methods, resulting in a novel and more conceptually valid measure of public preferences on immigration levels.

An important normative feature of climate change as a migration driver is that advanced industrialized democracies are directly responsible for the driver through the relatively higher levels of carbon dioxide they emit into the earth’s atmosphere. Drawing on new survey experimental data, I test whether invoking responsibility for climate change affects public preferences over (i) admitting climate migrants, and (ii) the number of climate-displaced people admitted.