The displacement of people is an important consequence of climate change, as people may choose or be forced to migrate in response to adverse climate conditions or sudden-onset extreme climate events. Existing studies show that there is a consistently higher social acceptance of migrants fleeing political persecution or war than of economic migrants. Here we examine whether individuals in Vietnam and Kenya also extend the notion of deservingness to environmental migrants in the context of internal rural-to-urban migration, using original data from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment. We find that although residents in receiving areas view short-term climate events and long-term climate conditions as legitimate reasons to migrate, they do not see environmental migrants as more deserving than economic migrants. These findings have implications for how practitioners address population movements due to climatic changes, and how scholars study people’s attitudes towards environmental migrants.

人的流离失所是气候变化的重要后果，因为人们可能会因不利的气候条件或突发性极端气候事件而选择或被迫迁移。现有研究表明，逃离政治迫害或战争的移民对社会的接受程度一直高于经济移民。在这里，我们使用基于选择的联合调查实验的原始数据，研究了越南和肯尼亚的个人是否也在内部农村人口向城市移民的背景下将应得的概念扩展到环境移民。我们发现，尽管接收地区的居民将短期气候事件和长期气候条件视为迁移的正当理由，但他们并不认为环境移民比经济移民更应得。