When Hurricane Ian hit Florida in September 2022, Ken Gurtner and Teresa Merck woke up to find the bottom floor of their family’s home submerged. Without flood insurance, the family could only watch as the water overtook their home in the Central Florida city of Oviedo, leaving them with just their personal belongings.
The family and their dogs waded through knee-deep water to a neighbor’s house, where they stayed for 10 days before relocating to temporary housing in nearby Sanford for six months. Once the water receded, about 30 neighbors and friends helped the family bring their furniture and other water-soaked items to the dump.
“All the debris that needed to be taken away was gone in that one day,” said Gurtner, 51. “That was one of the most profound, humbling human experiences in my life — people came and helped us.”
The family’s experience influenced their views in a way similar to others who have gone through climate disasters such as hurricanes. These disasters are likely to cause positive attitudes toward climate migrants and a heightened belief in climate change, according to a recent study.
The study by Princeton University researchers Sabrina Arias and Christopher Blair defined a climate migrant as someone who has either been forced to leave their community or chooses to leave due to changes in their local environment that negatively affect their living conditions. This definition aligns with that of the International Organization for Migration.
The research measured attitudes toward climate migration and climate change in the U.S. Southeast before, during and after Hurricane Ian. The results revealed that people impacted by Hurricane Ian were more likely to have positive attitudes toward climate migrants, recognize climate migration and climate change as important issues, and support policies that assist climate migrants and combat climate change.
Experiencing a climate disaster allows people to put themselves in the shoes of a climate migrant, said Arias, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. She theorized that this caused more positive attitudes toward climate migrants.
The study found that these attitudes were short-lived, but were strongest among vulnerable populations and transcended differences such as political party.
“We do find that there are differences in their beliefs about climate science, but for the most part, we find these effects are essentially identical across partisan lines,” Arias said.
Mathew Hauer, a sociologist and demographer at Florida State University who wasn’t involved in this research but specializes in the study of climate migration, said that bipartisan support for climate migrants after a hugely disruptive hurricane is not surprising.
“We know that environmental events have a tendency to coalesce public support around them, and we’ve done this for a number of years, going back to the 1980s with the Valdez oil spill,” Hauer said. “It was a major shock, something that transcends demographics, political orientation, class and so on.”
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative formed to cover the impacts of climate change in the state.
