After months without rain, your crops have withered away and died, and you’re thirsty. Or maybe you have the opposite problem, and relentless rains flooded your home  — not for the first time.

There are lots of reasons people move, and climate change increasingly numbers among them. News headlines warn of a coming “climate refugee crisis,” with rising sea levels spurring mass migration on a “biblical scale.” Provoking anxiety is sort of the default mode for talking about climate change, but is this the best way to discuss people trying to move out of harm’s way?

A new study — among the first to test how Americans react to learning about climate migration — suggests that these kinds of articles might trigger backlash. Both Republicans and Democrats reported colder, more negative feelings toward migrants after reading a mock news article about climate migration, according to research published this spring in the journal Climatic Change.

“There’s a real potential of stories invoking a nativist response, making people view migrants more negatively and possibly as less human,” said Ash Gillis, an author of the study and a former psychology researcher at Vanderbilt University. Depending on how they’re told, stories about climate migration might not only provoke xenophobia, but also fail to rally support for climate action, research suggests.

Read the full article about climate migration narratives by Kate Yoder at Grist.