BEMPdata

R package for the Bangladesh Environmental Mobility Panel

DOI Shiny app

BEMPdata provides functions to download and work with the Bangladesh Environmental Mobility Panel (BEMP), a household panel survey on environmental migration along the Jamuna River in Bangladesh (2021–2024). The dataset follows 1,691 households across 20 survey datasets and 24,279 completed surveys.

Wave data are hosted on Zenodo and downloaded on demand (~6 MB for all CSVs). Files are cached locally so subsequent calls are instant.

Interactive data explorer

An interactive app for browsing the codebook, inspecting variable distributions, and downloading data subsets is available at:

https://b68gkn-janfreihardt.shinyapps.io/bemp-explorer/

Or launch it locally after installing the package:

BEMPdata::run_app()

Installation

# Install from GitHub
remotes::install_github("janfreihardt/BEMPdata")

Quick start

library(BEMPdata)

# See available waves
wave_overview

# Download the baseline wave
w1 <- get_wave("w1")

# Download the Wave 6 migrant questionnaire in Stata format
w6m <- get_wave("w6_M", format = "dta")

# Find variables by keyword
lookup_variable("income")

# Get the codebook for one wave
cb <- get_codebook("w1")

# Check / clear local cache
bemp_cache_info()

Wave structure

Round Type Files
1 In-person w1, w1_V (village profile)
2–5 Phone w2w5
6 In-person w6_M (migrant), w6_N (non-migrant)
7–11 Phone w7w11
12 In-person w12_M, w12_N, w12_V
13 Phone w13
14 In-person w14_M, w14_N, w14_V

Data source

Freihardt, J. et al. (2026). The Bangladesh Environmental Mobility Panel (BEMP): Panel data on (im)mobility, socio-economic, and political impacts of riverbank erosion and flooding in Bangladesh [Dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18229498

Citation

If you use this package, please cite:

Freihardt, J. (2026). BEMPdata: R package for the Bangladesh Environmental Mobility Panel. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18775710

For the underlying dataset:

Freihardt, J. et al. (2026). The Bangladesh Environmental Mobility Panel (BEMP): Panel data on (im)mobility, socio-economic, and political impacts of riverbank erosion and flooding in Bangladesh [Dataset]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18229498

License

Package code: MIT. Dataset: CC BY 4.0 (see Zenodo deposit).