We already are experiencing
climate change. This is not our
grandchildren. This is today. This is right now. Some of us are in aircraft
carriers and some of us are in dinghies as it goes. It was very intense to live
in a place where wildfires were becoming an everyday,
very normal reality. Natural disasters hit nearly
one in ten American homes in 2021, leading to an
estimated $56.92 billion in property damage. We're fighting systems and
laws and policies that don't quite fit the new climate
reality. One of the biggest issues
with climate change is that people have been living in
riskier environments. Think a coastal community
or a mountain house surrounded by a dry forest. Nowhere is completely safe
from climate change, but there is some good news. Adaptation efforts are
working and there are some places where Americans can
move to escape the worst impacts of climate
disasters. There are cities that are
going to fare better under climate conditions and are
already. These cities, particularly
around the Great Lakes, I think are considered to
have some superior advantage. But with home prices soaring
nationally, location isn't the only factor in finding
a safe haven. Issues of justice and equity
have to be addressed now before mass migration start
moving to haven cities. You can't just say I'm a
climate destination because I'm in Wisconsin and we're
going to be fine. That's absolutely not true. You must earn it. It's not a passive title. So where can Americans go to
escape climate change and can we afford to live
there? Researchers have designated
some cities as climate havens or climate
destinations. Unfortunately, they don't
include major cities like LA, San Francisco or where
I live in Brooklyn, New York. I would define a climate
destination as a location that has perhaps more
manageable climate impacts. That is, there's no
exposure to sea level rise. There's less risk of
wildfires and hurricanes. They have a ready access to
fresh water, and they may be a legacy city, which means
that they have a history of being built out for a much
larger population. Marandi also requires
climate destinations to have plans to decarbonize and
address affordable housing. Jesse Keenan identified a
few lucky cities that meet these criteria. So in the United States, a
variety of different cities have strengths and
weaknesses in terms of their capacity to onboard climate
migrants. But some of those that come
to mind are Asheville, North Carolina. Knoxville,
Tennessee. Toledo, Ohio, Duluth,
Minnesota, Buffalo, New York, Rochester, New York,
Burlington, Vermont. Keenan also sees promise in
Detroit, Pittsburgh, Madison and Milwaukee and
Minneapolis. Marandi and her research
partner have added to that list. Cincinnati, Ohio,
Charleston, South Carolina, Chico, California, which
absorbed many migrants fleeing the camp fire in
2018. Ann Arbor, Michigan. And maybe surprisingly,
Orlando, Florida. You would say, Oh, well,
they're in Florida. They must be high risk. And yes, there are some
risks. But again, like Cincinnati,
Orlando is working really hard to decarbonize and
they're doing it in such a big way. They're really
growing their green economy. They're looking at their
affordable housing. They are in quite a housing
crunch right now, but they're very aware of it. They're working on it. Affordable housing is a key
ingredient in all of this. About half of Americans say
affordable housing is a major problem in their
local community. Maggie Lawson, a chef and
visual artist, moved to Cincinnati from Oakland in
2020. What made you move from
Oakland to Cincinnati? Many, many things, as one
might imagine, because they're very different
cities and very different lifestyle. I think the
first thing was just my housing was not tenable. I had roommates and I was
approaching 40 and I was like, This is not the life
for me. I couldn't afford to buy a
house. Lawson also wanted to be
able to support her aging parents financially and
cannot do so in the competitive financial
environment of Oakland. She was also concerned
about the impact of wildfires on her parent's
health. The smoke just descends on
the city for weeks on end and it's really
unpredictable. She grew up about 45 minutes
outside of Cincinnati and went to undergrad there. I didn't envision moving
back. It was kind of a surprise
to me when I decided to do that. That type of move is
consistent with Miranda's research. People go to where they have
people. But Lawson's move is
exceptional for its distance. Most people tend to make
moves in their own county. The problem arises when you
consider that about 30% of Americans live on a coast. We could expect up to 63
million people who live in the low elevation
coastal zone to need to either move or relocate
somewhere else. So there are a lot of
people at risk. Places like my community in
South Louisiana are going to be taken by the sea. So people are going to have
to figure out what to do. Some experts like Kenan
suggests moving from, say, Miami to Duluth. Check out his proposed ad
campaign for the Minnesotan Winter. No amount of marketing
campaign is going to shape the decisions that you make
in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. I know I
myself have been displaced right now from Hurricane
Ida. It's not easy, but I think
we have to think in the long term and recognize that
we're going to build a community for today. And that's going to be the
foundation for the building of a community for
tomorrow. Climate havens like
Cincinnati have been investing in infrastructure
to support a new wave of residents while building
for a low carbon future. I see climate migration as
an opportunity for these cities to avoid the
mistakes of urban sprawl. They often have a vibrant,
walkable downtown that might just need a little bit of
revitalization. And so I live in this really
progressive little neighborhood and we have a
really sweet farmers market. It's not huge, but people
are really invested in it. So some of the farmers that
I'm partnering with and I'm working with in my business
have stands there and have gotten to know them through
that space. Climate havens create
opportunities for new and existing residents to work
together and established farmers market, like the
one Lawson goes to, is a great example. Big
employers also referred to as anchor institutions like
hospitals or universities, can play a major role. How can we help people who
are already in these cities in the receiving zones? We
don't want them to be crowded out. How can we
think about jobs, the tax base? All of this is part
of a broader economic development strategy,
again, to think about a sustainable economy. Migration is not a problem
to be dealt with. Migration is a natural way
of being as humans, and it's one that we're going to
have to reconsider. We don't question wealthy
people who go to their summer houses around their
migration patterns, but that's exactly what they're
doing. Migration is quite natural. It's only
questioned based on your income level and your skin
color. And this is where we have
to do a lot of educating our society and our community
and even shifting how we look at migration. What can local governments
do? They can prepare, they can
start having these conversations, they can
invest in their affordable housing. They can start
preparing for their own climate risks so that even
if they are in taking more people, they are still
prepared. This is an opportunity for
us to show the best of who we are as a human society,
as a nation, and as individual communities who
are stepping up. It's really about building
communities and people are going to come in. And one of the things that
helps bridge our society together is our ability to
accommodate newcomers. This is the story of
America. It's the story of
immigration in America. So should we start packing
now? I wouldn't urge anyone to
move immediately unless they're under immediate
threat. But I would say start to look at your risk. It's often a confluence of
events that force people to move. After three years of really
intense fire seasons, I was really clear that a the
cost of living was not manageable and being in
that environment was really hard on my nervous system
and you just don't really understand the long term
impacts that like wildfires can have on your body. Lawson felt being unable to
afford the life she wanted in California, coupled with
the unpredictable fire season, the time had come
to leave. That process has to be one
rooted in autonomy of something that I've had to
learn. You know, not everybody is
going to move. Not everybody wants to
move. Some people's identity is
tied to a place and some people's life is tied to a
place. If you're really relying on
this house as a nest egg, you're a homeowner. Equity is part of your
investment strategy. You may very well want to
consider moving much sooner than later because your
investment is declining. If it's in a high risk area
such as a sea level rise zone, it is declining. Now on an annual basis. You can look at FEMA flood
maps, you can look at first three foundation, maybe one
day when you're bored, just like, oh, let's look at our
flood risk, honey. Right? And then you can if
you're informed, you can start making decisions. But not everyone can afford
to move, even if they want to. There's a lot of costs that
come, including the cost of being removed from your
loved ones and from your friends, those that loss of
social capital. But there's also benefits,
and that's the benefit of being part of a new
community. That's the benefit of rebuilding
something or building something that is truly
sustainable, walking away from our high carbon
lifestyle into a low carbon lifestyle. When we think about people
having the autonomy to move right now, we've got to
understand what we're saying. We're talking about
people with wealth. What keeps a lot of us up at
night is that a market driven retreat will leave a
ton of impoverished people behind. So there's a huge risk in
not sort of doing this managed or
planned relocation ahead of time. If cities want to do climate
migration right, there are a few things they need to
start thinking about now. One is, yes, where are the
opportunities? A simple repurposing of
land that has already been made for some sort of mass
development. The other thing we need to
really keep in mind is what is going to happen in the
long term to the residents who are already there. And this is work, this is
education. This is setting up
programs, not social programs that give. People charity, but instead
socializing and caring programs that give people
power and connection into a new community. And third, I
think we're going to have to respect culture that comes
in. I mean, we have to be able
to move from a place of our own power in receiving
folks in power, receiving folks with dignity and
receiving folks honoring their own autonomy and
honoring ours and making sure that the resources
that we have together, culture, water and
everything in between are ours collectively. There are lots of structural
changes that residents can do to increase the life
cycle of a community. For example, when I was
reporting on hurricanes and sea level rise in Miami
Beach, Florida, residents were elevating their homes
to avoid the rising seas. And in fact, there's many
infrastructure possibilities that we can do to
particularly with water and as well as extreme heat,
for instance, with extreme heat, planting more trees
and building more biomass to help cool and shelter us in
the shade. But on a bigger scale,
reducing our carbon emissions will help stem
the flow of climate migrants. One of our best defenses
against large scale displacement is climate
mitigation, which means reducing our emissions. So we cannot just continue
to fill this bathtub full of water. What do we do to get people
out of harm's way as we stop fossil fuel drilling, as we
stop the extraction? That is how we get people
out of harm's way. Local municipalities can
also make smart choices to make it easier for
residents to lower their carbon footprints. When we're thinking about
what is this community preparing for for the next
ten years or 20 years, perhaps elevating homes
does the trick. But when you're talking
about 50 to 100 years, which is very, very difficult for
communities to conceptualize, some of
these fixes are maybe not the best idea. They may
give that false impression of security. But I think now is the time
for greater engagement and democratic processes to
hold and really participate, not just hold leaders
accountable, but participate in the process of
envisioning what you want your city to look like.
