Retreating from Climate Disaster in the United States

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

CHAPTERS 

[00:02:24]: Historical examples of relocation after environmental disasters 

[00:03:19]: Policy gaps: why the United States lacks a coordinated relocation framework 

[00:05:23]: Why some communities choose to remain in high-risk areas 

[00:07:00]: Flood buyout programs: how they work and who can access them 

[00:11:24]: Adaptation options: prevention, accommodation, and retreat 

[00:15:12]: Community participation and outcomes in relocation efforts 

[00:23:08]: Managed retreat as part of long-term climate adaptation planning 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:04.14] 

Welcome back to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This is a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that examines different ways in which climate change is affecting migration. My name is Julian Hattem. I'm the host of this podcast and the editor of the Migration Information Source, which is MPI's journal. This series is part of a broader focus on climate change and migration and including a collection of articles that we've published. You can access those online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. On this podcast, we've talked before about how most of the migration that happens in response to or amid climate change will be internal to a country rather than international. In Western countries we tend to think of these movements as happening someplace else, such as in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Pacific Islands. But actually some of this movement is already happening here in places like the United States. Joining me today are Kavi Chintam and Chris Jackson. Kavi and Chris recently co-authored an article in the journal Issues in Science and Technology where they looked at some of the challenges in the US Particularly with regards to rising sea levels. They examined the policy responses that can mitigate these challenges by anticipating and facilitating communities and to move away from flood threatened areas. So I'm really happy that they agreed to come on the podcast. Kavi and Chris, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:01:34.07] 

Thanks for having us.

[00:01:36.23] 

So you two and some and your co authors have looked at a process known as managed retreat, which is basically a coordinated and intentional effort for people to relocate from one area to another in the face of climate threats or environmental threats, I guess. Tell me about what's going on at a 10,000 foot level. What are the policies in the US for intentionally moving communities away from threatened areas? And I guess what kind of threats are we talking about here? You talked about sea level rise or western wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat. What are we looking at?

[00:02:11.13] 

Yeah, I think that's a great place to start and I think it's important to contextualize when we're talking about managed retreat. A lot of people are thinking about the right now we're thinking about a lot of the present dangers and the challenges that climate change are presenting. But it's important to recognize that there's a long history kind of a managed retreat in the United States. So just to give a couple examples, right, the town of Niobrara, Nebraska, actually moved twice through the process of managed to trade, first in 1881 and then in 1977 kind of as a result of flooding from the Missouri River. Then there's of course some more and more modern examples as well of different towns throughout the 1990s as well in Illinois and Missouri that were also relocated off of different floodplains as a result of flooding. So these are a couple examples from history. But these types of wholesale buyouts where we're moving entire towns, entire kind of geographic centers and location are actually much more of the exception rather than the norm. So a lot of managed to treat a lot of buyouts in the past. Recent decades have been more piecemeal.

[00:03:14.23] 

And kind of one of the challenges that we address and we wanted to really raise is that there's kind of a failure of the United States to implement kind of a unified process to support displaced persons. And you mentioned a couple examples of reasons why folks might leave. Sea level rise. A lot of the wildfires we're seeing in the western US and kind of intense storms and flooding and a lot of managed retreat to date has been in response to these and kind of implemented as post disaster relief. So that's kind of one of the areas where we felt there was a significant kind of policy need to think proactively about managed retreat prior to some of these disaster events.

[00:03:56.06] 

So I like those examples that you listed of these towns in Nebraska and some other places with water, water flooding, river flooding. Can you tell me a bit more about what happens there? Is it just one town realizes, oh, no, the river's gonna flood, we should move to the next town over? And I guess who makes that decision and how does that process work or how has it worked, at least in the past?

[00:04:19.24] 

So there are a couple of ways that happens. As Chris said, it usually is spur of the moment. Something is happening now we have to leave because there's no other choice. One example of that, I grew up in Florida, so that's kind of my frame of reference for the coast. But recently there was the. The falling of the Champlain Towers south in Surfside, Florida.

[00:04:45.21] 

Sure.

[00:04:46.12] 

Where this building just fell over. It's unclear if it was climate change related, but regardless, it did bring up that discussion of coastal flooding. By like 2050, buildings are going to experience at least 2 to 3ft of sea level rise. So those buildings are the ones that are going to experience more of the stalling, more of the erosion. So it's really up to the community to decide to leave. And that's kind of where the difficulty is. People have their roots there. Families live there for generations. Very hard to convince people like that to move without a very strong incentive for them to do so, because it's easy to be like, I'll deal with it when it comes. But you know, that leads to a whole bunch of other issues for the community and for people taking them in and for the government.

[00:05:41.17] 

And you made a good distinction there, which I just want to highlight about. In some of these cases are may, may more clearly be in cases of climate change per se, rather than other environmental change, which was just something I want to flag to the listener that not every instance of, as we've discussed on previous episodes of the podcast, not every instance of movement displacement in response to an environmental change is necessarily a climate change one, although there are some connections. But I want to follow up on that. So I understand that there are some inequities in the current system.

[00:06:14.07] 

Right?

[00:06:14.14] 

I mean, as you kind of allude, who moves and who gets to move and who wants to move is not always a fair or equitable process. So in what ways do people who tend to be poorer or tend to be more disenfranchised, how, what kind of different or harsher consequences do they face, both because of the impacts of environmental climate change and also in the displacement in their displacement.

[00:06:41.16] 

Yeah. So FEMA has had these, these volunteer flood buyout programs where essentially they'll buy out your property and that money can be used for you to relocate. But largely as of now, much of it has only been affordable for affluent communities because they get, you know, the most money once they sell their homes and then they are more flexible in being able to move. For low income communities it's a little more complicated because either they don't own what they're living in, or the money that they would get from their house that's probably worthless isn't enough to completely uproot their entire lives. So that is one way that there's really this disproportionate action where it's easier for affluent people to escape dangerous situations. Another thing I'll mention is it's been predicted that much of managed retreat in regards to climate will be to urban areas and obviously inland. And that can lead to a high rate of unemployment, a strain on the infrastructure of the community that's taking in people, and an increased rate of poverty just because the resource to people match is really different. So there are many people, pretty much everyone is affected, but there's definitely an unequal way people are affected.

[00:08:11.07] 

Yeah, I can add on to that as well. I think Kavi kind of mentioned at the individual level how folks who are more well off have more resources be able to move. But I think it's also important to mention kind of at the community level, when we're talking about FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and kind of their role in the buyout system for these voluntary flood buyout programs that they operate, FEMA only covers about 75% of the costs for buyouts. The remaining 25% of those costs falls on local governments. So when we're talking about equity concerns and kind of thinking about the same programs that are implemented at a national level, those communities that are already under resourced might not have even that 25% to help relocate folks. So it's kind of these systemic policies that are also an important issue. We're thinking about who are the people who are able to move.

[00:08:56.24] 

That's really interesting. So it's not just the individual, like homeowner, if they are a homeowner, their wealth that impacts the situation, but also the community's town's wealth. Right? That's true. And so you mentioned. So tell me a little bit more about the FEMA buyout program. I think in your article you mentioned that they spent $500 billion in flooding disaster relief since 2005. So how does that work? Is it like if I, if I have a house and it floods, I can write a form to FEMA and they'll give me 75%. I mean, what are the, what's the process of it and how does that work kind of in reality? Because also I assume there's like every government agency bureaucracy there, things do not always work quite as smoothly as they are expected to, or they could.

[00:09:40.05] 

Yeah. So most of that 500 million went towards repairs. So that 75% FEMA voluntary flood buyout program is buying out a property to allow people to move. The 500 million largely was for repetitive loss properties which are, which are basically properties that are rebuilt using federal flood insurance payouts. So it's basically taking a building that's been affected by flooding, repairing it, and then this happens, you know, multiple times over the years with climate change, it's going to happen more and more. So you're putting money constantly into the same problem rather than removing the problem altogether. And it's been predicted that the cost of managed retreat itself would be about above $200 million. And so that is already significantly lower than the 500 million about that's been used for repetitive, repetitive repairs for properties. So there's that clear distinction there, that there needs to be a shift in what the money is used for because we certainly have it earmarked for these type of disasters. But there's a way to be more economical with it.

[00:11:03.01] 

I assume managed retreat, and maybe I'm wrong, but I assume it's not necessarily a strategy that works in all situations. Right. I guess. What are the circumstances in which managed retreat policies do make the most sense, and why might they not make the most sense? And then in those situations, what might some alternative approaches be?

[00:11:23.22] 

So there's this common, like Venn diagram of three things people talk about when it comes to reacting to climate change on a community level. And it's prevention, accommodation, and retreat. So talking about the coast prevention would be putting sandbags up, preventing the, you know, the water from flooding. Accommodation would be changing the way you're building things, maybe like making the, you know, the structure go more underground, things like that, so it's more stable. And then retreat is what we're talking about, which is just leaving altogether and letting what happens happen. So it makes the most sense in a lot of places that are going to be experiencing these really high sea level rises to move more towards the retreat option as it rapidly approaches the need to do that anyway, because there's only so much you can do to prevent sea level rise, especially at this point. Accommodation, again, is pouring a lot of resources and money into something that you'll probably need to retreat from anyway, unfortunately. And that's really what makes the decision of if you should retreat or not. And some communities have a little more time than others. And one of the issues of that is that there isn't much data or there's no centralized data to figure out what communities are going to experience the highest sea level rises, what migration data already exists to help figure out where people are already moving.

[00:13:04.09] 

So because there's this lack of data consolidation and organization that makes it harder to decide those things and help communities make that decision, make an informed decision. And then there's also because they're isolated responses to individual events, that makes it harder to be like, okay, like, this happened in this one place and we fix that, when is it going to happen again? And then something happened in another place. It's less of like an overall look at a community or even like a whole region.

[00:13:37.13] 

Sure.

[00:13:37.24] 

Even though we know, like, if a hurricane hits X place today, like hurricanes are cyclical floods, or if not cyclical, they happen again and again. We can predict with some degree. Right. Like where these events will happen. You mentioned, you hinted at this earlier, and this is a theme that's come up before on this podcast, is the notion that the question of whether or not people want to leave, over and above whether they can or Whether they should. I mean, in other words, just because the place where they live is threatened by flood or a hurricane or whatever, that does not necessarily mean that they don't want to live there any longer.

[00:14:15.10] 

Right?

[00:14:15.15] 

I mean, people have strong connections to their homes. What is to be done in these situations, as are those cases where you try and build up sea barriers, you try just reinforce buildings, build them deeper into the ground as you were describing? Or are, are there incentives to be given to people to encourage them to move? I mean, how do you approach these kinds of situations and how could or should the government or other actors approach these situations?

[00:14:42.07] 

Yeah, that's a really tough issue and tough question to tackle. I'm thinking about these individuals and even whole communities who don't want to move. And there are valid concerns for why people don't want to do that. Right. There's a lot of people who have historical ties to location. There's a lot of emotional attachment. There's also, from a community and government perspective, concerns about loss of tax base. Right? If we're moving entire portions of a community, what about those who are not moving? How do we kind of support those who are still there? So there are a lot of issues to that kind of what the research has shown is the most effective buyouts. Right. Required neighborhood wide buy in for kind of especially for environmental flood mitigation practices. And there's some examples can kind of get into. But in particular, as we're thinking about balancing some of these financial calculations with some of the more intangible benefits that I alluded to is one way to kind of think about whether we're talking about entire relocations, maybe removal of some degree of flooded structures or some portions. And overall, I think there's kind of a necessity of both a combination of local leadership as well as federal resources and expertise to kind of address these issues and can give kind of one example of a program that's been kind of managed to treat kind of literature that's been kind of widely touted as the New Jersey's Blue Acres program.

[00:15:58.20] 

It's kind of listed as this model where they bought up more than 700 properties. So post Hurricane Sandy, they bought up over 700 properties in this area and demolished them completely to kind of preserve this land as an open space buffer zone. So that's great. And it's a kind of an example of how you need this community wide buy in in order to create these flood zones. On the flip side of that, it's not perfect if you take a closer look at all of these houses that were demolished, they were pretty much all low to middle income communities. So a lot of the communities that still exist in the area that are still at risk of sea level rise and flooding are some of these communities who are people who are less willing to move and have the resources to be able to kind of stand up against that. So there's some of these issues around equity when you're thinking about who moves and what's the best way to do that.

[00:16:52.18] 

It's interesting you mentioned that the tax base concerned that like municipalities might be concerned that if they're half their residents move, they have half as much tax money. And especially given your the previous thought that like city wealth, municipal wealth has an impact both I'm sure, in like the buyout, flood buyout as you were describing, but also just generally recovering from places I can imagine there's a situation in which there's sorts of a death spiral or like a, a downward cycle.

[00:17:22.19] 

Right?

[00:17:22.24] 

In which the communities move, especially wealthier people move and it brings the tax base down and it like reduces the amount of systems and resources that cities have, which then it, it keeps going.

[00:17:36.24] 

Right?

[00:17:37.06] 

Which. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:17:40.17] 

And I think in addition to that kind of there's some concerns when we're talking about, especially when we're talking about subsidizing or kind of promoting management tree. There's, I'm based in California, some particular interest and there's A Senate Bill 83 has been proposed by Senator Ben Allen out here, which is a low interest loan program specifically for local jurisdictions to buy up these types of coastal properties. And this is kind of, it's a really interesting idea. It kind of falls in line with, you know, how we need resources as well as community buy in to kind of do this miniature treat. But it has been critiqued at the state level saying are we really just subsidizing, you know, coastal properties that belong to more affluent people in the community? Like what is the role of government when the kind of demographics vary very widely based on location? And that's. It's a challenging issue that I think is one reason why we need some combination of a unified larger policy as well as more local buy in.

[00:18:32.12] 

That's really interesting. I want to turn briefly to receiving areas, receiving communities in preparation for this. I was reading a bit about Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and famously something like 150,000 people moved permanently to Houston from Louisiana after that storm. And there were lots of reports about tensions between these new arrivals and established communities. What people call Compassion fatigue among locals. And these types of situations are not new, especially to followers of forced migration generally. This is an issue that comes up, I guess how much of a concern are dynamics like that and what if any, policies are there to alleviate those problems for not the origin places affected by the environmental catastrophe first, but the receiving areas into which residents move?

[00:19:24.15] 

Yeah, that's a super important point. That it's not just people who live on the coast, for example, that are affected. It's, it's really all of the U.S. right, because they're gonna be, they're gonna be communities taking in more people that's gonna affect the dynamics between everyone. Because culturally, even if it's like a state away, things might be really different. So you deal with that. And then also it's tension with if a place already has high unemployment rates and then you bring in a bunch of new people, there's going to be that, that issue there too. And there's also a stress on existing infrastructure, you know, healthcare, social services, water, transportation, really everything. So what needs to be done there that isn't super popular yet is having programs to help incentivize those receiving communities to make those necessary adaptations coming from for example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, those kind of departments, those types of agencies would be really useful in doing so. For example, adaptations like you were saying with compassion fatigue, yes, communities should be compassionate to allow their fellow US citizens or non citizens to come. But also there is a limit to compassion.

[00:20:52.09] 

You can't, you can't make compassion monetary. Right? There needs to be resources. Unfortunately there needs to be resources and money put in by the government to help everyone in this situation benefit. Because even if you fix the voluntary flood buyout program and make it more easy for low income people to get more money from that, if they move to a new area, they're going to have trouble finding a job again if there isn't support. And the low income people in the new community will also experience more pressure and more trouble trying to get those strained resources and money. So along with that, there are a lot of programs in the US and internationally having to do with refugees. For example, like certification programs where a refugee will come to the US they can go through a skills training program. They, they basically help them get used to life in the US and really set up how they're going to live a good life here. A similar thing can be done from community to community and the advantage there is, you know, you don't have to deal with a lot of things not deal with, but you don't have to think of a lot of things refugees do, which is a lot of language barriers, really deep cultural barriers.

[00:22:12.01] 

So this, this is more, a little more close to home, obviously, and it needs to be done so everyone is comfortable with what is happening.

[00:22:25.21] 

That's good, That's a good point. I want to close just kind of, I guess by looking forward. There are lots of problems, environmental problems, rising sea levels, erosion, heat. Things are getting hotter, I guess. What might we expect to see in the US in the next decade, two decades, three decades in terms of crisis and displacement caused by environmental crisis? And can or should we expect a greater focus on managed retreat away from threatened areas and in response to some of these things, especially as threats accelerate, which they are seeming to do?

[00:23:06.10] 

Yeah, I mean, I think the short answer is we will have to. I don't think it's going to be a choice. But to your point, thinking about the different types of disasters, disaster response that migration will be kind of following, most kind of managed retreat to date, or just retreat in general has occurred in response to flooding is kind of why it's something we focused on a lot today. But future retreat will be obviously in response to much wider range of threats. You mentioned wildfires and other, including slower onset trends such as desertification, groundwater salinization, and those will likely kind of inspire other new innovations and other ways to think about adaptation as well. But as we kind of think about planning forward and moving forward, there's a lot of talk about infrastructure in this country right now, thinking about how to build climate resilient infrastructure now and thinking a little bit more critically about where we're building things with this eye towards climate change and managed retreat in the future. And I would say especially in the US compared to other nations or thinking about other island nations perhaps that don't have the option of managed retreat.

[00:24:10.20] 

The US is actually kind of in a very privileged position that we do have a lot of land, we have available space, we have money and resources to kind of facilitate this managed retreat. Maybe it's not always distributed equitably, or maybe those programs don't exist yet in the forms that they could, but we do have these kind of resources to facilitate managed retreat that just need to be better developed and better distributed and kind of ways you can do that, right? In the short term, there's more adaptive measures you could take. Whether that's thinking about floating settlements, storm fire, barriers, kind of, there's a wide gamut of things that people are trying now. But in the long term, again, managed retreat will kind of need to become this larger part of our adaptation efforts and really thinking about manage retreat as an adaptation effort, whether that's kind of more limited efforts, thinking about restrictions on maybe where we're allowed to rebuild, setbacks, limiting development in areas prone to disaster and things like that. But it will definitely kind of need to become a more central way if we think about both post disaster relief and pre disaster adaptation.

[00:25:12.03] 

I don't know if that's a hopeful message or a dispiriting message, maybe a little bit of both. Maybe it's bittersweet in some ways, but we should probably wrap things up there. But this has been super interesting. I appreciate you two coming on, I guess. Where can the listeners find you on the Internet?

[00:25:25.10] 

You're on Twitter, right?

[00:25:39.19] 

Yeah, you can find me H W I S T O F U  on Twitter at @thakavic. That's T-H-A-K-A-V-I-C. Yeah, and

[00:25:39.19] 

I'm on Twitter as well. @chwistofu. C-H-W-I-S-T-O-F-U.

[00:25:44.13] 

Great.

[00:25:45.06] 

Kavi Chintam and Chris Jackson. They're the leading authors of an article titled A Concerted and Equitable Approach to Managed Retreat. That's in the Summer 2021 edition of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for listening to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. If you enjoyed this conversation, please check out the rest of our episodes and subscribe to the show. We're on all the major podcast services and our archives are online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. This special issue of the Migration Information Source focusing on climate change and migration is online at migrationpolicy.org/climate and for more of MPI, you should follow us online. We're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and you can also send me an email at [email protected]. Yoseph Hamid produced this policy podcast with support from Julia Yanoff, Lisa Dixon and Michelle Mittelstadt. The music you're hearing is called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. Once again, I am Julian Hattem and I thank you for listening.