Are Americans moving to places where climate change poses less of a risk? Some are. They don’t want to worry that rising sea levels are going to wash away their coastal home or that a wildfire will roar into their wooded western valley. Or they want to avoid triple-digit temperatures or water rationing.
“Millions and likely tens of millions of Americans” will move because of climate through the end of the century, Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate at the Tulane University School of Architecture, told Yahoo News. “People move because of school districts, affordability, job opportunities. There are a lot of drivers, and I think it’s probably best to think about this as ‘climate is now one of those drivers.’”
Yet a surprising number of us are still heading to areas that face above-average threats. Census projections suggest the Southeast will see the nation’s largest population gains over the next two decades, despite the climate change-related risks that the region faces.
Joseph Von Nessen, a University of South Carolina economist, said that most of Southeast’s new residents are coming from New England. Many are retirees attracted by the region’s lower cost of living, mild winters and other charms. Younger workers are moving to the region as well, drawn by newly-created manufacturing jobs.
The population of Charleston, S.C., grew 25 percent from 2010 to 2020. The city has approved plans for a 9,000-acre residential and commercial development that, environmental advocates say, would locate about half of its homes in a flood plain, Anna Phillips wrote in The Washington Post. From 1970 to 2020, Florida’s Cape Coral-Fort Myers area grew an astounding 623 percent, to more than 760,000 people.
Can the insurance industry convince homeowners to choose wisely? “I’m very concerned,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas told The Associated Press, “that these natural disasters are either going to raise premiums or we’re going to be in a deeper crisis like Florida, where insurance providers don’t want to come to New Mexico because it’s a very challenging market to insure.”
Some climate advocates fear that despite the hazards, newcomers to the Southeast may not be aware of the risks they’ll face. Realtors aren’t required to disclose the flood history of the properties they sell, and finding that information can be difficult, The Post’s Phillips reported.
“If every Realtor was required to tell people, ‘You should know over the period of your mortgage your home will flood at least once, maybe twice,’ I think people would go, 'Whoa, what?” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But due to policy failures in state capitals and in Washington, we have made it extremely difficult for people to not only find that information but to even tell people about it.”
The reality, sketched out in a report by the nonprofit research group Climate Central, is that hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida are in danger of being lost or severely damaged because of rising sea levels.
According to PBS, the report says that, in just 30 years, more than four million acres of land will be increasingly threatened by routine flooding. By 2100, over $100 billion worth of property could be in jeopardy as the coastlines of the U.S. continue to creep inland.
The most aggressive effort to persuade Americans to leave hurricane-threatened areas, The New York Times reported, may be a new program that prices federal flood insurance according to climate risk, dramatically increasing costs for people living in vulnerable places.
Another approach, now being tried by the Biden administration, will give three Native tribes $25 million each to move away from coastal areas or rivers. The three communities — two in Alaska, and one in Washington State — will move their key buildings onto higher ground and away from rising waters, with the expectation that homes will follow. The spending, The New York Times’ Christopher Flavelle explained, is meant to create a blueprint for the federal government to help other communities move away from vulnerable areas.
Help also may be coming from Congress. A bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) would strengthen federal investments in coastal restoration and resilience efforts by sending revenue generated from offshore wind back to coastal states and amending the revenue sharing program under the 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. It was approved in July by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Known as the RISEE Act, S. 2130 has 20 cosponsors. It will need to be reintroduced in January. Please urge your senators to support it and encourage your House representative to cosponsor the House version (H.R. 9049).