From Unthinkable to Unavoidable: How to Manage Climigration
Photo credit: Peter Cannavò
As climate change makes more and more communities uninhabitable due to drought, fire, heat, sea level rise, and flooding, relocation, or climigration, becomes unavoidable. A recent World Bank report estimates that climate change will displace 216 million people by 2050. International boundaries and other barriers to refugee and migrant relocation and resettlement vastly complicate this crisis. But internal migration is also a serious challenge. In the U.S., by 2100, some 13 million may be displaced by sea level rise alone.
Relocation is traumatic, involving psychological and physical distress and illness, disruption or loss of livelihood, loss of home and possessions, loss of social networks and of culture and community, and loss of place. Yet there are ways to mitigate these hardships and enable communities to relocate and survive in some form.
The U.S. is largely unprepared for climigration. There is no coordinated framework, bringing together federal, state, and local jurisdictions, to manage migration. Government policy traditionally aims at rebuilding in place after disasters. Government support for relocation is generally on an as-necessary, case-by-case basis and under various legal and institutional frameworks. Relocation policies are generally voluntary and focus on individuals rather than whole communities.
We often see relocation as surrender or failure. After Superstorm Sandy, political leaders in New York defiantly vowed to rebuild in place. Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg even wanted to build further out into the water to create a “Seaport City” with “thousands of new residents and hundreds of businesses.” Relocation, climigration expert Liz Koslov says, goes against dominant ideologies of progress and the conquest of nature. But for many communities, climigration is now inevitable.
The recent federal infrastructure package provides some resources for relocation, including funding to move highways and drinking water infrastructure threatened by climate change and $130 million to assist relocation of Indigenous communities. However, this is just a start. The U.S. needs a massive, comprehensive climigration effort, structured along several key guidelines.
To make it more manageable and less traumatic, relocation should first of all be planned ahead rather than as an emergency reaction to disaster. Planned relocation enables a community to determine its own future.
There are cases of U.S. communities undertaking planned relocation due to environmental factors. Allenville, Arizona, an African-American, working-class community of about 50 households, became subject to flooding due to an upstream water management project. In the 1980s, residents, working with the Arizona State Division of Emergency Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, decided on relocation and picked a new site, Hopeville. Newtok, Alaska, a Yup’ik community facing permafrost melt and coastal erosion due to climate change, began evaluating relocation sites in 1994. In 2003, the residents acquired the site for the new village of Mertarvik, nine miles away. They are in the process of moving.
Second, the impacted community must take a leading role in collectively and democratically deciding on and planning relocation and choosing its new home. The community and its social networks should stay intact. In a process similar to Allenville and Newtok, two-thirds of the nine hundred residents of Valmeyer, Illinois collectively agreed to relocate after the Great Midwest Flood of 1993. They rejected individual buyouts on the grounds that these would disperse the community.
Third, relocation must, as far as possible, uphold a community’s cultural identity. For example, Alaskan Native communities have sought places where they can maintain subsistence practices, though this is not always possible. Newtok found a new location accessible to traditional hunting areas. Shishmaref and Kivalina, two other Alaskan communities, have not had similar success.
Fourth, relocation must be affordable and equitable. An NPR investigation noted, “disasters, and the federal aid that follows, disproportionately benefit wealthier Americans. The same is also true along racial lines, with white communities benefiting disproportionately.” FEMA buyouts overwhelmingly go to predominantly White communities, and long delays in buyouts exacerbate inequities. A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council says, “Wealthier homeowners may be able to absorb the costs associated with waiting for a buyout, such as finding temporary housing, paying for repairs not covered by flood insurance, or dealing with the disruption of subsequent floods,” whereas those with low incomes suffer.
Relatedly, climate migrants must also have access to safe and affordable relocation sites. They should not be crowded out by climate gentrification.
Finally, though climigration must have a strong democratic component, it also requires resources and institutional support at the state and federal levels and coordination at the regional level. Indeed, this would be just one of the many costs and institutional changes incurred by climate change. For Newtok, the lack of an established state or federal framework and resources for climigration has meant a ponderous, laborious, piecemeal process taking over twenty years, even as the community’s situation has worsened. Another Yup’ik village, Napakiak, faces relocation costs of $118 million and has had trouble securing federal funding. It has received only $5.5 million, mostly from a regional tribal organization.
Intergovernmental and geographic cooperation is essential at the metropolitan and regional level to ensure housing affordability and coordinate development, adaptation and mitigation measures, land values, and population movements.
Climigration has gone from virtually unthinkable to unavoidable. We must ensure that it proceeds as equitably, democratically, and humanely as possible.
