[Climate change is fast making large parts of the US
uninhabitable. As the South and the Southwest grow more dangerous and
hot, people will be forced to move north. And those who stay behind
will be disproportionately poor and elderly.] [[link removed]]

CLIMATE CRISIS WILL FORCE A NEW AMERICAN MIGRATION AS MUCH OF US
BECOMES UNINHABITABLE  
[[link removed]]


 

Abrahm Lustgarten
September 15, 2020
ProPublica
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
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* [[link removed]]

_ Climate change is fast making large parts of the US uninhabitable.
As the South and the Southwest grow more dangerous and hot, people
will be forced to move north. And those who stay behind will be
disproportionately poor and elderly. _

Erika González and her son, Kevin, evacuating their Sonoma County,
California home as the LNU Lightning Complex Fire approached in
August. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit
areas, but if the people there move, where will they go?, Meridith
Kohut/New York Times

 

August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge
in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a
population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the
dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded
possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130
degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had
cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of
bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and
forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven
infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought
on record. Soon, California was on fire.

Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land
as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people
from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned
simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another
fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as
towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions
and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I
spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how
long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the
steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in
my mind what my family would do to escape.

But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once
this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for
good?

I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been
studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense
was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet —
changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential
movement of hundreds of millions
[[link removed]] of
climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most
important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising
temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the
poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an
enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might
shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration
here in the United States.

So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these
last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear
to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year
felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the
pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer
seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my
reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces
erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the
very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?

I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has
seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life
increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already,
droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while
destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to
Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of
the Great Lakes
[[link removed]].
Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands
of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California
burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with
150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th
named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix,
meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than
the previous record.

For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their
own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted
not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by
expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of
the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the
emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more
fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have
largely gravitated _toward_ environmental danger, building along
coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the
cloudless deserts of the Southwest.

I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans
finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives?
And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing
— was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these
questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and
demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects
and urban planners, and ProPublica mapped out the danger zones that
will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the
first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an
independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by
United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about
America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first
published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last
spring [[link removed]]. (A detailed
analysis of the maps is available here
[[link removed]].)

 

According to new data analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times
Magazine, warming temperatures, rising seas and changing rainfall will
profoundly reshape the way people have lived in North America for
centuries.

What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation.
Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly 1 in 2
— will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their
environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them,
the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis
suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4
million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in
places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of
resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have
already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will
be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is
for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to
retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove
too expensive to maintain the status quo.

Then what? One influential 2018 study
[[link removed]],
published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and
Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern
half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or
the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences
alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and
widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate
rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the
burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and
amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity,
dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern
regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of
collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and
coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities
face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty.
Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a
reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be
left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the
society around them ceases to offer any more support.

There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of
Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from
roughly one-third in 2016, and 3 out of 4 now describe climate change
as either “a crisis” or “a major problem.” This year,
Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of
farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as
an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities
found that even Republicans’ views are shifting: 1 in 3 now thinks
climate change should be declared a national emergency.

Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now
face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at
exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will
almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off
relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for
themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst
environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual
perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat
reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and
financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It
begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer
safe.

It has already begun.

Let’s start with some basics. Across the country, it’s going to
get hot. Buffalo, New York, may feel in a few decades like Tempe,
Arizona, does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average
summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from
New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly
unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into
debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply,
not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and
Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040,
according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages
will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer,
a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and
Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a
day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer — which supplies nearly a third of
the nation’s irrigation groundwater — could be gone by the end of
the century.

It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many
factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face
megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places
like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million
Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to
Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working
outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields
will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through
Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.

The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans
seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop,
400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising
waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme
projections of 8 to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the
shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move 3 miles closer to my house,
as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school,
a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway
to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge
will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the
city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in
the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first,
but research from Mathew Hauer
[[link removed]], a sociologist at
Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of
American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in
2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread:
Nearly 1 in 3 people here in Marin County will leave, part of the
roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay
Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.

From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just
chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the
subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable
life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off
from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland,
saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of
the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas — Miami, New York and
Boston among them — will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting
some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or
dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not
every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most
likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a
strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.

In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to
move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending
with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might
move — though difficult to predict precisely — could easily be
tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though,
would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The
Great Migration — of 6 million Black Americans out of the South from
1916 to 1970 — transformed almost everything we know about America,
from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the
sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many
people moved? What might change?

Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate
threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that
rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or
scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient.
Even a subtle environmental change — a dry well, say — can mean
life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is
often simply a question of survival.

By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more
insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from
the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a
culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money.
So even as the average flow of the Colorado River — the water supply
for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation’s
vegetable and cattle farming — has declined for most of the last 33
years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more
than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite
its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures
there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew
devastated Florida in 1992 — and even as that state has become a
global example of the threat of sea-level rise — more than 5 million
people have moved to Florida’s shorelines, driving a historic boom
in building and real estate.

Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us
how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought,
regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other
disasters.

The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened
Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably
falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick
up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example,
water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in
Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to
rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And
federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to
drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones
that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a
few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what
the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.

Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more
misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. From
state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it
attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of
disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat
and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are
safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most
policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term
trends even as insurance availability influences development and
drives people’s long-term decision-making.

Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to
reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them
to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of
underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it
themselves. The regulations — called Fair Access to Insurance
Requirements — are justified by developers and local politicians
alike as economic lifeboats “of last resort” in regions where
climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do
protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also
satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able
to buy insurance.

At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina
and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve
as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of
climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and
wildfires.

In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of
shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs
and scientific research suggest that it should stop.

That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of
cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts.
Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would
happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the
Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties
itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by
essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t
exist.

As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities
worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total
budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion.
Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida,
concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back
its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in
place.

On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full
of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and
climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission
on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate
professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of
Architecture, had been in the news
[[link removed]] last
year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that
Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate
boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I’d
spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where
these migrants would be driven from.

Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California,
his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all
looking for his read on the state’s future. Their interest suggested
a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting
environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country.
It’s an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch
directions. “And once this flips,” he added, “it’s likely to
flip very quickly.”

In fact, the correction — a newfound respect for the destructive
power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans’
appetite for reckless development — had begun two years earlier,
when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how
the climate crisis was changing the rules.

On Oct. 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar
neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, virtually in my
own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were
reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong
cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.

The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible.
Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls
and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,”
according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global
insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does
similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven
years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how
insurers could anticipate — and price — the risk of their
happening again, had begun to see other “impossible” fires. After
a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm
consumed Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said, “alarm bells started going
off” for the insurance industry.

What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the
Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk
forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe
50% of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90% had been leveled.
“The destruction was complete,” he told me. Van Leer determined
that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning
70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest
homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes
ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing
that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds
weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with
intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development.
“It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he
said.

For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with
California’s rolling power blackouts last fall — an effort to
preemptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire — which
showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my
own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all
the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six
more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All
around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing.
Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to
evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel
like the “new abnormal.”

It was no surprise, then, that California’s property insurers —
having watched 26 years’ worth of profits dissolve over 24 months
— began dropping policies, or that California’s insurance
commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on
insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February,
the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the
words of one consumer advocacy group, “follow the lead of Florida”
by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a
requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against
fire. At the same time, participation in California’s FAIR plan for
catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180% since 2015, and in Santa
Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable
zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects
a 20% increase
[[link removed]] in
extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special
form of climate negligence.

It’s only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the
unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the
sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a
neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt —
and devaluation — from door to door. It happened that way in the
foreclosure crisis.

Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries
around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and
indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the
same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in
days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street
Foundation released maps [[link removed]] showing that 70%
more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than
previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income
neighborhoods.

Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention
investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited
from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages
of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here,
were testament to Keenan’s belief that the bluelining phenomenon
will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class
Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy,
starting in the nation’s largest state.

Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed
mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system.
Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a
study published in the journal Climatic Change
[[link removed]] in
June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on
environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along
to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but
stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for
the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly
passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.

Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists
to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base
declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a
negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising
insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating
agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to
issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks,
meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their
own liabilities.

Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives
that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk
were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic
collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the
transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial
protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms
had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development.
But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers
divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the
full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.

And that’s when the real migration might begin.

As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window
onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat.
This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric,
had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had
to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of
wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for
heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned
this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my
house and getting — ”

He cut me off: “Yes.”

Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl
started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to
offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the
Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie
grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely
predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across
Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers
destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring
temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than
skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington.
The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to
the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but
also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and
competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate
refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns.
Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent
life did some towns bounce back stronger.

The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years
later, Dust Bowl towns
[[link removed]] still
have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest
of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely
to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change
made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.

A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains
states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and
cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export
that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will
drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at
the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies [[link removed]] found, Dust
Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water
jumps by as much as 20%. Another extreme drought would drive
near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the
broader economy. At that point, the authors write, “abandonment is
one option.”

Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to
America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and
flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming
but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than
just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang
[[link removed]], a climate
economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis
of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality
and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the
United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will
in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their
gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment
[[link removed]] also warns that the U.S. economy
over all could contract by 10%.

That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and
researchers expect that trend to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic
ends. In 1950, less than 65% of Americans lived in cities. By 2050,
only 10% will live outside them, in part because of climatic change.
By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could
each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of
sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities — not
the places that empty out — that wind up bearing the brunt of
America’s reshuffling. The World Bank warns
[[link removed]] that
fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment,
competition for services and deepening poverty.

So what will happen to Atlanta — a metro area of 5.8 million people
that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows
will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that
hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by
2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure.
Atlanta — where poor transportation and water systems contributed to
the state’s C+ infrastructure grade last year — already suffers
greater income inequality than any other large American city, making
it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns
less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on
its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.

Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change,
but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city
converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a
larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against
drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the
poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That
Atlanta hasn’t “fully grappled with” such challenges now, said
Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance,
means that with more people and higher temperatures, “the city might
be pushed to what’s manageable.”

So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities
with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under
increasingly adverse conditions.

Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the
United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With
time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and
hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and
the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern
California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and
a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are
disproportionately poor and elderly.

In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths
per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison,
produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people,
meanwhile, will pay 20% more for energy, and their crops will yield
half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That
collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10%,
amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American
history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that
change and see their fortunes rise.

Where Will Everyone Go?
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ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the
Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees
might move across international borders. This is what we found.

The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of
the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by
roughly 10%, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota
and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and
inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang’s research
forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry
up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will
enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit; Rochester, New
York; Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess
capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put
to good use. One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line
could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine
country and the country’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border,
to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with
Vancouver to its north.

Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I
talked through the implications of this looming American future. The
facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many
intangibles — a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost
of moving — that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to
migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever
closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.

[_Abrahm Lustgarten is a Senior Environmental Reporter at
ProPublica. Al Shaw contributed reporting._]

_ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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as soon as they’re published. This article, the second in a series
on global migration caused by climate change, is a result of a
partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with
support from the Pulitzer Center._

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