Changing Places
As temperatures keep rising, tens of millions of people will be moving from the places they now call home. A great climate migration in America has already begun.
It’s not just about California wildfires and Florida hurricanes. Some of the nation’s top risk analysts say regions all across the U.S. will experience massive shifts in population over the next 10-20 years. But where will most people go? Some communities will falter while others will thrive.
NEW YORK— The United States is no stranger to extreme weather, but now, a massive population shift is beginning to emerge in the U.S. due to climate change, and it’s not just being driven by today’s wildfires and hurricanes.
People have always moved as their environment has changed. But today, the climate is warming faster and the population is larger than at any point in history.
And as the U.S. gets hotter, its coastal waters rise higher, its wildfires burn larger, its storms become more severe and its droughts last longer. Scientific modeling of these pressures suggests that a sweeping change is coming in the shape and location of communities across America—change which promises to transform the country’s politics, culture and economy over the next 10 to 20 years.
“The affects of climate change are beginning to overlap and close in on the country from the edges,” says Abrahm Lustgarten, an award-winning journalist for Pro Publica and author of the 2024 book, On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. The combination of drought, coastal flooding, crop failures, intensifying hurricanes, high winds, extreme heat and wildfires are compounding to start making entire regions less attractive and more expensive—and even, says Lustgarten, “unlivable.”
But Lustgarten also says that people are moving now not just because it’s too hot or because of the last storm, “but because the economic consequence of that environmental change is becoming more obvious, and unaffordable.”
New America, a Washington, DC-based think tank, says nearly half (44.8%) of America’s homeowners are being hit with higher home insurance premiums [and lower real estate valuations] because they’re facing at least one type of climate risk exacerbated by rising temperatures where they live now. But even some of the smaller and subtler forms of climate change—declining crop yields in Colorado, for example, or the soaring cost of household water in Arizona, or much higher electricity bills due to expanded air-conditioning needs—are giving some homeowners new incentives to start checking out cooler climates now, before the prices of homes in more temperate zones start to rise.
Where might most people go? As the southern U.S., in particular, becomes hotter and more vulnerable to rising seas, flooding, and storms, millions of Americans could move to the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast. Cities in these regions might grow by roughly 10 percent in the coming decades, according to one model produced by Lustgarten and the news organization, Pro Publica.
More affluent Americans may, alternatively, choose not to relocate from vulnerable areas—at least not until their homes become completely unlivable, Lustgarten says. Wealthy individuals and households will be able to purchase property without a loan and afford progressively expensive insurance, as well as finance reconstruction following a disaster. The research firm, Rhodium Group, says that in the future, at-risk but attractive locations, such as high-risk cities like Miami or areas in California’s Sierra Nevada, may become expensive and exclusive enclaves, inaccessible to most people. Phoenix, for example, experienced more than 100 days of record-breaking heat above 100 degrees Fahrenheit last summer, prompting many of its wealthier residents to buy new homes in Flagstaff, a mountain city in northern Arizona, where summer temperatures were 25 degrees cooler than in the state capital.
Some future climate migration might also be seasonal or circular in nature, dependent on economic opportunities and other factors. According to Rhodium, warming temperatures could shift agricultural production to the northern Great Plains, potentially leading to an ebb and flow of migrant labor in the region due to growing seasons. Separately, “reverse snowbirds” might make their primary residence somewhere in the Sun Belt with a summer home in cooler New England or along the Great Lakes.
Many lower income people, on the other hand, will likely be unable to move to some locations and could be left behind, Rhodium says. “Storms and wildfires are leaving poverty, not just broken buildings in their wake,” says Lustgarten. In Panama City, Florida, for example, the number of unhoused people increased by 45% after this coastal city was obliterated by Hurricane Michael in 2018. In Northern California, legions of homeless remained through the Sierra Nevada foothills years after the famous Camp Fire wildfire displaced them from their homes in Paradise.
Rhodium says that in some places, the value of economic damage from climate change could amount to as much as 60% of local GDP, making it tough for some communities to fully recover. “The government won’t be able to save all communities hit hard by future climate disruptions,” says Ryan Miller, a geologist and expert in climate migration at the University of California. "Maybe we're in a situation where, increasingly, people are finding that in their search for affordable housing, they have to live in an area that's exposed to one of these climate-driven hazards,” Miller said in an interview last year.
Technology also might not be able to come to the rescue fully enough or fast enough—or affordably enough—as climate challenges become more aggressive, Miller, Lustgarten and others say.
“We have a whole culture in the United States that for 150 years or more has thought that we could out-engineer nature,” Lustgarten said last year in a conversation with climate writer Jeff Goodell for New America, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.
“We’ve done a pretty good job of it, for the most part,” Lustgarten said. “But I think what we’re approaching now is a point where maybe we can continue to out-engineer nature in certain ways but there will also be ways which we cannot. … We may be able to if we have limitless amounts of energy and limitless wealth with which to purchase that energy, and we might be able to continue to cool our homes forever in Phoenix and Austin, but we might get really tired of being stuck inside our cool homes and of not being able to go outside.
“…When you think of the impact of heat and humidity changing when our kids can go outside and play sports … or not having outdoor play time at school, I think those are the things that start to change what our imaginations hope will happen with technology advancements,” Lustgarten added. “I think we will continue to improve technology and will continue to have tech advances to mitigate some of these shifts—but on balance, the natural world and the scope and force of these shifts, I think, will continue to outpace anything we can do to blunt them.”
Future Moves
Predictions have proliferated on where domestic climate migrants will move in the United States. Here are some additional observations and predictions:
Rhodium says that in the coming decades, heat waves will drive people north—and could make cities in the Upper Midwest, like Duluth and Buffalo, “climate havens.” Officials in both of those cities, and in Milwaukee and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, are already advertising their climate advantages, but according to local officials, also are not yet fully finished with plans for northern migration and how to accommodate new migrants from other regions. Socioeconomic factors—like where companies can create employment opportunities and how well local cultures can accept the new migrants— will be a challenge. Beth Gibbons, Ann Arbor’s Director of Resiliency and Climate Adaptation, has said that “some people are unsure of what a new population and new immigrants will look like, what it will mean and who will be responsible for them. For some of these upper Midwest small towns and cities, it might be more of a burden than an opportunity.”
Historical trends suggest that the climate crisis will accelerate urbanization, and some researchers believe that 90 percent of the U.S. population will live in urban areas by 2050, in part due to negative climate impacts. Future urban growth will be robust, says Matthew Hauer, a sociologist and demographer in the Department of Sociology and Center for Demography and Population Health at Florida State University. He says decisions around migration are usually influenced by “pull factors” such as social networks, employment opportunities, and the availability of amenities.
In the short-term, many climate refugees will likely migrate to cities closest to where they had been living. Atlanta, for example, is already a fast-growing city and is expected to grow even more —by as many as 500,000 climate refugees within the next 10 years, all coming from the climate-challenged coastal towns and cities of Georgia, Florida and Louisiana, Rhodium predicts. Atlanta is already a decade into coping with how climate migration will challenge cities across the country and has been investing in new parks and bike paths for new residents. But the changes have triggered gentrification around the core of the city, and local leaders are exploring ways now to protect people who have owned homes in central Atlanta for generations—and also help local residents hang on to some of that generational wealth, which is primarily in some of the Black communities. Local government officials are experimenting with ways to create tax breaks which anticipate some climate migration and will keep annual tax costs low for legacy communities.
According to a recent study by New America, climate migration “is an opportunity for resilience and growth” and for economic revitalization of former Rust Belt cities, including Cincinnati, which are positioning themselves now as a climate havens and are developing affordable and mixed-income housing strategies to help future climate migrants find new work and welcoming communities.
The Great Lakes, with their northerly latitude and ample supplies of fresh water, is also seen as becoming a future destination for climate-displaced people from the South. Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan and halfway between Detroit and Chicago, also is aggressively recruiting people from locations hit hard by storms, heatwaves and wildfires.
Climate change deniers continue to exist, and millions of Americans are continuing to move into the country’s most climate-vulnerable areas, regardless of being warned of the risk. U.S. Census Bureau data from 2023 shows that 11 of the 15 fastest-growing large cities in the country are located in Texas, Florida, or Arizona—states which are all at increasing risk of sea-level rise, extreme heat and drought, flooding and hurricanes. Lower costs of living, economic growth and warmer weather have always been driving population increases across the Sun Belt, and many transplants in the American South may not fully understand the extent of climate risk to their new properties—or simply don’t believe the threat could outweigh the advantages. That’s risky, environmentalists say. Roughly one-third of states, including low-lying Florida, lack flood disclosure laws, and Florida’s public insurance funds and property insurance companies are facing tough new challenges.
A story I wrote last year delves further into why some Americans stay in harm’s way after experiencing a climate-change disaster. Have a look here:
Moving to Disaster
·
New research suggests that a variety of factors are at play, but that our political divide over climate change and how to manage it may remain one of our nation’s tallest hurdles.
Got a comment about the great climate migration? Please share it with us here.
As part of our climate coverage, Marcia and Bradley will be presenting a high-profile panel on climate migration at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference next month in Austin, Texas. If you’re attending that conference, please let us know so we can meet up with you there in person!
True 👏
Another great edition!