Climate change-driven change

A warmer planet is reshaping lives and pushing people to move, yet again

This original artwork was created with the assistance of DALL-E.

Remember the surge of people moving to new areas of the country during and just after the pandemic?

A lot of people were drawn by the lure to improve their quality of life, live in a cheaper area, and get a bigger home. They moved to the southern and western regions of the United States — a trend that sped up during the pandemic and the flexible work years.

But now? There’s another kind of migration starting up again, but this time, it is driven by the effects of climate change , which are starting to catalyze another mass move. This one has the potential to upend the lives of hundreds of millions of people, reset real estate and insurance markets and disrupt local governments and the services they provide in the coming years.

According to Eric Vermeiren, Director of NASDAQ ESG Advisory, “People in the United States often hear ‘climate change’ and think it’s a distant threat in both time (i.e., happening at some point in the future) and space (i.e., affecting some other part of the globe), but impacts from climate change are very real and they’re happening right here and right now.” 

In 2022 alone, the U.S. Census Department reports that 3.2 million U.S. adults were displaced or evacuated due to climate change-driven disasters — and more than  500,000 of them had not returned a year later. 

According to other data, about 3.2 million Americans have already moved due to the mounting risk of flooding. A recent First Street Foundation report said local populations in “climate abandonment areas” fell between the years 2000 and 2020 due to risks linked to climate change. The report also notes that extreme climate events of recent years have impacted 36 million properties nationwide — or one-quarter of all U.S. real estate. 

Eric believes that we can expect much more climate disruption in the coming years, including higher numbers of climate migrants, noting a White House report that estimates that worldwide “more than 216 million people could migrate within their countries as a result of climate change by 2050.” That’s more than two-thirds of the U.S. population today.

But extreme climate events will not be the only factors pushing people to move. Eric says “other forces, like salination of croplands, extreme drought and rising costs will increasingly factor into people’s decisions to relocate” if they can. 

Diverse Impacts

To be sure, climate change-driven migration will continue to affect people in different ways — depending on their income, age, and the severity of sea-level rise, forest fires, drought or flooding specific to the areas in which they live.

When the realities of climate change sneak up on older adults, for example, it can radically disrupt their plans to age in place and live with financial security. Danielle Arigoni, Managing Director of Policy and Solutions at National Housing Trust and the author of Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation, says, “Some older adults who are in denial about the effects of climate change, as well as those who are not, often find themselves in a vulnerable position.” Researchers at Florida State University say those best positioned to move to less risky climates tend to be younger, employed and economically active.

But deciding to stay put can also be risky, money-wise.

The rising cost and falling quality of homeowners insurance in areas that are experiencing repeated damage from weather disasters are also prompting a lot of people to move.

Property insurance rates in Texas shot up by a whopping 22% in 2023—double the average national increase. In California, some insurance companies have begun bailing on renewals, forcing state lawmakers to propose outlawing the practice in areas most prone to floods and wildfires. And in Florida, property insurance premiums have tripled, on average, since 2019 due to the rising floods and wind damage caused by an increase in the severity and frequency of hurricanes, accelerated by climate change.

Mitchell Baer, a licensed real estate agent in Florida, says the impact of these rising insurance costs is creating the conditions for a “climate-flight” among lower-income residents, especially. “People who are buying or own multi-million dollar trophy homes aren’t pulling back from these investments,” Mitchell says, “but those who have lower incomes may be forced to move where costs are more manageable.”

Washed away

Other impacts of climate change could include the complete erasure of private property and its value.  Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization, says that close to 650,000 privately owned land parcels, covering over 4 million acres, are projected to be below sea level within the next three decades. 

The potential losses for local governments as land becomes submerged will be significant. Under current laws, land submerged by tides becomes state property, which means the advance of sea levels could also erase a significant amount of private, taxable wealth. This loss could lead to a sharp decline in property tax revenues for coastal regions, a scenario that experts warn might lead to the financial collapse of local governments in cities and towns affected most severely by climate change. 

And it's not just the waterfront homes or those in forest fire zones that are feeling the heat. In a 2017 study, Ohio State University found homeowners living near Buckeye Lake and Grand Lake in Ohio experiencing a significant drop in property values due to increased algae growths in those bodies of water spawned by global warming.

Managing the retreat

Some cities, like Olympia, WA, which have been wrestling with rising sea levels, are considering raising property and local sales taxes to help cover the cost of mitigating the impact for local residents.  

The federal government, meanwhile, has put forth a program to help residents in climate danger zones to relocate to safer areas of the country. Known as managed retreats, more than 10,000 U.S. homeowners have so far received help through the government’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, including on the Isle de Jean Charles, a hamlet in the Mississippi delta of southern Louisiana. This program pays homeowners a pre-disaster “fair market” price to acquire and demolish their flood-prone homes. The relocation effort there has so far cost the Louisiana state government some $48 million to move roughly 100 families.

But is managed retreat a sustainable solution, given the sheer number of people projected to be impacted by climate change in the coming years? If so, to where do they move? Who foots the bill? These are tough questions to answer and even tougher pills to swallow, not just for the people directly impacted by climate change but for all U.S. residents. 

And where are many of these climate refugees going? A recent investigation by Pro Publica and The New York Times magazine, found that of 10 counties in the U.S. with the lowest climate risk, six were located in Vermont, and most of the remaining were in northeastern states like Maine and New York. The states most likely to receive climate refugees, according to projections by the Environmental Protection Agency, will be areas in the Great Lakes Region, which stretches from Western New York to Eastern Minnesota. 

Climate change-driven change

So, what's the takeaway from all this? For one, the effects of climate change are no longer just topics for scientists and policymakers. They’re living, breathing issues that are affecting real people, real communities, and real lives in a major way, especially those who are, and will be, less able to shoulder the costs of change. 

Current solutions include bolstering infrastructure in at-risk communities with a combination of state and federal dollars, to better “climatize” them to either receive climate refugees or retain current residents. 

But much more will be needed.

It is no longer considered unrealistic to start thinking about how some places will become just too risky to live in, weather-wise and economically—and soon. 

“Climate migration is being driven by physical, but also economic factors,” according to Tim Canty, Director of Marine Estuarine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Maryland. So, it's no longer an issue just for climate scientists, environmentalists and think tanks to consider. It’s an issue we all need to comprehend, and fast.

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