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The Sunday Read: 'How Climate Migration Will Reshape America'

2020-09-27

In August, Abrahm Lustgarten, who reports on climate, watched fires burn just 12 miles from his home in Marin County, Calif.

For two years, he had been studying the impact of the changing climate on global migration and recently turned some of his attention to the domestic situation.

Suddenly, with fires raging so close to home, he had to ask himself the question he had been asking other people: Was it time to move?

This week on The Sunday Read, Abrahm explores a nation on the cusp of transformation.

This story was written by Abrahm Lustgarten and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
My name is around- must Garten. I report on climate for pro. I recently wrote a cover story for the New York Times magazine about how Americans will begin to move in response to their changing climate. Most projects examining climate change tend to look at changing invite mental conditions, may be changing natural conditions. Few have yet looked at how people will live in a changed environment, that really is really went. Drove me into this project is to try to understand you as the world changes. What will it mean for our lives? How old people respond to that Where might they move too? And if they don't move? How would we doubt now? I think we tend to think about climate changes in the United States in
Hartman, analyzed way. You know we talk about fire risk on the West Coast or hurricanes in the southeast. When you look at all those risks. Together and we mapped them. I was just incredibly surprise to see how much they overlap and how much of the country has covered and really gives this sense dead. The breadth of the climate problem, is both much more far reaching and will be much more severe across the country than unrealized before taking on this project, and also the data suggested happening much faster and coming out us much quicker. That's something that you know really. I had begun to experienced myself in California mean just the last five fire seasons have grown increasingly more intense each year, projections that were a decade two decades. Our suddenly happening to me right now, and they look to that data across the country. I could
Imagine that that is the way that other people in other places were also experiencing this change. So here's my essay how climate migration will reshape America read by Eric Jason Martin. August besieged California, with the heat unseen in generations, a surgeon air conditioning broke the states electrical grid, leaving a population already Rep by the corona virus to work remotely by the day. Light if their cell phones, by mid month, the state had worked and possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth. One hundred thirty degrees in death valley and other worldly storm of lightning had cracked opened. The sky from set occur is 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 kill dried By the worst five year, drought on record soon, California was on fire over the next two weeks. Nine hundred blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the states. Twenty nineteen wildfires combined. Seeing one hundred thousand people from their homes, three of them just fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay area. Another fire burned just miles from my home in Marine County I watched his towering plumes of smoke, billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers. Criss cross to the skies like many Californians I spent those weeks were about what might happen next. Wondering how long it would be before an inferno of sixty foot flames swept up the steep grassy hillside on its way towards my own house.
Rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape. They also had a longer term question about what would happen once this on connected fire season ended it finally time to leave for good. I had an unusual perspective on the matter for two years I have been studied how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating Sequences of a warming planet, changing landscapes, pandemics, extinctions, the potential moving of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet. To be. Among the most important, I travelled 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 have also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift. And now I was work
come on 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 and years summer has brought a season of fear to California, with it worsening wildfires closing in, but this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear and the endemic had already uprooted. So many Americans, relocation, no more seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me it's in Incriminate 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 heats, more storms, all of it, making life increasing
untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already droughts regularly threaten food crops across the west, well destructive, in the towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland. Clubs dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the great lakes rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of american shoreline nearly habitable as California burned hurricane pounded the Louisiana Coast with one hundred fifty mile in our wines, killing at least twenty five people. It was the twelfth storm to form by that point. In twenty twenty another record Phoenix meanwhile endured fifty three days of one hundred ten degree heat twenty more days than the previous record. For years America, We have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The disease,
we make about where to live or distorted, not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by it. Pensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defining nature in much 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 largely gravitated poured environmental danger, building among SK lines, from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the South West. I wanted to know if this was beginning to change, might emerge 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 enter these
questions. I interviewed more than four dozen experts, economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planning, and I mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next thirty years. The maps for the first time combined exclusion, climate data from the rhodium group. An independent data analytics firm, wildfire projections, muddled by you states, forest service, researchers and others, and data about America's shifting climate niches and evolution of work first published by the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring, a detailed analysis, MAPS, is online at project. Stop pro public dot, Org forward Slash climate dash migration. What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation across the United It's some one hundred sixty two million people, nearly one to almost likely experience.
A decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water for ninety three million of them. The changes could be particular the severe and by twenty seven our analysis, suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least. Four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe in places decidedly outside the ideal niece for human life. The cost resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have Ready acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable and the main federal flood insurance programme is, for the first time require bring that some of its parents 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 twenty eighteen study published in the door
of the Association of Environmental and resource economists suggests that in twelve Americans in the southern half of the country will move toward California, the mountain West or the northwest over the next forty five years, because of claims influences alone such a shifting. Population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid pace Chaotic urbanization of cities ill equipped for the burden, testing capacity to provide basic services and simplifying existing inequities. It will way at prosperity dealing repeated the I'm a close to coastal rural and southern regions, which could in turn push higher communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in Rural Louisiana and Coastal Georgia, where low income and blackened, indeed communities face invite
mental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global migration experts point out is often overflow of relative wealth and, as some move, many others will be left behind those who stay risk becoming trapped. As the and in the society around them ceases: what for any more support. There are signs that the messages breaking through half of Americans now rank climate has a top political priority up from roughly one third in twenty. Sixteen Three out of four now describe climate change as either a crisis or a major problem. This year Democrat, caucus growers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland I did in twenty nineteen ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. By researchers at Yale and George Mason First, it is found that even Republicans
use or shifting one in three now think. Climate change should be declared a national emergency policymakers having left America unprepared for Its 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, begin this when individual perception of risk starts to shift when the environmental threats reaches past the least fortunate and rattled. The physical and financial security of broader will fear parts of the population it begins when even places like California's suburbs are no longer safe. It has already begun
Better help the convenient and affordable online counting service will match with the licensed professional, with whom you can start communicating in under forty eight hours talk with your councillor in a private online environment. If you are strong with anxiety or depression or stress right now, you are not alone. Joint one million, plus people taking charge of their mental house with the help of inexperienced better help. Counselor the daily listeners get ten percent off your first month at better help. Dot com slash the daily visit better help, dot com, slash the daily. Let's start with some basics across the country, when you get hot buffalo, may feel in a few decades, like Tempi Arizona. Does today in Tempi itself, Wilson, Dane one hundred degree average summer temperatures by the the century extreme here did he from New Orleans to Northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable forming. Otherwise, Seemingly survivable heatwaves into debt,
taping health threats fresh one- will also be in short supply, not only in the west, but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where drought snow, regularly whither, cotton fields by twenty forty. According to federal government projection, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri Memphis Sands Aquifer a crucial, water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana he's already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day the ogre aquifer, which supplies nearly a third of the nation's irrigation. Groundwater could be gone the end of the century. It can be different to see the challenges clearly, because so many factors are in play at least The eight million Americans are likely to face mega fires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas. In Florida in Georgia
At the same time, one huh million Americans. We in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin, will increase We face humidity so extreme that working outside we're playing school sports could cause he'd stroke. 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 in so interrelated that Americans seeking flee one could run into another. I live on a hill top four hundred above sea level and my home will never be touched by rising waters by the end of this century. Is the more extra projections of eight to ten feet of sea level rise come to fruition the shore. Of San Francisco Bay, will move three miles closer to my house as it subsume
some one hundred sixty six square miles of land, including a high school. A new county hospital the store, where I buy groceries the freeway too. Francisco will need to be raised and to the east. Newbridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Clearly the latino asian and black communities who live in the most vulnerable low buying districts will be displaced first, but research from Matthew how're, a sociologist at Florida State University, who published some of the first muddling of american climate migration in the journal. Nature climb change in twenty seventeen suggests, The tool will eventually be far more widespread. Nearly one in three people here and Marine County believe part of the roughly seven hundred thousand, who his models suggest me abandoned the broader Bay area as a result of level rise alone.
Remain to North Carolina to Texas, risings levels are not just chewing up shorelines, but 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 ways, amenities and escape routes, and even far Inland SALT water wills. Into underground drinking water supplies, each of the nation's twenty larger metropolitan areas. Miami New York in Boston among them will be profoundly altered indirectly affecting some fifty million people, Imagine large concrete wall separating Fort Lothar condominiums from a beach lists, waterfront or dozens of new bridges acting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend one hundred billion dollars 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 long term on salvageable in all our projects that thirteen million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wild fires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move, though difficult to predict precisely easily be tens of millions larger. Even thirteen million climate. Migrants, though, would ring as the largest migration in north american history, the great migration of six mill, like Americans out of the south from nineteen. Sixteen nineteen. Seventy transformed, almost everything we know about America from the fate of its labour 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 resilience you going to suck on the 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. Their distanced from the food water sources. They depend on and they are part of a culture that sees every problem is capable. Of being solved by money, so even as the average of the Colorado River, the water supply for forty
million western Americans and the backbone of the nation's vegetable and cattle farming has declined for most of the last thirty three years, the population of Nevada as doubled at the same time, more than one point, five million people have moved to the Phoenix Metro area, despite its dependent. On that same river and the fact that Is there now regularly hit one hundred fifteen degrees since hurricane drew devastated Florida in nineteen. Ninety two, and even as that state has become global example of the threat of sea level rise. More than five million people have moved it. Florid is shorelines, driving a historic in building and real estate. Similar pet are evident across the country senses to show us how Americans move toward heat toward coastlines poured drought, regardless of evidence. Of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters. The sense that money and technique.
Gee can overcome nature as emboldened Americans, where money and technology failed, 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 it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance programme has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over. In the same spot and federal agriculture aid with subsidies from farmers who switch to drought, resist crops while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefits at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing
Perhaps no market forces proved more influential and more guided. Then the nations property insurance system from state to state readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replaced Holmes, even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most The look only twelve months into the future, ignoring long trends, even as ensure in 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 fordable 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, Well, they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities. The laws also satisfied the demand of wealthier homeowners, who still to be able to buy insurance. At least thirty states including Louisiana Massachusetts. North Carolina and Texas have developed so called fair plans. 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,
Policies amount to a sort of shell game meant to keep growth go. Even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggests that it should stop that's what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduce two parts of cities to landfill and insurers. Nearly sixteen billion dollars in pay out many insurance companies, recognising the likelihood that it would happen again declined to new policies and left the state so the Florida legislature? created a state run company to ensure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and in economic collapse. By a centrally pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn't exist as a result, floored as taxpayers by twenty files and assumed liabilities worth some five hundred eleven billion dollars more than set times the states total budget as the value of coastal property. Topped
point. Eight trillion dollars. Another director, a cane wrist, 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 power. Is on a small afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfires smoke. I called Jesse Keenan an urban planning and climate change specialist than at heart words 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 two lane, universities, school of architecture, had been in the
whose 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 migrant smooth north. But, like other scientists, I'd spoke, with keen and 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 for his red on the states future. Their interest suggested a growing in your great nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country the sign. He told me 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 new found, respect for the destructive power,
or of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans. Appetite for reckless development had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surgeon asters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules on October nine, twenty seventeen, a wild fire blazed through the suburban blue color neighbourhood of Coffee Park in Santa Rosa California, virtually in my own back yard. I awoke to learn that more than eighteen hundred buildings were reduced to ashes less than thirty five miles from Where I slept inch long cinders had piled on my window sills like falling snow. The tubs fire as it was called shouldn't, have been possible. Coffee park is surrounded not by vegetation but bike creates and molds and freeways so insurers had rented. It has been please zero risk. According to Kevin Van Lear than a risk model. Earth
the global insurance liability, firm risk management solutions. He now does similar work for Cape analytics, but then Lear who had spent seven years picking through the debris left disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate and price the risk of their happening again had begun to see other impossible fires. After a twenty. Sixteen fire tornado, ripped through Northern Canada at a consumed Get Lindbergh Tennessee. He said alarm bells started going off for the insurance industry. What then Lear saw when he walked through coffee Park a week after the tub fire changed the way here, model and project fire risk forever, typically firewood spread along the ground burning. Maybe fifty percent of structures in Santa Rosa, more than ninety percent, had been levelled. The destruction
was complete. He told me, then we are determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy spawning seventy miles per hour, wines that kicked the storm of embers into the modest homes of coffee park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that my never have been possible if California's autumn winds were getting fiercer and drier every year colliding within it's a fine climate, driven heat and ever expanding development. It's hard to four ass, 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 and effort to preemptively avoid the risk
the live wire sparking a fire which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices more on a collision course after the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was asked when power was interrupted. Six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stopped all around us. Small fires burned thick smoke produced fit of coughing. Then, as now, I packed and acts and go back in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Governor Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the new abnormal. It was no surprise, then, the California's property insurers, having watched twenty six years worth of profits dissolve over twenty four 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.
Twenty twenty in February, the legislature introduced a bill compelling California too, in the words of one consumer advocacy, follow the lead of Florida by mandate that insurance remain available in this case, with a requirement that homeowners first hardened their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California is fair plan for catastrophic fires, as grown by at least one hundred eighty percent, since what he fifteen and in Santa Rosa houses, are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire, vulnerable zones, the proved so deadly and twenty seventeen, given that a new study projects at twenty percent increase extreme fire, whether days by twenty thirty five such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence. It's only a matter of time before homeowners begin
recognize. The on sustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of culture, awakening to risk that Keenan observes can strike a neighborhood like an inn, just disease with fear spreading doubt and devaluation from door to door. It happen that way in the foreclosure crisis, Keenan call, The practice of drawing the arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk blue lining, and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are blue lining, are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist red lining practice. In days passed this summer, climate data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that seventy percent more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought most of the underestimated risk was in low income neighborhoods. Neighborhoods see little in the way of flood prevention. Investment
my Bay Area neighbourhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend against the ravages of climate change that questions of live ability had reached me here. We're too, to too belief that the blue lining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity, holding middle class Americans too with broad implications for the overall economy, starting nations largest state under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt, climate distressed mortgage loans, might already be threatening the financial system lending analyzed by Keenan and his co author, Jacob brought for a study published in the journal. Climatic change in June shows that more 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
the money for the higher and 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 recovery to see how entire communities spin out of control the tax base declines. The school system and civic services falter, creating negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave rising in currants costs and the perception of risk force credit rating agencies. Who downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks, local, Meanwhile, keep securitized their mortgage death snuffing their own liabilities.
Keenan, though, had a bigger point, all the structural disincentives that is built Americans, irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical end point 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 head 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 of two wasteful and so on. The full weight of risk instability will fall on individual people. That's when the real migration might begin. As I spoke with keen and last year, I looked at my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland singed brown by months of dry summer. Heath
was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific, gas and electric had three times then a fight as such an imperilled tinder box that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wild land urban interface that hold the studies. I read blamed for heightening Californians exposure to I'm at risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan should die something my house and getting he cut me off. Yes, Americans have dealt with climate disaster before the dust bowl 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
effectively. King, the drought from nineteen, twenty nine to nineteen thirty, four crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and misery, funded by sixty percent, five million acres of winter weak with leaving farmers, destitute and exposing birth. Now baron topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures, the cloud of dust right from east to west the eyes of the resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes and blue is far EAST is Washington but Summer of nineteen thirty, five, many of them rising out of the dutch people, their possessions of public sector poverty, stricken people. The disaster propelled an exodus of some two point: five million people, mostly to the west,
we're newcomers bookies 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 still have
lower 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 is kept them poor. Ever since the dust bowl events will most likely happen again, the great plains states today nearly half of the nation's wheat, sorghum and cattle, and much of its corn, the farmers and ranchers their export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. My twenty fifty researchers at the unit, city of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for space studies found dust bowl. A yields will be the norm even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as twenty percent. Another extreme drought,
DR at near total crop losses. Worse than the dust bowl me capping the broader economy. At that point, the authors right, abandonment is one option. Projections are inherently imprecise, but the grand we'll changes to America's cropland, plus the steady begging and burning and flooding, suggest that we are already witnessing a slower forming but much larger replay of the dust bull that will destroy more than just crops. In twenty. Seventeen solomons Young, a climate economist at the University of California Burg, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate. Driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poor Stu counties in the United States, mostly across the south, and the southwest,
in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic product. The twenty eighteen national climate assessment the ones that the US s economy overall, could contract by ten percent. That kind of loss typically drives. People towards cities and researchers expect that trend to continue after the covert nineteen pandemic ends. In nineteen. Fifty less than sixty five percent of Americans lived in cities by twenty. Fifty only ten percent will live outside them in part because of climatic change by twenty one hundred how're estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and austin- could each receive more than quarter million new residents as a result of sea level displacement alone, meaning at me
be those cities, not the places that empty out that wind up bearing the brunt of America's reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty. So what will happen to Atlanta Metro area of five point: eight million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat driven wildfires. Our estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate, jeez will move into the city by twenty one hundred swelling its population, and it's stressing its infrastructure Atlanta, where transportation and water systems contributed to the states, see plus infrastructure? Great last year already suffers reader income inequality than any other large american city, making it a virtual tinder box for social conflict,
One in ten households burns less than ten thousand dollars a year and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts. Even as the city center grows, wealthier Atlanta has started bolstering its defence. Is against climate change, but in some cases this is only exacerbated divisions when city converted an old West side rock quarry into a reservoir part of a larger green belt to expand parkland clean the air and protect against drought. The project also fuelled rapid upscale growth driving the poorest black communities further into it. Average suburbs that Atlanta Lent hasn't fully grappled with such challenges now says in Turkey. Osborne jokes, chair of the West,
Let a 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 Hunter 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 in hospitable, dangerous and hot, something like a tenth of the people who live in the south and the South West, from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas, too then California decided to move north in search of a better economy and a more tempered environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places. Heat alone will cause as many as eighty additional deaths per one hundred thousand people. The nations of Europe crisis by comparison produces fifteen additional deaths per one hundred thousand the most affected. People, meanwhile, will pay twenty percent 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 regional incomes by roughly ten percent amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in american history. Has people live farther North will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise. The millions of people moving north will mostly head to this these of the North EAST and North West, which will see their populations grow by roughly ten percent. According to one model,
Chile places like Minnesota and Michigan and four March will become more temperate verdant and inviting vast regions will prosper just as soongs 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 responding expansion, cities like Detroit Rochester, Buffalo and The walkie 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 who's up and coming wine country and the country's new breadbasket among the canadian border to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then as 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 conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home. Even when an inexorable dangerous inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice
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Transcript generated on 2020-09-27.