January 5th, 2025
Via the New York Times, commentary on growing risk of rising sea levels:
In the 1930s, a terrible drought plunged farming communities across the United States into catastrophe. As millions of Americans abandoned their homes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created something remarkable: the Resettlement Administration, which sought to move entire communities to newly built towns such as Greendale, Wis., and Greenhills, Ohio.
Almost a century after the Dust Bowl, America is on the cusp of another displacement crisis, this one caused primarily by climate change. At the end of 2022, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international nonprofit, counted 543,000 Americans who fled their homes to escape a disaster and had not yet returned. As the country’s 20th-century infrastructure becomes increasingly incompatible with the 21st-century climate, this number will grow. When it does, the fates of entire regions, and particularly coastal areas, will fracture along economic fault lines.
With the Resettlement Administration long gone, no federal agency bears responsibility for helping the most threatened and remote communities relocate if they wish to do so. Policymakers have essentially abandoned those Americans who need to move to safety in the wake of losing their land to rising seas and worsening storms.
This failure is especially striking because since the middle of the 20th century, the United States has almost always offered some form of compensation (however paltry) when its citizens’ land is taken. But most rural communities on the front lines of climate change are not granted the same consideration. While climate change is not eminent domain, the distinction hardly matters from the perspective of a displaced community.
Wealthy, dense cities such as New York, London and Venice have spent billions on elaborate infrastructure that will shield many residents (but by no means all) from extreme weather. But rural towns and villages generally lack the resources to build enormous sea walls or levees to hold back storms and the rising tide. Many of these communities will have no choice but to relocate. They could either do so on their own terms (if the government would help them), or wait until disaster renders their homes unlivable and their options much more dire.
A changing climate, a changing world
The village of Shaktoolik, Alaska, where I’ve conducted research since 2022, is one such place. Its 250 residents, almost all of whom are Inupiaq, live on a blush of land barely more than a sandbar on the storm-prone Bering Sea. There is no road along which residents could evacuate, nor a harbor where boats could safely dock during a storm. Instead, a short gravel airstrip is the primary connection between this community and the rest of North America.
A 2009 government report described Shaktoolik as “imminently threatened” by coastal erosion and flooding. In 2022, a typhoon barreled out of a record-hot Pacific Ocean and destroyed the gravel levee that was the village’s only defense against being swept out to sea. The disaster confirmed what many elders and engineers had said for years: The people of Shaktoolik must relocate to higher ground, and quickly.
When displacement is unplanned, it can shatter communities, with residents scattering to distant cities, unable or unwilling to return. For Native communities in particular, giving up a homeland endangers language, culture, sovereignty and traditional hunting, fishing and harvesting.
Planned relocation, by contrast, allows communities to remain intact as they move collectively to safety. For Shaktoolik, that safe place would likely be the low-lying hills 12 miles away, set back from the eroding coastline but still within the tribe’s homeland.
Because there is no one agency that coordinates relocations, communities must patch together funding from as many as 12 separate entities in Washington, often by applying to dozens of competitive grant programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and others. When evaluating proposals, federal officials often require that applicants undertake a cost-benefit analysis that places poor communities at a disadvantage. Villages can tally up their modest housing stock and limited infrastructure, but the cultural and spiritual value of remaining intact is excluded from the final balance sheet.
In the last 25 years, just two American communities, both of them Indigenous, have cleared these hurdles. The first, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, took 20 years to complete the process. The second, Newtok in Alaska, is in the final steps of its relocation, after more than 30 years of planning and fund-raising. While Shaktoolik’s leaders have applied for relocation funding from various federal agencies, the community hasn’t yet raised enough. Some of its proposals have been funded; many have been denied.
In December, the Biden administration recommended changes to the bureaucratic morass hindering community relocation. But it stopped short of instituting these recommendations, or taking the critical step of designating a single agency to lead on climate relocation.
Under the second Trump administration, leadership on community relocation will be a tough sell for Republican lawmakers looking to pay for tax cuts. But conservatives who are enthralled with the notion of efficiency should remember that it generally costs less in the long run to act than to wait until the damage is done. A study commissioned by Louisiana, for example, projected that coastal protection efforts would spare the state $11 billion to $15 billion annually in climate-induced damage.
To date, the general response to climate-vulnerable communities has been the policy equivalent of a shrug. But by failing to ensure that rural Americans can relocate, their futures become collateral damage in the political gridlock that haunts the climate crisis, while most government officials are safe behind sea walls and sophisticated flood defense systems.
Americans deserve better. What was clear to policymakers during the Dust Bowl should not be a matter of controversy or inaction today. Those communities that wish to relocate must be able to move to terra firma while remaining whole.
'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.
'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.
It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.