Wildfires, hurricanes, floods and other hazards displaced 2.5 million Americans in 2023, and this year promises to be even more brutal. As climate-change-fueled weather extremes and disasters become more frequent and severe, 50 million US residents are projected to become climate migrants in the coming decades. More than 3 million Americans have already relocated due to climate considerations, according to the First Street Foundation.

But so far, relatively few of these people have moved to the places often identified as “climate havens” — cities like Duluth, Minnesota and Rochester, New York, which are comparatively sheltered from extreme heat and have the carrying capacity for new residents. Instead, most of this first wave of climate migrants just relocated to towns nearby. And what’s worse is that many millions of Americans are actively migrating into the most climate-vulnerable parts of the country, largely in the Sun Belt.

For now, cities like flood-prone Charlotte, storm-wracked Houston and furnace-like Phoenix are making it work, albeit under the strain of rising housing costs and buckling infrastructure. But population inflows into increasingly untenable locales are a ticking time bomb. When that bomb detonates in the coming decades, it will usher in a chaotic and costly mass exodus, in which homeowners will lose their life savings and poor communities of color will be left behind to fend for themselves.

If we want to avoid that, we need a plan to coax climate transplants to parts of the country that are safe and appealing in the long term, and we need to do it now.

As we outlined in a recent report for the think tank New America, climate safety is just one factor Americans consider in relocation decisions, alongside jobs, housing prices and social networks. The result is that most families who relocate stay within the same county — even those who move primarily as a result of climate impacts. Researchers at Rice University recently crunched the numbers on 10,000 government buyouts of flood-prone homes over the last 30 years and found that on average, homeowners moved only 7 miles (11 kilometers) away. The impact, the Rice researchers wrote, is that “most retreating homeowners are not moving long distances to safer towns, states and regions; they are churning in and between nearby neighborhoods.”

To make matters worse, US Census Bureau data shows that 11 of the 15 fastest-growing large cities in the country are located in Texas, Florida and Arizona, states variously at risk of sea-level rise, extreme heat and drought, flooding and hurricanes. These two demographic trends — a preference for short-distance moves and the Sun Belt’s population boom — mean that millions of US climate migrants will be living in communities that are only marginally less climate-vulnerable than the ones they flee.

Fast forward 40 years, and economists predict a climate-driven property meltdown worth hundreds of billions of dollars as home insurance and mortgage industries flee risky locales and homeowners’ equity disappears. In fact, this process is already starting: From California to Iowa, the increased frequency and intensity of disasters is exponentially increasing home insurance rates and prompting insurers to exit markets. Climate migrants will have no choice but to make a messy and expensive retreat, likely at a severe financial loss.

To avoid this bleak eventuality, the US needs a whole-of-government plan to incentivize climate transplants to the Great Lakes, the northern Great Plains and the Northeast. That entails working with local partners in future climate havens to entice both businesses and individuals northward.

To start, it’s clear that people move for jobs. Across the Sun Belt, a strong job market is driving population increases. In the Rust Belt, which has experienced decades of deindustrialization, communities that could receive climate migrants must work to revitalize their economies and provide greater economic opportunities for newcomers, including through more favorable tax regimes that are competitive with business-friendly Southern markets.

The federal government can incentivize significant private sector investment in these geographically resilient communities by partnering with key industries to create relocation and reskilling programs, especially for low-income workers with limited resources. The Department of Commerce, for example, can help by directing loans and grants to businesses in the Northeast and Midwest.

The 2022 decision of tech giant Micron Technology Inc. to open a chip plant in central New York is a good example of how this might work. The company is leveraging $5.5 billion in incentives from the state, tax credits from the Chips and Science Act and city and county-level infrastructure support to build a semiconductor facility in Onondaga County. The plant is expected to create 50,000 jobs, potentially drawing tens of thousands of people to a climate-safe region.

Fledgling entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular will require support to survive and grow. To that end, the Small Business Administration could direct financial resources and technical assistance to these climate havens through existing initiatives such as the Small Business Innovation Research program, while the National Science Foundation’s regional innovation engine program can further help stimulate local innovation, job creation, and economic growth in the Rust Belt.

Federal policymakers might even work with localities to set up “climate opportunity zones” that offer tax breaks for new or relocating businesses, especially those within fast-growing sectors.

Beyond economic pull factors, many climate migrants will need support moving longer distances, especially because some may be relocating while down-and-out financially. The federal government should set up a national climate relocation program and offer household tax breaks, housing vouchers or direct payouts to those who move to climate havens. On the local and state level, there are already programs that provide incentives for people to relocate to Tulsa, northwest Arkansas and rural Vermont in order to boost the white-collar workforce or address aging demographics in rural areas. Similar federal initiatives could be created for climate migration.

For old industrial centers in the Rust Belt like Buffalo and Cincinnati, climate inflows could provide a crucial opportunity for revitalization. Former manufacturing hubs like Detroit, home to roughly 1.8 million people in the 1950s but only 650,000 today, can leverage sparsely populated residential neighborhoods and underutilized public infrastructure to more effectively accommodate rapid population growth.

However, these receiving cities will need resources to ensure rapid population inflows don’t increase housing and employment insecurity among existing residents. The emblematic cautionary relocation tale is that of Chico, California. After the 2018 Camp Fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills, thousands of people displaced by the destruction quickly relocated to neighboring Chico, overwhelming local housing stock, causing home prices to skyrocket and fueling a homelessness crisis.

In order to avoid these sorts of outcomes, receiving cities need to start planning now for the impacts of climate migration. Luckily, federal funding packages like the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act provide funds that receiving cities can use to conduct these planning exercises and then execute on building the housing, transit and other infrastructure to absorb newcomers without displacing existing residents.

Meanwhile, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in collaboration with state and local partners, could factor in climate migration and geographic resilience for its funding allocation decisions of the Housing Choice Voucher program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program and the Community Development Block Grant program, thus better ensuring more affordable housing in climate havens. The federal government might even create a national land trust to acquire housing and land in climate havens, and then offer property at a subsidized rate, both to new arrivals and existing residents.