When the sea level rises by six feet, up to thirteen million Americans will be displaced. That’s the estimate from a team of researchers at the University of Southern California. The map shows those states and counties most affected. Florida is particularly impacted, especially Miami-Dade and Broward counties which would contribute 3.5 million refugees alone.
So where will these refugees go? The research team used data from the movement of people recorded after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and then used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projections on the effects of sea level rise on coastal counties, and future population projections to train a machine learning model to predict where the refugees would move to.
The vast majority, as shown in darker red on the map, flee to adjacent counties and to the mid-West.
What happens then?
The experience of Chico, California after the Paradise wildfires in 2018 might be instructive. This news story gives a clue:
The tent city in the Walmart parking lot is gone. Most of the emergency shelters around town have closed. Target finally has been able to refill shelves fast enough to keep up with spiraling demand (but) ‘When are things going to get back to normal?’ …the answer is, it’s not going to be days or weeks or months. It’s going to be years. The result is…a costly and vexing challenge for an overburdened city government and people who yearn for the old, pre-fire Chico.
The results of the study suggest that the effects of sea level rise are pervasive, expanding beyond coastal areas via increased migration, and disproportionately affecting some areas of the United States.
But sea level rise is just one effect of climate change. Heat waves will drive people north—and could make cities like Buffalo ‘climate havens.’ Urban flooding could reshuffle populations within a city. Finally, socioeconomic factors—where employment opportunities exist, who has the means to move, and how discrimination keeps people out, for example—will also play a role in dictating how many people move, and to where. And of course, the problem will affect a lot more people than just those in the United States.
This article resonated with me, as our fictitious State of Concord in Court of the Grandchildren is a ‘climate haven’ for the ‘coasties’ in a 2050’s world where climate change has forced millions of climate refugees to move.
Map Source: Robinson C, Dilkina B, Moreno-Cruz J (2020) Modeling migration patterns in the USA under sea level rise. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227436. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227436
Story Source: citylab.com
