Climate Change and American Population Shifts

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday on the show. Today, will the effects of climate crises force you to move from your home? Research from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that, extreme climate-related weather events like rising temperatures, rising sea levels, the growing frequency of forest fires, and hurricanes, and drought, and tornadoes point to a pretty unavoidable future.

Many millions of people are going to be driven from their homes. Over the next 30 years, just in this country, the estimate is between 13 and 100 million Americans are expected to move, as their homes and communities become less hospitable, and more expensive. Even at the lowest end of that spectrum, 13 million people, if that's how many have to move because of climate changes, that's twice the size of the largest migration in American history.

According to a new book, even in regions that were once thought to be relatively shielded from the effects of climate change, people have been, and will continue to be uprooted. Yet, Americans these days are moving more South than they are North. That's the baseline, that's the starting point in 2024. Are many of them in for a rude awakening in their new hometowns?

Joining me now, Abrahm Lustgarten Investigative Reporter with ProPublica, and The New York Times, and the author of a new book called On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. Abrahm, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Abrahm Lustgarten: Hey, Brian, good to talk to you again.

Brian Lehrer: First on today's migration patterns. Just to start from where we actually are, Americans are moving South, right? The census tells us, over the last few years, that New York and California are losing people to Florida and Texas, respectively. The Carolinas are growing. Phoenix, despite its intense heat continues to boom, in terms of Americans moving there, all those trends, that's the baseline of 2024. Yes?

Abrahm Lustgarten: Yes, that's exactly right. My book projects a large-scale movement that you described, generally, that's probably going to go northward. Then, 8 of the 10 fastest growing regions of the country at the moment are in those southern, most vulnerable places. I think that points us to what a slow-moving, and subtle change this is going to be.

We're still in a turnaround period, but we are also beginning to see an out-migration of people who would attribute their moves to climate change, and climate displacement in some of those same places that are still growing.

Brian Lehrer: Which is exactly, by the way, and of course, I've mentioned this before, why we do a climate story of the week, it's because the climate does not change at the speed of the news cycle. It's very easy to overlook climate changes, because they're so gradual when they don't register, except at moments of extreme weather events that might be related to climate. They don't register as news events, these subtle, but gradual and ongoing changes over decades in the climate.

That's why we make room for it in a show that is generally news-focused. Is some climate migration already happening in this country, as well as the larger trend toward moving to the South?

Abrahm Lustgarten: Yes, absolutely. It's anecdotal, and it's often difficult to measure. The data isn't great on how many people are leaving California, because of wildfires, for example, but the population of the state has declined the last three years running due to lots of factors, not just climate forces. I talked to tons of people, dozens of people interviewed for my book here in California, who are moving, or have moved because of wildfire, and smoke.

We see a similar movement away from hurricane-prone areas along the Gulf Coast, and places like Louisiana that are seeing very rapid sea level rise already, as well as subsident. We have government-funded and sponsored retreat programs from coastal Louisiana, and people that are moving away from coastal areas, and the southern Louisiana parishes have all lost dramatic proportions of their population over the last 20 years since Hurricane Katrina. Those are just a couple of examples where we're already seeing dramatic movement in response to environmental change.

Brian Lehrer: You write in the book that cities like Detroit and Buffalo will eventually be hubs for climate migrants. Really, they're so widely seen as inhospitable places to live, right? Largely, because of cold weather and de-industrialization, removing jobs like in the auto industry. In New York City, people make disparaging jokes about living in Buffalo. Buffalo, really? Detroit?

Abrahm Lustgarten: Yes, really. There's a couple of reasons. For my book, I worked closely with enormous data sets from the Rhodium Group, the environmental and economic analysis firm. On a physical level, those cities, those Rust Belt cities, or the northern parts of the US are slated to get warmer, and also don't face some of the direct physical threats like hurricanes that so many other parts of the country face.

The future climate of Buffalo may well be in 40 years similar to what Arizona was like 15 or 20 years ago. That turnoff factor, I think is diminishing. There's lots of other reasons that migration experts talk about a northward movement. It's because cities like those you mentioned in the Rust Belt, you also have great capacity. They peaked their populations in the '70s. They have land, housing, infrastructure capacity to invite, and settle large numbers of people, should they come.

There's great economic opportunity that might go along with that as well. Yes, Buffalo could see growth in the future as a result of climate migration, and that city is actively preparing for it, as are places like Cincinnati, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Detroit. Governments in each of these places are beginning to talk about plan for map out and model future population growth, and the economic growth that could come with it, as the climate shifts.

Brian Lehrer: What's an example of that? How are those northern cities preparing for that potential future?

Abrahm Lustgarten: The city of Ann Arbor, for example, just past a, I believe, passed a bond measure to expand their sewage treatment plant. When they did that, they had to size it appropriately, and they had to get public buy-in, essentially, to spend more money than they would need to, based on their current population productions to build a larger sewage treatment plant that would account for their future climate migrant-influenced population projections.

They worked over the past couple of years with a number of climate modelers, and demographic modelers to try to get a sense of how great climate-influenced migration might be into that region, and to account for it. I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but they have invested in that larger, and more expensive infrastructure project in anticipation of that future growth.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners who has a question, or maybe a story for Abrahm Lustgarten, Investigative Reporter with ProPublica and The New York Times, author of the new book called On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, we're doing this book interview as our climate story of the week. For this week who has a question, or maybe a story of climate migration that you yourself have already engaged in, or somebody you know. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or maybe you haven't moved yet, but you're feeling climate-related pressures, like maybe your home insurance went up.

Maybe your house was flooded, maybe you're considering relocating, because those wildfires every year are getting closer and closer to you. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You really dig into the home insurance industry. I think insurance, generally, is so interesting to talk about with respect to climate change, because the insurance industry tends to price things in a pretty realistic way, usually, outside of the realm of politics. Start to talk about the home insurance industry, and how it predicts migration to the North.

Abrahm Lustgarten: Well, we started our conversation with pointing out the growth that's still happening in vulnerable places like Florida, for example. That's a place where the pricing of insurance, or the availability of insurance has directly affected how people move, and has essentially kept people there. An interesting story from Florida begins in 1992 with Hurricane Andrew, devastated the state.

The state was seeing the prospects of large outmigration of its population, and insurance companies, many of them went bankrupt after that storm, and many of them refused to offer policies to Florida residents after that storm. The state stepped in, and created a state-run plan of its own, and it guaranteed that anybody living there could buy property insurance, and that property insurance would be available cheaper than the open market plans. That kind of subsidization has encouraged, has basically made it safe to move into a hurricane risk zone, and it's driven enormous growth over the last 20, 30 years in Florida. That plan has been replicated across more than 30 states now.

California is using an active state-run plan to protect homeowners from losing wildfire insurance, for example. That's an example of where the easy availability of insurance has blinded homeowners to the risks of their changing climate, to the economic risks. It's also created a really unstable economic situation in those states that are now relying on state-subsidized plans, because those commercial insurers are increasingly backing out of climate risk markets.

We're reading about that daily in The New York Times and elsewhere about the unavailability of wildfire insurance in California, or flood insurance in Iowa, and all of these places. Insurance is one of the greatest protectors of American assets, of homeowners' assets, but also just of larger economic systems. If we can't insure our properties and our infrastructure, then we face enormous economic peril.

One of the thesis of my book of On the Move is that, Americans will begin to move when climate affects their economic welfare, and their economic standing, not necessarily because of the environmental perils themselves, but when it changes their cost of living, or it changes their economic risk. While we're still seeing some movement into those high-growth southern parts of the country, I think that the signs point to a bit of a turning point.

Insurance is one of those turning points, where we're seeing real instability in the insurance market, and real questions among insurers about how to protect, or if they can even protect against the array of climate-driven perils. That's the type of thing that's driving enormous personal financial risk for individuals across the country, and the kind of thing that people will eventually move away from.

Brian Lehrer: I think we have a climate migration story here from Marie in Rensselaer County, East of Albany. Marie, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Marie: Hi, Brian. I sold my house on Long Island, which was in the Franklin Square area, sort of the middle of the Island, north-south. I wanted to get rid of it before it became waterfront property. I've been up here for three years full-time. Everyone I speak to up here-- I mean, it's very climate-resilient up here, but you went to school up here, you know.

I had to have my driveway plowed only twice last year. There is no more snow like there used to be. It does get cold. Two days ago, they had a tornado warning in Troy. Even though we're resilient up here, and even though I certainly feel more immune to it than I did on Long Island, or I would in Queens, where I'm from, it's happening up here, too.

Brian Lehrer: It is incredible how Albany has changed. I still have friends up there. I'm going up there next week on vacation, as a matter of fact, to Albany and other places in the general area, going to see the Jazz festival at Saratoga, but nobody cared about that. I'll never forget when I went to Albany, that is, when I was a freshman going to college there at SUNY at Albany.

The very first Thanksgiving break, took the bus back. The bus was driving back on that Thanksgiving Sunday through what felt like canyons of snow, like I had never seen as a kid in Queens. It's like when you watch the luge races on the Winter Olympics, big walls of snow on either side. Well, they don't get that anymore.

Marie: No, they don't. I have my driveway plowed when it's about five-six inches twice last year. That's it.

Brian Lehrer: Marie, thank you very much. Let's see. Oh, Constance in Redding, Connecticut, wants to do a general shout-out to quality of life in Buffalo, right, Constance?

Constance: That's correct. I grew up in Manhattan, and then I went to college in Courtland, and then ended up moving to Western New York in 1981. A bit of a culture shock, but I lived there over 40 years ago, had all my kids there. I got to tell you, Western New York, yes, and the whole Buffalo area gets a bum rap, because, as Woody Allen once famously said, "Committing suicide in Buffalo is redundant."

I got to tell you, it's a lovely area. Two of my daughters and three of my grandsons live there. It's definitely a place where we're retired now, and we're thinking maybe we'll move back there. [chuckles] I just wanted to let people know that there's a lot of stuff to do. They've revitalized the city, and the downtown. It's really a nice area, and it gets a really bum rap.

Brian Lehrer: Constance, thank you [chuckles] very much. Fair enough. Hello, Buffalo. Listener writes a text message, Abrahm, that follows up on what you were just saying about the insurance industry, and how it's getting subsidized now in various places, just so people can stay in their homes. Listener writes, "How is that subsidizing affecting insurance rates for the rest of the country?"

Abrahm Lustgarten: It's raising rates across the country, and not necessarily the subsidization itself, but the rising risk. As I write in the book, and explore deeply, auto insurance customers in Vermont are paying to subsidize the risk of homeowners insured by Allstate, or another large commercial insurer in a high-risk hurricane zone. The less insurers are able to pool their risks and spread them out and mitigate their own financial risk across the country, the more unpredictable the weather and the climate gets, and there is flooding loss in one place, and wildfire loss in another, the higher those rates are going across the board.

We're starting to see that it's not just homeowners' rates, it's all rates. It is auto insurance rates. It's even health insurance rates. As insurers grapple with climate-induced losses there, like the effects of last summer's wildfire smoke on the East Coast, for example.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener writes, "I moved from New Mexico back to the Hudson Valley, as fires and drought felt more and more threatening. In the mid-Hudson Valley, there is water, and plant diversity, and farmers." As you say, Abrahm, it might be anecdotal, the trends might still be moving from north to south, but there are starting to be some climate migrants back to the north within the context of the United States.

By the way, why did you make the book just about the United States, because I think most of the climate migration that we're seeing in the world, including situations that are really pretty desperate, are from desertification, and other things in the Global South, affecting a lot of poor countries, certainly compared to us.

Abrahm Lustgarten: Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, big picture, this book stems from a project that I did with The New York Times in 2018 that looked at that global situation. Globally, the habitat for humans is shifting northward, and billions of people are being left outside of their ideal human habitat, as the climate warms. That suggests that we could see large-scale migration on the planet in the range of two to six billion people over the next century, a third to half of humanity. That's because the population is larger than it's ever been before, and because the climate is changing faster than it's ever been before.

I looked at those migration hotspots around the world, which are North Africa, Sahel, and South Asia. I spend a lot of time reporting in Central America in particular, and following climate-influenced migrants from Guatemala to the US border. During that reporting, I found that my own life, where I live in California, was also being dramatically affected in those seasons that I was reporting about wildfire smoke in my case.

It really opened my eyes to the fact that Americans will be dramatically affected, are being dramatically affected by the changes in their environment, and will also move. It's all relative. Our comparative wealth is enormous compared to so many other parts of the world, but it's still going to be an enormous challenge, and a huge demographic shift that signs suggest will change the culture, and the entire demographic makeup of this country. When it came time to pinpoint, a focus for a book project, I was really thinking deeply about my own stability, and what that means for Americans in this country, locally.

Brian Lehrer: It's true, though, even in this country, that there's a disparity, a disparate impact. Marginalized communities and communities of color are already suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change in this country. That's why calls are not just for climate change prevention, but climate justice, and environmental justice, right?

Abrahm Lustgarten: This is one of the most significant aspects of the climate migration story in the United States, and a heavy focus of my book. What we'll see is that, climate change will exacerbate all sorts of existing disparities and vulnerabilities, and so all of our systemic patterns of racism and inequity in this country will be dividing lines that will designate who suffers more and less because of climate change. We look at, for example, at the effects of redlining in American cities. I focused in my reporting a lot on Los Angeles, where historical redlining from the 1930s has left underserved Black and Hispanic communities with less tree cover. What that means today, as heat waves hit Los Angeles is that, the temperatures in those same neighborhoods can be as much as 10 degrees hotter, and commensurate with that, the health risks are enormous, so people in those communities suffer higher rates of cardiac arrest, and other health risks.

We are seeing that across the country, underprivileged communities have seen less investment in the infrastructure that protects them against future climate change. They have less flooding infrastructure, fewer parks, fewer green space, and so on. When we look into the future of how climate change is going to affect these communities, we can see, not only that people who have the means to move, will move, that mobility is connected to wealth, but that many people won't be able to move, or many people might choose not to move, but then remain underserved by the infrastructure, and the governance that remains around them. We're seeing that these climate pressures are really driving a wedge along existing fault lines in our society.

Brian Lehrer: A few minutes left in our climate story of the week with Abrahm Lustgarten, Investigative Reporter with ProPublica and The New York Times, and author of a new book called On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. I will just note that a caller informed us, and Google agrees. We confirmed it, that the joke about dying in Buffalo being redundant came from A Chorus Line, the play, not a Woody Allen movie, just saying. [chuckles]

The context was that Abrahms' book predicts that places in the north that have been depopulating for a long time, like Buffalo and Detroit, will see population growth because of climate migration in coming years. Susan in Chatham, New Jersey, wants to add something to that about Detroit. Susan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Susan: Hi. I had recently heard information about the city of Detroit, which, of course, always gets a bad rep. I've heard about the south side versus, I guess, the north side. My concern is that with, let's say, a large migration of people from the north, who may have the ability to buy better properties and all, and would this make the people who are in power in Detroit, even make things more difficult for those people who are trying to hold on to what they have, even the water system, and everything else.

I don't know, will there be enough jobs? I guess, it's similar to something else you talked about, about people being treated fairly, and not just a bunch of people coming who may have a better means than these folks who've been struggling.

Brian Lehrer: It's a really important point, because your next book, if your prediction about climate migration within the United States comes true, might have to be about gentrification.

Abrahm Lustgarten: Thank you for that question. Gentrification is an enormous issue in this conversation. We already see it happening in a lot of places. You see gentrification in Southern Louisiana, as people move out of New Orleans north, and build homes on slightly higher ground in communities just north of there. You see it in Atlanta, which is a city that's receiving great numbers of climate migrants and population growth, in general, and the gentrification of neighborhoods there.

For sure, it's a risk in places like Detroit and everywhere. It points to the need for really aggressive policy responses that can address some of these risks. You see, Atlanta has played with some of these policy responses, for example, like tax programs that protect people in communities from rising property taxes in communities that are gentrifying, and can keep legacy families in their homes without those rising costs.

There's a real need for policy action at the local city level now that ranges from tax policy to housing, to making sure that there's adequate jobs for changing populations, and to try to get ahead of that curve before that change is overwhelming?

Brian Lehrer: One more call, Charlie in West Orange, you're on WNYC. Hi, Charlie.

Charlie: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I have a question. Is there a point? We see a point where state, local, and federal governments are going to reach a tipping point, where they're going to say, "We're not going to be rearranging deck chairs in the Titanic anymore," where the areas keep flooding, or they're going to flood, sea levels are going to rise, where they're just going to throw up their hands and say, "We're done." That we're going to stop-- That we're almost literally throwing money into a hole in the water. I'll take the answer off the air. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. It's a great question. It's a policy question, right?

Abrahm Lustgarten: Thanks for that question. I want to point out how incredibly complex this issue is. Most of the migration that happens, happens on a small, on a local level, it doesn't mean that people are all fleeing Arizona for Detroit, but rather that people in rural parts of Arizona might move to Phoenix, or that people in Staten Island are moving away from the lowest lying blocks in coastal areas, to just slightly higher blocks a half a mile inland, and things like that.

Brian Lehrer: We should remember that this kind of government expenditure to keep communities that are at climate related weather event risks, habitable and expensive as it's getting, is not just for places like Florida and Texas and Phoenix right now. Superstorm Sandy in 2012 in New York, which is such a destructive event. In the book, you highlight how the state prevented insurers from canceling policies on most high risk homes to blunt the pain of disaster, as you put it, by spending tax dollars on those subsidies. I'm just localizing a little bit for some of the listeners.

Abrahm Lustgarten: That's exactly right. The fact is that, larger cities and wealthier places will have the funds and the tax bases that they need to build and invest in those protections. New York is a great example. I think that New York will one day build the seawall that's been so discussed. The cost of that seawall are already estimated to be in the neighborhood of $120 billion, but you won't see rural communities along more rural coastlines, or smaller communities able to make those kinds of investments.

The demographic models project an urbanization, as these climate influences grow. What that means is, there will inevitably, unfortunately, be communities that are left behind in terms of their ability to adapt, and make these investments. On the dark side of that equation is the risk of a spiraling decline, that you get underinvestment in infrastructure, and some people leave a community, and the tax base drops, and there's less money to reinvest in schools.

The quality of the schools drops, and more people leave as a result, and you get a spiral of decline. To the caller's question of, is there a tipping point where people just throw in the towel? I don't think it's a finite point, but that risk is there that some communities, most at risk, in proportional to their ability to fund what they need to do to protect themselves, might find themselves in decline, as opposed to growth and opportunity.

Again, the key, the trick there is going to be, how can you manage that decline? Probably, how do you keep your community, and your funds proportional to your needs. and what you're realistically able to sustain?

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to sneak in one more call, because I love the point that I think Jim in Spring Lake in Jersey is going to make about one early sign that predicts human migration. Jim, you're on WNYC. We've got about 20 seconds for a soundbite length, but go for it.

Jim: Thanks for having me on, Brian. Yes, living here at the Jersey Shore my whole life, growing up, working on the fishing boats, in the last five years, I have never seen more whales, dolphins, just sea life that has not belonged here. Being six years working on the fishing boats, I saw three whales in that entire time. You can go out on boats every day now, and see whales just off the Jersey shore.

Brian Lehrer: Jim, thank you very much. last question, Abrahm. I don't know if you deal with it in the book. Do wildlife migration patterns predict human migration patterns?

Abrahm Lustgarten: Yes. I don't tackle it head on in the book, and it's not an area of expertise, but the short answer is, yes, living species, including plants, are migrating in response to climatic change. It gets me back to that climate niche study, which is really pointing to the fact that human habitat, just like certain plant species, and trees, and whales, is shifting. As it shifts, we will, as those other animals do, seek that most opportunistic, and safest, and most supportive environment that we can thrive in in the future.

Brian Lehrer: Abrahm Lustgarten, Investigative Reporter with ProPublica and The New York Times, and the author now of On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. That's our climate story of the week. Abrahm, thank you so much.

Abrahm Lustgarten: Thanks for having me.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.