The term “climate haven” has never made much sense. After Hurricane Helen dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, a lot chief media outlet amazed How Asheville, celebrated as a climate haven, was destroyed by a climate-related disaster.
Later some in the media reported it correctly Climate shelters don’t actually exist. But it still raises the question: Where did this climate shelter idea come from?
Before humans start spewing billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, entire populations will migrate to better conditions in search of a place with a milder climate or more fertile soil or absence of drought.
Because of its speed and magnitude, however, human-caused climate change is particularly extreme, and everywhere will be affected by some degree of risk. There is no absolute safe haven.
Which is part of how we ended up talking about the concept of climate shelter. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helen carved a path of destruction across the Southeast and Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the effects of climate change become more real and evident, the media and local leaders begin to look for better stories to tell.
“People are desperate for optimism,” he said Jesse Keenandirector of Tulane University’s Center on Climate Change and Urbanism, who describes the concept of climate shelters as a myth. “It gives people hope.”
Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that seems so pervasive now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate shelters in the media before 2018. That’s when the Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move. To save yourself from climate change which used the phrase “safe haven”. Buffalo, New York and Duluth, Minnesota, Keenan had suggestions.
The idea gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown called Buffalo “Climate shelter” is his 2019 state of the city address, followed by the outlet Bloomberg And Quartz Refers to Buffalo as a haven for climate. The New York Times A full spread on “climate-proof Duluth.” A slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package launched by the city. He told me it was just a joke taken out of context.
It is difficult to know how much a professor with marketing skills was responsible for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would put a hold on it.
The Census Bureau estimates that climate change will warm the planet over the next few decades, 100 million Will move in and around it US flood risk rises Millions of people may already be shocked Out of coastal and low-lying areas across the United States, as wildfires Questions about immigration began to arise in the west
Inner cities, such as those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population over the years, see an opportunity to draw in those people.
“The idea of a climate shelter is itself an escapist fantasy,” said Billy FlemingDirector of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “A climate refuge even exists, it’s not a specifically physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.”
For these climate havens, attracting new residents is a way to draw in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community, Fleming added. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the stuff that pays for everything else in the city.”
The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helen hit the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature which displays the climate risk score Interactive map and insurance requirements as well as listing pages. Now, you can search for an address and see, on a scale of one to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures and wildfires for that property, based on the information provided. Climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, Launched its own Climate Risk Index Using First Street data earlier this year
Zillow and Redfin’s new climate risk scores can’t tell you for sure whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into a home. But it’s a tool that can help you decide how you want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.
It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are working to show that climate risk isn’t binary. There is no such thing as a perfect climate shelter for the same reason no home is risk free.
Climate risk is a complex equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a little more transparency about the insurance side of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it.
“As we start to see insurance costs go up, that all starts to impact that affordability question,” Skyler OlsenZillow’s chief economist, told me. “This will help the housing market move to a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.”
That said, knowledge of risk does not prevent people from moving In disaster prone parts of the country Right now people move to new parts of the country for a myriad of different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job opportunities and affordable housing. They are A few reasons Why are high-risk counties across the country? Growing faster than low-risk countriesEven in the face of future climate disasters, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. Knowing how to properly prepare ourselves for the worst-case scenario is almost inglorious.
“The scale of these events that we’re seeing is greater than anything humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandasis an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see erosion.”
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate shelters by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future.
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