Science Friday - Degrees Of Change: Climate Change Migration. Oct. 18, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

When the water rises, whether from heavy rains or rising seas, communities have a few options: reinforce flood-threatened homes, rebuild after the water recedes, or—in places where the threat of repeated floods and even more damage is increasing—leave. And while leaving may feel synonymous with defeat, more cities and states are interested in encouraging people to leave risky floodplains—a process called managed retreat. FEMA offers a buyout program that usually involves offering homeowners money to encourage them to move elsewhere. New York Times reporter Christopher Flavelle and University of Delaware social scientist A.R. Siders describe some of the different ways cities and states have attempted the process: from Staten Island residents who took buyouts after flooding from Hurricane Sandy, to Louisiana’s new statewide plan for strategically targeting high-risk areas. But how can managed retreat go wrong? New research in Science Advances from Siders and her colleagues has found that it’s often rich counties that apply for FEMA money, and they often use it for buying out poorer residents—leading to questions of whether resources or opportunities are being distributed equitably. Jola Ajibade, a geographer at Portland State University, expands these questions to the global scale: In Lagos, Nigeria, managed retreat offers no financial incentive to people being asked to leave. And in Manila, Philippines, people are offered new homes, but aren’t given a way to earn a livelihood. Finally, with enough planning, can retreating retain the fabric of an entire community? In Sidney, New York, neighbors have been waiting eight years trying to move together to higher ground—and they’re still caught up in red tape. The planned relocation of a Native American community on Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, has hit roadblocks as well. But small Midwestern towns fleeing massive river floods have tried the same, and seem to be thriving decades later: see Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, and Valmeyer, Illinois. Lehigh University anthropologist David Casagrande explains why collective community planning may end up being a key factor in retreat that leaves peoples’ lives and livelihoods most intact. At a United Nations climate meeting in Poland last year, President Trump’s advisor on energy and climate change didn’t advance a forward-thinking plan to tackle climate change, but instead extolled the virtues of natural gas and even coal—one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. So, in the absence of meaningful federal policy on climate change, a grassroots effort by 435 U.S. mayors seeks to solve the climate problem, starting at the local level instead. Emily Atkin, who writes the HEATED newsletter about the climate crisis, talks about that and other climate policy stories in the news, such as the lack of climate questions at the Democratic debate and the candidates’ views on punishing fossil fuel companies; Google donations that fuel climate science denial; and the Department of Agriculture’s lack of assistance for farmers dealing with increasingly extreme weather. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iraflata. The climate is changing, and because we need to deal with it now, we open the next chapter of our series, Degrees of Change. Our series explores the challenges of a changing climate, and how we as a planet and a people are adapting to the crisis. We'll be talking about retreat, communities that are encouraging people to escape floods and rising seas, more info on how you can get involved in our coverage, and sign up for our climate newsletter at ScienceFriety.com slash degrees of change.

But first, we check in on the gatekeepers, the decision makers, the controllers of the purse strings. This week, we again saw the Democratic contenders for the presidency on stage to debate. And did you notice what was missing from three hours of debate? Did you notice not one question about climate change? With climate change rapidly morphing into climate crisis, Not one of the CNN moderators saw it fit to find out how a dozen candidates would handle it. Emily Atkin writes Heated, a newsletter about the climate crisis, and she's here to talk about that and other climate policy stories in the news this week.

Welcome, Emily. Hello, thank you for having me. You're welcome. Climate change is polling right up there with health care among Democrats, and while we've got a lot of talk about Medicare for All, not a peep about climate change in the debate, really. No, it's like flashback to 2012 and 2016 and just being ignored all over again. Well, let's be fair to CNN.

They did hold a seven-hour climate town hall a while back, right? Sure, they did. That's a little different than a debate, sort of targeted to a more niche audience, and the candidates can't interact with each other during those forums. So we haven't seen really the candidates have a robust argument about the climate crisis yet. And of course, they ruled out having a climate debate. the DNC, so that's not going to happen very soon. No, I don't think that's going to happen ever, well, at least not this cycle. Not this cycle. And all the candidates on stage this week have

also gone on the record to talk about how they'd hold fossil fuel companies accountable on climate change. What sort of solutions are they talking about? I think the number one solution that people are talking about is holding companies liable through litigation. There are a number of consumer protection laws and state laws that seek to hold companies accountable for making false claims to consumers. So say you buy a candy bar and the candy bar causes you to get migraines or something like that. And the companies know that, but they don't tell you and you get migraines. So you can sue them. That's the same with fossil fuels. Candidates and lawsuits are seeking to hold them accountable for making false claims misleading the public about the fact that their product

caused climate change. Is this something like the tobacco industry? Is that what they're arguing? It is exactly like that. Yeah. But they're not talking about a carbon tax or something like that. I mean, sure, that's part of many different policies that candidates have to talk about. But the fact is that cities and states and the federal government, which means taxpayers,

we're going to have to pay a lot of money to prepare ourselves for the damage that is coming with the climate crisis. and the strategy is to take some of the load off of taxpayer's shoulders by saying that fossil fuel companies have a duty through the law to pay for some of this because they lied about it. Your next story is about the Department of Agriculture and how little money it's devoting to prepping farmers for the effects of climate change, like extreme weather. Right. So this year, the extreme... stream weather was really bad for farmers. About 20 million acres of land, the record-breaking amount of land, were left unable to be planted by wet weather just in the Midwest. And that doesn't even have, that's without mentioning, you know, fires in the west and hurricanes in the southeast. And the agriculture department is only devoting 0.3% of its budget to help farmers prepare for an adapted

events like this, which again is a taxpayer concern because this year taxpayers have paid $2.5 billion in crop insurance. So that also only stands to get worse and worse. Yeah, because we are seeing all these record rainfalls and flooding on these farms. Right. And we're sort of in this place now, too, where the farmers see that this is happening, but there's also widespread. There's also widespread. There's also a farmers don't tend to not think that this is climate change because they're so connected to the climate. They see the climate changing and they think, yeah, the climate's changing and this is bad, but there's still a reluctance to accept that this is human-caused and thus preventable.

Let's move on to another topic. Google has a whole sustainability website talking about how they're purchasing clean energy installations, how they're fighting climate change with data and so on. But that website isn't really telling the whole story about Google's complicated relationship with climate change, is it? No, so the Guardian has this story published earlier this week revealing Google's support for policy groups that back climate science denial and back repealing of environmental regulations

to solve climate change. So the main two groups that the Guardian revealed Google was sponsoring is the same. state policy network, which is this umbrella organization for conservative groups. And those groups include the Heartland Institute, which is like this very radical anti-science group, climate denial group. And then also just financial support for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading groups to help convince the Trump administration to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and withdraw some Obama-era climate regulations. Have they been called out on any

of this stuff? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you read the article, there's quote from, I believe, Senator Sheldon White House, who's, he's a senator from Rhode Island. He's one of the most outspoken senators on climate change, and he basically just says, you don't get to have it two ways. You don't get to say that you're, you don't get to say that you're a leader on climate change and then support primarily climate-denying front groups. Essentially, if you've been, I've been covering this issue for a long time. And it's pretty clear that one of the biggest problems towards acting on climate change is misinformation about climate change. Science denial. It's one of the biggest, most insidious problems. And so if Google is supporting climate science denial group

while saying that they're leaders in climate action, they're definitely being called out for hypocrisy. And social communities is the right place where this is, you know, people are residing and keeping track of this stuff. Yeah, and I mean, we have problems there to social networks. I mean, willingly or not, that is where a lot of the misinformation takes place and spreads. Finally, mayors from around the country are stepping up to negotiate directly at the U.N. climate talks. They aren't leaving it to federal diplomats, are they? No.

The United States has a federal presence at the U.N. climate talks is sort of, devolved into maybe a like a side show at this point. There's not a real actual negotiating on climate change happening anymore now that the Trump administration is leading federal talks, U.S. talks at the U.N. climate

summit, so mayors are just taking it into their own hands. Yeah, we are seeing a lot more of this and all the climate issues, aren't we? We're seeing that the mayors and the states, they're saying, you know, we have a political and we have an economic impact. We've got to take this on our themselves? Well, I mean, that makes sense because they're the ones directly dealing with the

impacts to their communities. They're the ones whose budgets pay for maintaining infrastructures, and they're the ones who have to respond first to extreme weather. They don't really have much of a choice. They're on the front lines every day, and it should be noted that the U.S. Conference of Mayors, they have submitted a resolution in support of those accountability measures, we were talking about earlier, those lawsuits, because fossil fuel companies have been saying, okay, we'll support climate policy in exchange for immunity from lawsuits that seek to make us pay for it. And just recently, the U.S. Conference of Mayors submitted a resolution to the U.N. saying, we can't have that. We need that money from those fossil fuel companies to help pay for these measures

because it's expensive. Yeah, because they saw what happened to, you know, the tobacco industry. when people were allowed to sue them. They had giant settlements. Exactly. And I think mayors are hoping that the similar settlements will ease some of the financial burden on their citizens. You know, I was reminded of the recent story about California trying to, you know, push back against the White House, which wants to take away their car emission standards that are higher than federal standards.

It seems like states are being emboldened now, aren't they, looking at each other? and what they're trying to do. Right. And I think their main argument is that if you're a Republican government in your first state's rights, let us do what we want to do. Okay, your federal regulations aren't going to be that strong on fossil fuel companies or climate change. Well, let us do it if you're not going to. And so, and that's something the Trump administration is trying to prevent, is to prevent states from being able to go further than the Trump administration is going. I mentioned at the top about health care, climate change, right up there,

or even sometimes topping health care as an issue among Democrats. I'm so, I'm really surprised since, as you mentioned, 2012 and 2016, I've talked about this before. Are you surprised how quickly this has risen as an issue? I'm surprised as a person, particularly who has been covering climate change for that long, because it's, I've said this before, it's almost been like for the last six years, I've been just throwing quotes into the void,

and all of a sudden I'm throwing quotes into not a void, and people are listening to them, and it is very surprising, but also at the same time, it's not that surprising because from a journalistic standpoint, I've always looked at climate change and just been like, wow, this is a very big, very important issue. I wonder when people are going to start paying attention,

and it turns out it's now, and I think that's partially just because it's, it's starting to become a little more obvious than it once was. You really can't deny what you can see, can you? Yeah. You can't deny these giant storms, the hurricanes, the floods, the fires. I could go on. You could go on.

I mean, you can deny it. You certainly can. It's possible. We still see it all the time. But something you can't deny is that it is polling at the same level of interest among Democratic voters as health care. But we are seeing so much more discussion of health care than climate. change in our journalistic realms, like these debates. And so I think that's where a lot of the controversy comes from. It's like, listen, people care. We need to start talking about it.

We'll see if it shows up in the next debate. Thank you, Emily, for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me. Emily Atkin writes, Heated, a newsletter about the climate crisis. We're going to take a break, and when the floodwaters get too high, or just keep coming, why some communities are adapting to climate change by leaving. They're getting out of the way. We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. When climate change threatens your very existence, it now becomes a climate crisis. Water is rising on the coasts and in storm-deluged rivers, fires are burning in the West.

And people are giving up on the idea of rebuilding if it happens time after time. So here's what we heard from our listeners on the Science Friday Voxpop app. My wife and I recently moved from Florida to Vermont, because of climate change. I recently moved from Sonoma County, California to Maine. I moved from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Cincinnati, Ohio. And we chose an area of the state that is especially resilient to flooding. I was born and raised in California, and, you know, when I was younger, there was never wildfires, or if they were, they were very rare. I think that Vegas is getting hotter each year, and the summers there are already brutal. There's very little water, and that

situation is not improving. About a year ago, my family and I took a road trip to Texas looking for affordable housing. We woke up one morning with lake water about 30 feet from our front door. We were flooded out of the area, and we are still trying to find affordable housing in a safe place. I have decided not to buy real estate in New York City because I worry a lot about rising tides and how that will affect the city long term. In the early 2000s, I was living north. north of Lake Pontchartrain in South Louisiana in a flood zone, which began to flood regularly. I've moved to Houston since then, and I'm considering relocating again because climate change has put this home in danger from the heavy rainfall such as Harvey.

That has definitely made me reconsider living anywhere near the coast. Some thoughts from your neighbors commenting on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. Thanks to Craig from Vermont, Melissa from Maine, Nancy from Ohio, Molly Ann from California, Diana from New York, and Hillary from Texas for checking in with us on these signs Friday Vox Pop app. And I know degrees of change is where we talk about adapting to climate change from the changing fast fashion industry to cool roofs in urban heat islands. But what happens when leaving?

Leaving is the adaptation. Cities and counties and floodplaces. are increasingly looking at something called managed retreat as a solution, where homes are repeatedly inundated. Using FEMA's buyout program, they incentivize homeowners to leave. And depending on the community, they turn the land into a park or a wetland or some other less costly use. But not every community is interested in retreating from rising waters. And even when they are, not every homeowner benefits equally. So how do we level the playing field?

Perhaps a bad metaphor here, but for flooded citizens. We want to hear about your experience, too. Let us know, have you taken a buyout or otherwise left home because of rising floodwaters? Our number 844-8255, that's 844-Sy-Talk. You can tweet us at SciFri. Here's the question again. Have you taken a buyout? or otherwise left home because of rising floodwaters.

844-724-8255. Let me begin our discussion today. Dr. A.R. Siders, assistant professor of geography and public policy at the University of Delaware and Newark. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. And Dr. Christopher Flavel, reporter for the New York Times covering climate adaptation. Welcome also.

Thanks, sir, having me on. You're welcome. Christopher, what's the difference between people just taking FEMA buyouts and actual managed retreat? Yeah, the premise of managed retreat is it only makes sense in contrast with the alternative. And the idea here is policy makers want to avoid a situation where people are fleeing in sort of an ad hoc fashion that doesn't really give any consideration to equity or fairness or the safety they find themselves in at the end.

So the idea of manager treat is if you have some sort of a cordiality. policy between different levels of government, where you say to homeowners, let's think about this, let's think about which areas we want to encourage people to leave, maybe where they want them to go, and how we can make sure that everyone has access. Otherwise, it tends just to be the wealthy or the people who have some ability to leave, and you tend to find that the communities that don't have managed to treat just get the poor and people who have no options stuck in place, and I think policy makers are looking for ways to avoid that. So managing means you've thought it out, you've come up with a plan instead of allowing everybody just helter-skelter go where they liked

it. Ideally, and to make sure it's not just dependent on who has the money to do it on their own. So there's an issue really governments are fumbling towards some concept of equity here and what we owe as a society to people who are in these areas. They're not safe, and they might not have the ability to leave on their own. Is that what happened after Hurricane Katrina, for example? Certainly, to a degree, yes. I mean, you look at some parts of Louisiana, Blackman's Parish comes to mind, and just a series of storms pushing many people, but not everyone, out of those areas. And the result, when you visit these places, they're, number one, they're shells of what they were. And number two, the people who were left behind are the ones who didn't have options. The idea here is governments saying to themselves

and to their citizens, what do we owe people who maybe aren't that safe and might want to leave, but to what degrees is it appropriate for taxpayers to help them to pay them to leave versus leaving up to them on their own? Dr. Siders, your research team just mapped out pretty much every FEMA buyout in the U.S. Where did they tend to be happening? Give us a little roadmap there. So we were actually surprised by the fact that we found buyouts in 49 states. So every state except Hawaii has used FEMA money to do some sort of buyout.

And we found them in about 1,100 counties, which means that one in three counties in the U.S. has used a buyout. So we were a little surprised by that, that there's so much experience with this, and so little discussion of it or research on it or planning for it. So in terms of which counties are taking these buyouts, we found that the counties, Counties that are taking the buyouts tend to be denser and wealthier than counties that don't take buyouts, but that also experience damage. But then within the counties, once they have the funding, we find that they buy out homes in neighborhoods that are have lower income and are less dense. Probably because these places are trying to buy up the most land and affect the most homes possible for the same amount of money. Christopher, what are some of the communities that are actually trying managed retreat and how's it going?

So there's, as I mentioned, there's a surprising number. This is happening already. New Jersey has a statewide program called Blue Wakers, where they're trying to sort of, in an intelligent way, select communities that would benefit from having sort of large-scale buyouts. Louisiana probably is the furthest along. They've got a statewide, at least a system, a plan, if you will, where they say, let's look at the areas that we probably can't defend for much longer. and let's look at how we can help people leave those areas and where they might go. I think that's the next step in this manager treat is thinking not just of where you leave, but where you go to. And Louisiana is saying, what are the, quote, receiving communities? How do we change those communities to make them more sort of amenable to new residents? And how do we get local officials on board? That's always the Achilles here.

People, officials don't want to lose the tax base when people leave. And officials in receiving communities are, often worried about how those places will change with a new influx of residents. So we're really just beginning to think of what these issues are and how to address them. And Dr. Siders, as a researcher, how would you define then success in places like Houston or even Staten Island after Sandy? Success in a buyout is always really multifaceted. So the research has tended to look at buyouts as a success if the homes are bought up and the houses

are removed. so it returns to open space. But there are so many other factors in that that need to be considered. And this is an area where the research is just kind of catching up with practice. So trying to figure out things like where do people move. As Chris mentioned, then we need receiving communities on board. Are people really better off after they accept a buyout? What is their experience long term?

How are they doing financially, socially? When you move, you can lose connections with your neighbors and communities. So how do they recover those in new areas? is. Equity is a big piece of this. The people are also trying to figure out how do we do this in a way that feels fair and transparent so that everyone understands how decisions were made when they're being made in these places. And then finally, how is the land being used and what happens to the community who decides to stay in place? So when some homeowners leave, what does that do to the people who are still in that community and how do they maintain a sense of community with a shrinking population?

Do you have an example of a success story in any of these? I would point to some of the Midwest community relocations that occurred due to river flooding, actually, a success story. So thinking about Val Meyer, Illinois, they relocated the entire town as a result of major flooding on the river. The whole community decided to relocate. They all decided on a new location. And as part of the move, because of the move, people's property values went up. They found new people coming into the town who could now find housing and could use it as a commuting zone. They had the new sources of industry and tourism popping up because of the relocation and some of the other investments that they put in. And they just celebrated 25 years after the relocation. So

looking back over the last 25 years, they recognize that, yes, the community has changed, but they're very, very glad that they don't still live in the flood zone anymore. Yeah. Christopher, give me an idea of what can go wrong with a managed retreat. Do you have an example? Yeah. So when I visited communities in New Jersey, taking part in their Blue Acres buyout program, what you see in general is, say, officials select a block or two blocks that they say really shouldn't be there anymore. Because these are almost always, in this country, voluntary buyouts, it's very rare that every homeowner says yes. So the result usually is sort of a patchwork where you get some open lots surrounded by the occasional

home. And so the purpose of the buyout, which is to return an entire contiguous area to a buffer of some sort, typically doesn't work. And cities hate that because they have to keep on paying for services for those handful of houses. So I actually can't think of any examples yet where it worked in the sense of everybody who was in the area in question left, and the result was you got sort of a return to nature. That might happen down the road, but so far it's a very piecemeal process, and it's largely because officials just do not want to impose this through eminent domain on people who would rather stay put.

A tweet came in from Brandon on Twitter. It says, should insurance companies also take part in some of these buyouts? I mean, NFIP, the Federal Flood Insurance Program, is certainly an actor in this, but they have the same issue where they're not forcing anyone, and there's no mechanism in federal flood insurance to say to somebody, we have paid X number of times to rebuild your home after a flood. So we're not going to do it anymore. You've got to move. I think there's a real political reluctance in this country still, but it's shifting. But so far, nobody wants to say, you've got to leave. And my sense from reporting this here and in other countries, that's probably the next step,

some way of making these community-wide buyouts to really gain the benefit. But I think the problems really have to get worse before local officials can, would be willing to consider that step. Insurance companies have put some restrictions on individual. I know individual homes after Sandy, they were told you if you want to get insurance. You've got to raise your, you know, your foundation up 10 feet. I'd put it on stilts, things like that. Yeah, there's certainly, look, there's certainly things that NFIP and other insurers are doing to try to encourage behavior. But again, I think it comes down to, in most cases, you can still get insurance.

especially through NFIP, and for a lot of people, their home is their identity, and whatever the financial consequences for living somewhere that's vulnerable, that is not only how they think of it. And I think there's a real emotional component, and it's so hard to make this a policy debate around money or around safety when people still think of their homes in those heartfelt terms. So it's a really tough issue. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC studios talking about the retreating from flooded areas. Let's go to a message left on a sifri-a-vox pop app. I live in Houston, and when I first heard the question if I have thought about relocating because of climate change, I thought, no, that's ridiculous. But then I

thought again about it, and I actually have been thinking about leaving because of the increased flooding and the increased risks from hurricanes and the damage that they bring. Christopher, what do you think? Look, it's... Is this common? People who don't worry about climate change, but do think about flooding? Yeah, there's a semantic issue here, right? I mean, you call it what you want.

Nobody wants to have their home ruined again and again. And what I found in the reporting is the one, the point at which people tend to change their minds is when they don't have just one event they're exposed to, but I think it hit multiple times in a short period of time, say two floods in two years, two floods and three years, that's when you see a real shift. And you get a big number of people saying, I'm willing to leave. But until that happens, you get a really mixed response, and I think policymakers struggle with that. And that brings up an interesting question about where it happens. Dr. Sider, does this managed retreat seem to work differently, depending on whether a community is urban or rural?

Dr. Seidt. Hi. So the mini-treat in the United States, we tend to use the same buyout process. So it's often the same kind of government intervention. One of the biggest differences between the two appears to be where people are able to move afterwards. So particularly in really dense urban places that are experiencing housing crises and affordable housing crises, especially. If you're purchasing and demolishing affordable homes, that can be able to be.

homes, that can put even more pressure on the housing crisis. And so it goes back to this original question of once people are bought out, where do they go? What options do they have? Do they have options to stay in the community? Yeah. And so we should be looking beyond just buyouts there. Absolutely. We need to be thinking about something much larger than just buyout programs. Buyout programs are a type of managed retreat, but there are so many other ways we could do manage retreat, and that that would involve far more, far more management, far more of the kind of large planning processes that Chris described in the beginning, thinking about the receiving communities, and then also thinking about how do we prevent people from building in places

in the first place. So right now, in the United States, we're building in the floodplains. We're actively putting more homes in the floodplain, even in the same communities and the same towns where we're buying up homes, which is sort of nonsensical, right? So if we could think about this in a larger, more holistic way, we could not put more homes in place that eventually will need to be bought out. And we could start using other strategies for community engagement, insurance regulations, other pricing issues in order to help communities think about shifting their location. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Saiders is going to stay with us through the break. I want to thank you, Dr. Christopher,

Plavel for taking a time. Yeah, New York Times reporter covering climate adaptation. We're going to take a break and what about global perspectives? How Nigeria, the Philippines and even Japan are tackling the question of retreat and stories from Midwestern towns that relocated decades ago. What have we learned from that? We'll be right back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. we're talking about adaptation to climate change, and in this case, adapting by moving away from areas of repeated catastrophic flooding, rising seas, intensifying rainfall, even fire areas. We may get into that a little bit. Dr. A.R. Sider is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Geography at the University of Delaware is with us. I want to turn our attention to a more global perspective.

What are other countries doing? there examples of successful retreat? The U.S. is not alone in trying to relocate people out of floodplains. Let me welcome some new guests. Dr. Joel Adjabod is an assistant professor of geography at Portland State University in looking at how managed retreat is playing out in Nigeria and the Philippines. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much. And Dr. David Casa Grande is a professor and chair of anthropology at Lehigh University. He's been looking at Midwestern towns that move decades. decades ago to avoid flooding rivers. And of course, if you want to talk about it, you're welcome to give us a call, 844-8255. Have you moved or thinking of moving? And what are you wondering

about? You can also tweet us about at Cy Fry. Let me ask you, first, Joe, we've talked a lot about the United States so far in FEMA's buyout program for homeowners. But your work has taken you to two large cities in other countries. So let's talk about that. What does managed retreat look like in Lagos, for example? Well, managed retreat, the walk I did was in Lagos and also Manila. And managed retreat looks very differently in both cases. It looks different from what is going on here in the U.S. In the case of Lagos, what we see in terms of concerns around sea level rise, storm, storm sogees, as well as flooding, is very important. real, but what the government is doing is

forcibly removing people from those areas. And the government also have in place a policy around relocation of people on account of climatic risks, but how they are doing it is really where the problem lies. What do you mean by that? So what I mean by that is in the policy document,

what you find is that the government lays out a very elaborate explanation around how we should do Manate retreats and who should move. And in that document, those who should move include not just the vulnerable people, but industries, transportation, infrastructure, all the areas that are around the coastal places, particularly places that are at rinks of sea level rise and flooding are supposed to be removed. And there was also another elaborate information in terms of the ministries that should do

this relocation. So the Ministry of Environment is involved. the Ministry of Waterfront is involved. And so there are other types of ministries that are also supposed to come together and walk in how the city of Lega should encourage the relocation of people from areas that are to wreaks. But what happens in practice, go ahead, I'm sorry. Yes, what happens in practice is that those who are actually being forcibly removed

are the vulnerable people, the urban poor. And so as the urban poor are being removed from those places, you also see the new cities or new megastructures are been built right on the Atlantic Ocean. An example being the Atlantic City, which is currently being built. There is a diamond city as well. There are about four new cities that are actually popping up right on the lagoon and on the ocean. And so this makes you question what is really the purpose of money to retreat and the policy and why is it that the rich are being advanced and to leave in those places while the poor have been forcibly removed. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Just trade one for the other, does it? But on the other hand,

I understand that in Manila in the Philippines, you have a completely different situation unfolding. Yes, that's very true. In the case of Manila, while Manila doesn't have any policy around relocation per se or managed retreat, it's not in their large policy. But in terms of the practice, right after the Andoy storm accord. What you see was there, there was the swift move by the government to relocate people, particularly people living within three meters near the coast, near the river areas that were being removed, but not forcibly removed. They were given some incentive.

They were given money to relocate them to the province. But what happens is that where they are being relocated to, which is outside of the city, they are being related to places like Bulla Kahn and Kaviti. But those places just have housing. And all you get there is the housing. You don't have the infrastructure you need for your, you know, basic infrastructure. They don't have social amenities. They don't have really any sort of livelihood.

And so this has led to a cycle of what I call a cycle of retreat and return where people move, but then they return back to the city of Manila because they don't have any real sorts of livelihood in this new relocation site, and that has been the major concern for the urban poor in Manila. David, I want to talk about success stories, communities that have actually relocated in their entirety in the past and are still around to tell us about it. You've done a lot of work on that front in the Midwest. What's the story there? Yeah, so there were a lot of communities who had to move after the flood of 1993, which were very bad. had throughout the Mississippi Basin.

And so Valmire, Illinois, as you were discussing just a little bit earlier, is kind of a textbook case of a successful relocation. And so they experienced significant flooding in 1993 and kind of recognized that because of changing hydrology and deteriorating levees that it was probably a good idea to move. The town had about 1,000 people. and thinking about success after they moved, after they moved the most of the town, the population dropped to about 600, but it's slowly come back to close to 1,000 again. And so that's one way of thinking about success. And so what hints do you have for people who are thinking about relocating now, retreating?

Well, as the earlier conversation indicated, this idea that the FEMA buyout program targets individual homeowners actually creates a lot of conflict within communities. And so what we see in the Midwest is there tends to be better success if the relocations are done as a community. And so contrary to what appears to be happening in Lagos, what we see in the Midwest was that people were involved in the planning process. process and had a lot of say and how the process would be done and what the results would be. And so that's actually very empowering, and that actually brings communities together as opposed to the typical FEMA bioprocess, which turns neighbors against each other because they're arguing about loss of tax base and losing the school because the population is going to decline and so on. So moving as a community, I think, is a really powerful concept to keep in mind throughout all of this. That's interesting. Jolla, does your work in studying global situations give us any lessons for the United States? Yes, I think when you were thinking about successful retreat, based on the range of literature, which is really about 100 literature that I look through,

there is no consensus on what a successful retreat is or what that even means. And the reason, of course, being that retreat sometimes is often seen as something that is involuntary. and there is a sense of resignation that it's sort of like a defeat for some people. But if we think about it in other perspective, it is also about the safety of people. And so the tension between making sure that people are safe and they are not faced with repeated flooding and having to remove people from places of wealth, because most of the places we are asking people to move away from, are places that are, you know, used to be buoyant economic zones. For the reach, it's places where you have high property values for the poor.

It's places where they engage in tourism, activities, they engage in farming and fishing. And so there is this tension between safety and economics, which makes it even difficult when we are trying to think about what success means. And some of the lessons that I see in the work that I do is that, particularly in the case of the global south, is that retreating. it's expensive. The United States is the wealthy country, can afford to do the buyout for multiple people, whether individual or community-based relocation. But for some countries or some cities, it's expensive to relocate a large number of people thinking about one million or, in some cases,

undress of thousands of people away from those zones. So those are some of the challenges in terms of what it is to what is required to achieve some kind of successful retreat. So another issue is also the politicizing of retreat. Oftentimes, like I said in the example of Lagos, you know, you retreat some people, but then some other people take over those new places. And so it can reinforce this social stratification and this inequity in society. So that makes it difficult. And also ignoring local knowledge or imposing expert knowledge on people in terms of how they need to relocate becomes a problem. Also, retreat can create this invisibility for the poor because they are no longer seen in those places.

They are pushing places that are remote. These are some of the problems you have, including the issues of availability of land when you relocate people, where exactly are going to move, particularly thinking about because we have 20 million people. We have a lot of people who want to know that. Let me get to some of the calls because they're asking, where do I go to? Let's go, first of all, to Simsonia, Kentucky, to David there. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. I grew up in far western Kentucky near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. All my life, I have watched the water. I knew where the historic floods were. I knew where the intermediate floods were, and I bought a nice farm in the river valley, but thought it was high enough. And over the preceding years to 2011, I watched the floodwaters continually rise every year. And in 2011, we went from 15 acres to less than one, just surrounding the house.

So where did you go? Did you move someplace better? I did. I decided that global warming is real, that waters will flow. more because of rain and I decided to go up on the plateau. Okay, there's one person who decided he could get out of there. Let me take another call before we leave.

Let's go to Marlene in Ventura, California. Hi. Marlene. Marlene, are you there? No, I guess we can't get her. And we have tweets coming in from people who say, you know, what happens to, where do I go?

People are suggesting, how do I find places to live? Let me ask my guest. What would you suggest that they do? Dr. Siders, do you have any suggestion? Sure. Actually, the New York Times and Jesse Keenan did a piece about people moving to Duluth, Minnesota, which I enjoyed quite a lot because Duluth, Minnesota is my hometown. So, you know, there are places in the country where there's land, there's fresh water,

there's infrastructure, there are fewer hazards to think about. You can think about moving there, but even moving as the caller who just did, up under the plateau nearby can be a big step. So if you're not willing to think about moving all the way across the country or dealing with Minnesota winters, which I would understand, then, you know, think about where in the town, and it really should be a town decision. Like, where in the town do you want to build that new housing and help people move? And hopefully that is up on the plateau and up on elevation. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios talking about. out there, relocating. Dr. Seiders, what's your policy wish list for making retreat a better option for a flooded

communities? That's a really loaded question for a policy academic. All right. See? No one's ever asked you to just think out loud like me. I know, my wish list. No one asks me for my wish list. All right.

So, yeah, there's so much I think we need to know. We have some examples. All of the speakers, we've had different examples about this, but I think we need more examples of how this has happened. I love that you guys are reaching out to people who have actually experienced buyouts because we need to hear more stories from people who have experienced buyouts

and how this has worked for them in the long term. And then also for people who wanted buyouts but didn't get them or who want to move but don't have those resources. I want to hear from those people and what's keeping them stuck in these places. How can we help that? I think we need a lot more information

about what's working and what's not before we start scaling up or trying to scale up buyouts and manage retreat as a policy. My biggest wish is that people would stop building homes in the floodplain. That is my biggest wish is that we would stop putting more people at risk because we're doing a lot of that right now. And it doesn't help to buy out homes in the floodplain if we're just going to build more in the floodplain next door. We like to end our conversations with one thing that people can do.

and that seems to be it. Know what your risk is, right, in building there. And don't build there. Don't do it. And we have a really handy resource for thinking about your risk of floods from Science Friday Educator Collaborative partner Ralph Pantosi. A 100-year flood doesn't mean you only have to worry about it every 100 years. And he has some great tools for understanding that.

And if you'd like to learn about that, you can go to ScienceFriety.com slash risk to check that out. What do you think of that? Would that be a good tool, Dr. Siders? I think it'd be great. I think it's a great idea to think about where you want to move in the future and to think about the models

that tell you what your risk is right now. I think everyone should know whether or not you live in a floodplain and everyone should be, if you do live in a floodplain, you should be thinking about where you want to be eventually. And, David, if we've already built in a floodplain

or live in a community that has a higher flood risk, should we be starting to think working with our neighbors about making a plan. Absolutely. That is one of the big takeaway lessons from the research we did in the Midwest. The mayors we talk to, the people we talk to in folks groups and interviews, all sort of indicated that they wish they had thought about all of that before the flood.

Because what's happening is when you relocate after a flood, you're in crisis mode. All of the materials are very expensive. It's hard to make decisions. and if there was some sort of pre-planning incentive, then people would be able to have less stress when the flood actually arrives. They're like, well, we've got a plan to adopt. And so what we kind of need is some dedicated funding at the federal and state level for pre-disaster relocation planning and also for infrastructure,

because FEMA buyouts will pay for a house, but who pays for the new roads and the water systems and all that. Okay, we've reached the limit of where we can go. I want to thank my guest, Jolla. Jabad, David Casagarendi, and AR Siders. Thank you all for taking time to be with us today. And we have more information about managed retreat around the U.S. and beyond. You can check out our website at ScienceFriday.com slash retreat.

And congratulations to Science Friday educator, collaborator Ralph Pantazi, one of this year's winners of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. You can see his resource on reframing the risk of so-called 100-year floods on our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash retreat. Thanks also to our digital producers Lauren Young, Daniel Petershmidt, and Andrea Corona, for all their extra help putting this segment together. And please join us on Science Friday's Vox Pop ad,

where we're asking you, what unusual creature do you want to know more about? Yeah, we may answer your question with the upcoming segment. Let us know on Science Friday Vox Pop app where you like to get your apps. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer Christopher Taliatta. Producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Ella Fedder. Our intern is Donya Abdul-Homid, who put a lot of work into putting this segment together. Kudos to her for doing that. I'm Ira Flato in New York.