Short Wave - Nature Quest: Rebuild Or Relocate Post-Disaster?

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

In the face of floods, wildfires and other natural disasters, when should a community relocate to avoid potential harm? Listener Molly Magid asks that very question. Molly wanted to know how other communities have chosen the path of “managed retreat.” That’s the purposeful and coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm’s way. In today’s episode, Short Wave's Emily Kwong and Hannah Chinn explore cases from New York to Illinois and Alaska to see how successful relocation happens — and what stops it. Have an environment-based question you want us to investigate on the next Nature Quest? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with producer Hannah-Chin. And for this month's nature quest, we are digging into a question from Molly McGid, an Altai or Christchurch, New Zealand. This community has a pretty unique history. So the Otakuro-Avon River Corridor is what I think the official name is. It is also called the Red Zone, or at least that was the name. that a lot of people adopted after the earthquakes. So Molly's talking about the series of earthquakes that hit Christchurch over a decade ago.

They left a lot of the land near where she lives, unstable. And to prevent death and destruction from any future earthquakes in that area, the New Zealand government offered to buy people out of their homes and designated certain areas as residential red zones. Interesting. And did people take the government up on this on moving out? Yeah, so about 16,000 people in Korea. Church, over 95%, accepted the government's offer. And Molly told us now those red zones are home to things like community gardens and

walking paths. There should be plots of land where houses are, but there's nothing there. She wanted to know more about this process, managed retreat, and whether it's a reasonable strategy for dealing with climate change disaster in other parts of the world. What is managed retreat and how are communities experiencing it? Great question. Molly. Okay, so manage retreat is the purposeful and coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm's way.

And it's a part of the larger disaster risk reduction toolbox. There's lots of things we can do to protect communities. But if we do nothing, a flood or an earthquake or a fire can devastate or displace an entire group of people. And that is exactly what is happening in the state where I used to live and report Alaska. Earlier this month, the remnants of typhoon Hulong slammed into the coast. flooding villages and ripping houses off their foundations. Evacuee, Luke Amic Jr. mourned the loss of his village, as he spoke to Alaska Public Media reporter Eric Stone.

Kipnuk is our hometown, and we've been living there all our life. the Yukon-KKim Delta, the YK Delta. This is a coastal region that has sustained indigenous people for millennia. And now, as many as 2,000 Alaskans from that area are displaced. Yeah, that's so many. I mean, I know that Alaska's governor called for a federal disaster declaration to unlock federal aid to rebuild these communities. And President Trump announced on True Social that he approved $25 million for the state. Yes, this aid did come through. It will be critical for Alaska's recovery. The thing is, is Alaska, knew something like this could happen in the YK Delta. That region is especially vulnerable to climate change.

In fact, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium has estimated that over 140 communities, many in the YK Delta, are facing some form of erosion, permafrost, or flooding. And the question for many of them, long before this typhoon has been, is it better to just move out of harm's way? So today on the show, manage retreat in a warming world. We're looking at case studies from New Zealand, New York, Illinois, and Alaska of people on the move as the ground shifts beneath their feet. I'm Emily Kwong and I'm Hannah Chin. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

All right, M, we're back with Nature Quest, which is our monthly series inspired by listener questions about their changing environment. And this month's question is about manage retreat, the process of leaving. I guess I'm wondering, where in the world? the world are people generally retreating from? And then how do they make that decision? Yes. So, one, this has been happening for decades. This is nothing new. It's just getting more common under climate change. Two, it seems to be happening most within communities near water, so places that are flood prone. And three, the question of how retreat happens tends to fall somewhere along two ends of a spectrum. Okay, tell me more about that spectrum. What are those two ends?

Yeah, and this is not scientific. This is, This is just how I'm organizing these case studies. Totally. On the one end, you have kind of top down. So these are places where the government initiated and oversaw the retreat. And it's saying this needs to happen. This has to happen. Check these boxes.

You'll get the money and then go figure it out. This is Elena Sutley, a professor in structural engineering at the University of Kansas. And based on what she told me, I realized the other end to the spectrum is a community-led approach, or at least community-initiated approach, where a town. or a neighborhood calls for its own relocation and seeks out financial aid and political support to make it happen. Huh, okay. So which approach is more effective? It really depends on where you live, but overall, I would say it is really important to have community buy-in. Even better, community participation, as Elena put it.

People in the local community, they are the experts of the lived experiences. They're the ones dealing firsthand with, with these climate stressors. Elena is a lead co-investigator on a four-year study looking at managed retreat all over the world. And she told me again and again, the best outcomes tend to happen when there is a process that involves the people. All right. Has that happened before? Do we have any examples? Yeah, it's happened in the U.S. Let's talk about what some people cite is the first real case of managed retreat in the U.S. And that is in 1993. I know we were like children.

Well, I wasn't even born. Fair. I'll tell you that back then, the Mississippi River topped its levee system. This is known as the Great Midwest Flood of 1993, and it engulfed the village of Valmire, Illinois. The flood water lingered for months. It damaged like 90% of the buildings. Oh, man. And in response to this disaster, the town went through a process that they led themselves to relocate together.

Okay. So they had general consensus. They decided to move. Yes. How did it go? They took a vote. There were many meetings, and they brought in the federal government to help. So FEMA, the federal emergency management agency and the state of Illinois, actually, bought over 300 flood damaged homes and 25 businesses. And after a lot of work, the town was rebuilt two miles away on higher ground. And that is where it stands now.

They did this all in less than four years. Wild. Okay. So it seems like this was pretty successful. Yeah. How common. is this kind of thing. You know, I will say this, Valmar did set a precedent for buyout programs. I mean, these programs are now the most common form of managed retreat in the U.S. Miyukihino has crunched the numbers on this. She's an environmental social scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over 40,000 households around the U.S. have made this choice to sell their house to the government. Generally speaking, they get paid the pre-flood value of their home.

and then the government tears it down, restores it to open space, and it's indeed restricted, meaning you can't ever build on that again. It's happened in almost every state in the U.S. Even in states where at first, the government resisted buying the land after a disaster that happened in New York after Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012. The city remains paralyzed. Many businesses are closed. Power is still out for tens of thousands, and the city's subway system is shut down. The floodwater caused extensive damage. People were worried about their safety.

So on Staten Island, on Long Island, residents in several neighborhoods wanted a buyout. And they were told, no, the government is not going to buy your land. So the community escalated the issue. They reached out to their state senators. They put pressure on the state government to offer a buyout, and it worked. And New York started a buyback program for survivors of Hurricane Sandy. So Elena considers this a grassroots success. But there are some downsides.

Miyuki, the researcher at UN. and C told me about this conversation she had with a Hurricane Sandy survivor who did sell his home to the government. And he said, this is not managed retreat. This is chaotic because he had sold his home. It was getting torn down and restored to open space. His neighbor had just rebuilt normally. And then, you know, two doors down, they had sold to a real estate developer who was flipping it and building a much larger. house than had been there before. And so he's looking around and going, well, we have some percentage of this neighborhood that's never going to be built on again, but in other places, we're adding people, we're adding assets, we're adding risk. And this is one of the big problems with manage retreat in general. Unless there's some kind of red zoning like happened in New Zealand or a kind of widespread

spread community cooperation like happened in Valmire, Illinois, managed retreat can take on this kind of hodgepodge pattern where some homeowners sell and others stay and some build back even more. So can you maintain a road if now there's actually only one household that lives on it and there used to be 20, right? Or how do you maintain water and wastewater and trash pickup when now your community is split across multiple different geographies and it wasn't before? Right. Wow, I didn't even think about that. I mean, I'm going to be honest, Emily, I kind of feel like these examples are leaving me with way more questions than answers. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I kept coming back to doing this reporting is the notion of partnership, of government community partnership. When there is open conversation between the people in harm's way and the people who can pay to get them out, manage retreat can work.

And that brings me back to where the story started, Alaska. I have lived all my 57 years here in the community of Nunapito. Morris Alexi has spent his entire life watching the land give way. The permafrost, so the frozen bedrock is thawing, it's softening. In his community, there's boardwalks that cover the village. It's so people can move around without sinking into the land. And watching all of this over the years as neighbors lost their home, Morris has started to say the word relocate more loudly.

He is a community engagement specialist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and is part of a village-wide effort to move Nunapuchuk to higher ground, 50 feet above sea level. The possible new site we have chosen is only three, four miles straight south of where we at now. We would not be moving somewhere far from what we've grown. grown up eating and living off of. Right. So far away enough that they'd be safe, but close enough that they could still practice subsistence, basically maintain their way of life. Yeah. And even better, this land is land the village already owns. Quigilingok, that's one of the villages that was heavily damaged by the typhoon last month.

They were also trying to relocate, but they didn't have an obvious place to move and the storm got there first. They themselves did not have any land that was high enough for them. in their area. So we are very fortunate to have no red tape towards the site we had wanted to relocate to. Okay, so Nunapachuk seems like kind of the perfect example. They have it all. They have the new site. They have community buy-in. How come they haven't moved already? They don't have the money. An estimate from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium says it will take $277 million to relocate Nunapichuk, but not a single federal nor state agency. agency has truly stepped forward to help pay. Oh, okay. So as much as the community wants this, they're missing that financial support from the federal government, which all of those other places that we talked about earlier, New York,

Illinois, et cetera, all of them had. In one way or another, eventually, yes, the economics have to work. But President Trump's vision is to transfer disaster recovery entirely to the states. And all of this, it just poses a huge challenge to state and local governments. Right. Plus, like, can states honestly pay for all that disaster recovery themselves? It really is going to depend on the state. Miukihino hopes that states will take up leadership, strengthen infrastructure, deploy early warning systems, build community networks so people can check in on one another and share resources. But again, it depends really on where you live.

And Miyuki told me this has given her a new definition about what it means to live in a climate haven. I feel even more strongly now that the way that we should be thinking about resilience is not so much in the hazards that you're going to face, but much more in the social system and the community and the government effectiveness of what happens to people on the ground. Okay, so I guess this brings us back to the question that Molly asked, right? Is manage retreat a reasonable strategy? It totally can be. But it's not because of where you live. It's because of who you live among and what systems are in place to protect you in the event of a disaster. Emily Kwong, thanks so much for bringing us this reporting.

Thank you, Hannah. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior vice president of podcasting. I'm Hannah Chin. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Thank you.