As the Climate Changes, Where Are the Safest Places to Live?
By Tara Lohan
Talent.
King Mountain. Hugo. The town names — each the site of new wildfire ignitions
following a lightning storm the day before — are all new to me. After I read
each incident report, I head to Google maps to ask the same question that’s
been on my mind for weeks: How close?
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luxury homes
This is my first wildfire season — also
known as summer — in my new home state of Oregon. I’m learning the geography by
way of (potential) catastrophe.
After nearly two decades in San
Francisco, my wife and I moved to central Oregon in May. We had been plotting
our escape to a more rural location for years. While climate change wasn’t our
reason for leaving the Bay Area, it was a consideration in where to go next.
We first looked at towns along the east
and west flanks of California’s Sierra Nevada. But our searches mostly ended in
frustration … and a bit of fear. We’d hear from locals about getting dropped
from their fire insurance or the skyrocketing costs of keeping their policies.
And then there were the actual wildfires — like the ones that reduced large
swathes of Paradise, and now Greenville,
to ash.
When we eventually settled on central
Oregon as our next home, we were under no illusion that it would be free from
wildfires: I’m an environmental journalist who covers fires and climate change
as part of my beat. Wildfire risk, we knew, would come with our new territory.
And it has. As I write this, ash from
multiple fires burning in the region dusts my patio furniture. Cascade peaks,
usually visible on the horizon, have been smudged by smoke. The air quality has
once again reached unhealthy levels.
Still, there are numerous reasons we’re
glad to be here, even if we do have occasional pangs of doubt and wonder why we
didn’t move out of the West entirely — out of the path of increasingly longer
fire seasons.
Around the country, other families find
themselves in similar situations, or may soon. As this summer so cruelly
illuminates, climate change will present a barrage of challenges — including droughts, floods and hurricanes —
no matter where you live.
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Understanding the risks of different places isn’t easy. As we contemplated our move, I dug through state climate assessments and read scientific reports. But it was hard to match general findings with specific places, even for someone like me who gets paid to do that kind of stuff. Most people don’t have hours to read journal articles and try to decipher scientific lingo.
That got me thinking: Whether moving or
staying put, how do we assess risk in a climate change world?
Where To?
Last summer the San Francisco Bay Area had a day when the sun never seemed to rise. The sky remained a darkened, calamitous gray-orange from morning till night as the August Complex fire burned, eventually scorching a record-breaking 1 million acres. I received more than a few texts from friends asking if it was time to move somewhere less “apocalyptic.” Was there a safer place to live in the coming years and decades as the planet continues to heat up?
It’s a question on
a lot of people’s minds. The real estate website Redfin reports that
the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and extreme heat
are factors in plans for about half of people considering moves in the next
year.
Where to go may be a popular question,
but it’s also a hard one to answer for a number of reasons, says Daniel Swain,
a climate scientist at UCLA who gets asked that question multiple times a day.
“I don’t know what people’s motivations
are, what their priorities are and what their lives are like,” he says. “It’s
so personalized and individualized.”
The scientific factors, he says, are
equally complex. For example, the difference between living somewhere with an
extreme fire risk and a place with very little could be just a few miles in
places like Los Angeles, he says.
And this summer has already shown that
climate change is going to bring surprises.
“Most folks would have thought that
Seattle or Portland would have been great places to escape extreme heat waves,”
he says. “Well, clearly, that’s not always going to be the case. Seeing Death
Valley-like temperatures in British Columbia in June, I think, really gave
people pause. Climate projections suggest that all of these things and more are
possible in the future, but I think it’s a particularly visceral recent example
of how things are changing pretty fast.”
Climate change is likely to throw us
other curveballs, too.
While most people are concerned with
drought and fire in California, Swain says he’s more worried about how the
state will handle the extreme flood risks that will also come with a warming
climate.
“A lot of the risks, the physical
hazards that are relevant in a changing climate, are not going to be obvious,
and they’re not often going to be the ones that people are really hyper-focused
on in a particular region,” he says. “What comes out of the woodwork in 10 or
20 years won’t necessarily be the same problems in the same places that we’re
facing right now.”
Understanding the Science
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So given what we know — and don’t — how
do we go about figuring out where might be safe?
Historically, there haven’t been a lot
of great resources to tap. Most climate models aren’t accessible to the general
public. Or their raw data is taken out of context by others when trying to
convey more localized impacts, which can be misleading, says Swain.
“I think a good example of this is
California, where most of the state, according to climate models, is expected
to see neither more nor less mean precipitation in the future with a few
degrees of mean warming,” he explains. “And if you look at all of these
downscaled products, it’ll say ‘great news, your water availability isn’t going
to change,’ which of course is completely wrong for a variety of reasons.”
One reason is that rising temperatures
will ensure that even if total precipitation doesn’t change, there will still
be less available water supply because there’ll be more evaporation and
thirstier soil, diminishing runoff.
But even a small change in annual
average precipitation doesn’t catch the variability that California’s likely to
experience with more extreme storm events and more droughts.
“So you get more really wet periods, but
also more really dry periods,” says Swain. “In practical terms, it’s a really
dramatic change. And so you might get a very inaccurate picture of what the
future holds if you look at the wrong variables in the wrong context, even if
the information is technically correct.”
Emerging Tools
So how do we find the right information
in the right context? There are some new efforts attempting just that.
Redfin, for example, recently partnered
with ClimateCheck to add a
feature to their listings that provides the future climate risk of a particular
property. It assesses the change in the risk of heat, fire, drought and storms
over the next 30 years.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's how ClimateCheck rates Charlestown for climate risk:
First Street Foundation has
been doing something similar focused on floods.
Getting down to the address level makes
sense because risk itself can be hyper-local. Whether your house survives a
disaster may depend not on what state or town you live in, but on what side of
the street.
But can these tools really be precise at
such a fine scale?
Swain, who has done some consulting for
ClimateCheck, says it’s possible to take regional climate data and combine that
with very high-resolution spatial data at the parcel level. But he cautions, “I
think it’s more important to get it right than to be first to put something out
there.” After having seen it implemented poorly in the past, he says he now
sees people today “who are trying to do a more thorough job of vetting and
contextualizing everything.”
Do Everything
Having better resources to find places
that may have less risk is great … for the people who can afford to move there.
Or move anywhere.
I’m among those lucky enough to get to
pick a place on the map and point the moving truck in that direction. But
that’s not going to be a reality for a lot of other folks, as we saw last month
before Hurricane Ida, when many people didn’t
even have enough cash on hand to temporarily flee the impending
disaster, let alone permanently uproot their lives.
“It’s a pretty extreme privilege in a
global and even a national context to be able to choose where you want to live
on the basis of your perceived comfort or safety from a climate perspective,”
says Swain. “That’s not a choice the vast majority of people on Earth even get
to make, even if there is good information to use for making that decision.”
And while some places may seem like the
proverbial higher ground, climate change is not a problem we can move away from
— even for those with more resources. If it’s not directly threatening our
homes, it may endanger our food supply, water, jobs, health, neighbors, or the
wildlife and wild places we hold dear.
That means making every place safer is a
better bet — especially considering that the ground we’re starting from isn’t
level. Many communities of color and low-income communities already face
greater climate risks and climate-related health
threats.
As far as I can tell, our best bet is to
do everything — big and small. First and foremost, reduce greenhouse gas
emissions and speed up the energy transition — equitably. At the same time,
we’ll need to protect and restore critical habitats, green urban areas and
increase resilience wherever we are — including curbing new developments in
areas we know will flood and burn.
When I started this article, I wanted to
ask what resources people could use to pick new places to live. I also wanted
to ask: Who has access to them? But maybe, instead of focusing on where we
should go, it would be better to ask, “What more can we do to stay in the homes
and communities we already love?”
