In his book On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, Abrahm Lustgarten explores how climate change is reshaping American migration patterns. Focusing on Crowley County, Colorado, and other vulnerable areas, Lustgarten examines the economic impacts of environmental shifts, such as rising utility costs and declining agricultural viability. He argues that rather than sudden disasters, gradual economic pressures from climate change will drive future migrations, highlighting the complexities and policy challenges of adapting to a warming world.
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By Linda Poon
For decades beginning in the 1920s, farmers in Crowley County, Colorado, prospered off the abundance of water from the Colorado River. It fueled a lucrative agricultural industry, and as nearby cities grew and demand for water surged, farmers sold shares of their water rights to developers for as much as $10,000 each.
Then came a long period of drought, and farmers who had bet on natural rainfall to replenish their water supply watched as thousands of acres of once-fertile land dried up. Gradually, people began moving away and local businesses shut down, leaving the county to spiral into decline.
“Over the slow change of 25 years, an economically robust community shriveled into a real depressed zone with very little farming remaining, a mostly elderly population and little to no income,” says Abrahm Lustgarten, a climate journalist who reported on Crowley in 2016 as part of a ProPublica series on the water crisis in the American West.
In his new book, On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, Lustgarten revisits Crowley and other climate-vulnerable locales to explore the intersection between economics and a warming planet, and how these forces will shape the massive population shifts expected in the US in coming decades.
While climate migration analysis often considers catastrophic events like wildfires and hurricanes, Lustgarten focuses on the “steady creep of subtle change” — declining crop yields, for example, the rising cost of insurance, health care and energy from California to Florida.
“I don’t think people will typically move in the future because it’s too hot or because of a storm, but rather they’ll move because of the economic consequences of that environmental change,” he said in a conversation with Bloomberg CityLab.
Lustgarten says US migration patterns are partly the product of decades of short-sighted policies that have made — and continue to make — some of the country’s riskiest cities the fastest-growing. The water shortage in the Southwest, for instance, is rooted in the government’s century-old decision to settle communities in the desert. To sustain development and a productive farming industry, tax dollars were used to capture and redistribute water from the Colorado River hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, the overestimate of the abundance of water in the 1922 Colorado River Compact — drawn up to divide the river among seven states — has led to decades of overconsumption.
“All that’s created economic mechanisms that blind Americans to some of the climate risks, which changes the logical reaction mechanism,” Lustgarten says. Today, the continual sale of water rights has allowed tens of thousands of homes to be built and sold across Colorado’s Front Range and in less developed parts of Arizona. But a looming water shortage — which will hike water rates and make agriculture even less viable — could lead some communities on a path of decline as families consider moving away.
Bloomberg CityLab chatted with Lustgarden about these economic incentives and the future of climate migration. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
You mentioned in your book that before you began focusing on the US, you did a lot of climate reporting internationally. How does the US approach to climate migration differ from that of other countries?
There was a kind of standard mechanism to typical climate migration when I was reporting in Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador: There might be an environmental influence that degrades the quality of life, and it blends together with other influences like violence, persecution or economic harm. And people often respond in a logical way: They move in small, stepwise fashion — from a village to a larger town nearby, then to a larger city before making that big leap to leave a country, for example. It’s predictable.
But the US is inherently unpredictable. Compared to many other countries, we have incredible capability and wealth. We also have sort of collectively, from a policy standpoint, incentivized Americans to live in places that are more dangerous.
You’ve argued that climate migration will happen as sort of a slow exodus out of inhospitable places due to subtle changes in affordability. What do those changes look like?
For middle-class America, there are many ways in which the effects of climate change are making life more expensive. Air conditioning is becoming more essential across the South, and in places that never incorporated A/C into their building before. It’s incredibly expensive and it’s driving up the demand for electricity. The cost of water on a household is rising, and should rise, in places like Arizona. So it’s one of the subtle ways in which greater heat is translating to a couple hundred dollars a month in utility bill cost.
The entire country is reading daily about rising costs of insurance — not just disaster insurance, but also health insurance because of the incredible exposure to wildfire smoke over the last two years, leading to an enormous number of claims. Those are just a small subset of ways economic pressures are increasing.
Insurance has become one of the biggest issues today. How did we get here?
I look really deeply at the effective property insurance and pricing in the United States. It’s been subsidized at the state level and, in terms of flood insurance, at the national level, [and we’re] paying tens of billions of dollars to do it. Sometimes it’s to help people, but also specifically to stop the risk of an outflow of migration after a storm.
It goes back to 1992, when Hurricane Andrew struck Florida. Florida was seeing an exodus of people, and it saw real economic vulnerability. Insurers were going out of business and abandoning the state. Florida responded by creating its own state-run property insurance company and guaranteeing that its customers could buy policies at a discount to whatever would be available on the free market.
That created this whole system of subsidized insurance that’s now been replicated across 30-odd states, and is really prominent right now in California, which is offering state-subsidized policies to people who live in wildfire risk zones. As the insurance situation changes, the economic harm is becoming more apparent.
How will all this affect communities?
For my book, I used an analysis by the Rhodium Group that looked at economic damages across the country on a county level that included things like rising energy costs, as well as a modeled cost for everything from health care to mortality. They predict, basically an economic headwind across the country. In some places, [the value of those economic damages] will amount to as much as 60% of local GDP, which means it’s basically impossible for a community to have economic growth.
One reality, unfortunately, is I think that there will be communities that will decline. The government can’t step in and save them all. And we still have a capitalistic economy where people and communities make their own way. I don’t think we can afford, as a federal government, to completely socialize all of these places.
One thing experts talk about is trying to keep communities proportional to their tax base. So if they’re going to shrink in size, instead of allowing that to be kind of a source of decline, there is a managed retreat. Not in the climate sense, but in the degrowth sense where services and infrastructure might be curtailed so that they stay proportional to the tax base that’s available to fund them.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are places that could see an influx of people in coming decades. Where do the challenges lie for those cities?
There are going to be receiving communities that will face astronomical growth, and from a policy perspective, there are enormous challenges for meeting that growth, ranging from climate-related investments to really basic infrastructure needs.
Atlanta, which is already a fast-growing city, will grow more so as it absorbs people from the coast of Georgia, Florida and Louisiana. People who are displaced by environmental factors prefer to move the shortest distance possible. So the city is already a decade into coping with what this kind of change means. They’ve done a lot right, and they’ve learned some hard lessons about what doesn’t work. The city invested really aggressively in new parks and a new green belt, but one result of that — which should be a cautionary tale for places like Cincinnati and Duluth — is that they’ve seen enormous gentrification around the core of the city.
So Atlanta’s been at the forefront, exploring ways to protect people who have owned homes in central Atlanta for generations, and protect some of that generational wealth, which is in primarily Black communities. They’re experimenting with ways to create tax breaks that anticipate some climate migration and will keep annual tax costs low for legacy communities.
Aside from reporting on other families, you also write about the decisions you face as someone living in northern California. Why include that?
I live in a place that I’ve always understood to be vulnerable to wildfires, and I was reporting in South and Central America during a time when California was facing a string of really disastrous wildfire seasons. I’d come home from these trips and realized that environmental change was really upending my own life. So like all of my neighbors, I keep a go bag in my driveway by the car, and it’s got spare clothes for my kids, goggles and a chainsaw. I mean, we sort of live with it, to be prepared for an emergency disaster scenario.
I was sitting in this home having these conversations with economists, [including] Jesse Keenan at Tulane University. I was describing where my house is, and home values in California, and I was like, “Well, should I move?” And he said, emphatically, “yes.”
That was a moment where he educated me on that spiral of decline that comes with even the perception of declining home values related to environmental risk: If people are afraid they’re going to lose their insurance, then already the value of homes becomes depressed. Then it spreads like a virus through a community, and you can have a real estate market collapse. And so, economically, that really scares me.
It was all of those experiences together that shaped my turning the focus of my climate migration reporting to what it means for Americans. While we have our relative privilege — I certainly have mine — we are each going to be facing very personal decisions about how we adapt our lives and our families.
I thought that I would have moved by the time I finished the book, and I haven’t. My experience is similar to people I write about, where the choices are more difficult than maybe they seem at the outset. There are a lot of countervailing forces, which include attachment to community and a network of friends and family, that make climate migration a lot less black and white.
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