The central premise of Abrahm Lustgarten’s book “On the Move” is that the impacts of climate change are already driving human migration within the United States and that that trend will accelerate as the impacts of climate change ramp up.
The book opens with an account of the fear Northern California residents feel in an era of repeat forest fires. He describes the constant anxiety residents feel watching out of control fires on approaching their homes over the hillside and the exhaustion of constant vigilance and evacuation planning for months out of the year. He captures well the weariness people feel in the face of repeated weather and climate disasters.
It’s an anxiety that feels familiar to me having lived the past couple of decades in Central Texas, with our increasing incidence of extreme heat and drought. In the summer of 2011 the Bastrop fires erupted southeast of Austin and generated a plume of smoke I could see looming over the horizon as far away as Round Rock. I wondered at what point it would make sense to sell my house and rent, so that I could move quickly if necessary. More than a decade later, during the searing heat of 2023, the same question hovered near the edge of my imagination.
According to Lustgarten’s research, many people experience climate anxiety. And this anxiety affects the decisions people make for their families about where to live and when to leave.
“On the Move” combines storytelling and local history with rigorous scientific research to paint a picture of the way climate impacts affect migration within the US in places as diverse as the Desert Southwest, Northern California, Colorado, the marshy South Louisiana coast, and coastal Florida. Repeat natural disasters, drought, sea level rise and extreme heat are drivers in demographic and economic change for affected regions, many of which he says are at a “tipping point” for migration that threatens to destabilize communities.
Certainly, the experience of residents of Houston, Texas, who this year have experienced an unprecedented parade of floods, windstorms, and hurricanes, culminating (for the moment) with Hurricane Beryl, which knocked out power to millions, is relevant to Lustgarten’s research. Is the fourth largest city in the country, a major port on which the economy of the State of Texas depends, at risk of the kind of major out-migration Lustgarten describes?
Between the flooding, the power outages, and extreme heat, and the way those factors affect the affordability of things like property insurance, Lustgarten argues that places like Houston face a very real threat of major demographic change, both due to out-migration of people with the means to do so, and in-migration of people from even harder hit parts of the Texas coastline looking for more stable conditions close to home.
How should cities plan for climate migration?
The book’s latter chapters offer a hopeful vision of what a well-managed climate migration might look like. In an era of climate migration, a thriving city depends on cooperation between all levels of government, attention to contemporary scientific research, and strategic incentives to decarbonize, add greenspace, and stabilize neighborhoods and jobs markets. Planners must pay careful attention to the impact of policies around energy, housing, public transit, and employment to ensure proposals don’t contribute to a worsening economic or racial divide as communities grow and change.
And some parts of the country are well-poised to benefit from climate migration. One chapter points to the midwestern former manufacturing cities like Detroit and Milwaukee, with their abundant housing and underutilized infrastructure, as places with potential to receive people moving north to escape extreme heat just as they once received people during the Great Migration of Black people fleeing the Jim Crow south.
Finally, the book speaks to the opportunity presented by mass electrification of the American economy. Transitioning vehicles and appliances to electricity, as opposed to fossil fuels, on a massive scale has the potential to reduce American emissions of greenhouse gases by as much as 40% while creating millions of good-paying jobs. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was designed with such a transition in mind.
Provisions within the IRA to support energy communities, or communities which depend on fossil fuel development for their economy, as they transition to cleaner energy sources, mitigate the causes of climate migration. This promotes stability for families and communities and lessens the concerns around mass migration.
“On the Move” describes the massive scale of cooperation needed to mount a serious, economy-wide response to climate change in the United States. It does a good job of outlining the stakes of large-scale migration and the need for appropriate planning. Alongside the migration argument, the book explains the coming climate impacts around the country with clarity and scientific accuracy. The book is timely and well-researched and links climate science with personal stories and local history to create an informative and compelling narrative that motivates readers to hopeful action.
Although this is beyond the scope of “On the Move,” I would advise the reader to bear in mind that the kind of comprehensive policy design Lustgarten advocates domestically in response to climate change is the same scale that is needed in the international policy sphere. Just as climate impacts like extreme heat and drought cause Americans to relocate to more favorable places, climate impacts in the Global South also cause migration. Often that means crossing international borders.
Everyone deserves a safe and healthy place to live and an opportunity to earn a living. Recognizing the way climate change drives migration domestically and internationally will help us craft humane and constructive policy that promotes stability for our communities and world.