UPDATE: Watch the replay of the panel discussion below.

Join us for a live conversation Monday, Oct. 3, at 10 am EDT with the journalists behind Harm’s Way, a project focusing on the impact of climate-driven disasters in vulnerable communities.

This investigation explored how prepared the U.S. government is to help relocate communities from heavily impacted areas and whether people already in need of that assistance are getting it. Reporters from Public Integrity, Type Investigations, Columbia Journalism Investigations and InvestigateWest will discuss their on-the-ground reporting, data collection, and their open-source approach to collaborating with community newsrooms across the country. 

Moderator: 

• Kristen Lombardi, director of Columbia Journalism Investigations

Panelists:

• Rochelle Gluzman, environmental reporter and InvestigateWest contributor to Harm’s Way 

• Alex Lubben, Columbia Journalism Investigations postgrad fellow, and 2021 graduate of the Science M.A. Program

• Jamie Smith Hopkins, editor and senior reporter for the Center for Public Integrity 

Participants will have the opportunity to attend both virtually through our Facebook page or website, or in-person at the Columbia Journalism School’s Pulitzer Hall. 

Register now through Eventbrite.

Read the published Harm’s Way stories here.

The post Join us for a live discussion: Harm’s Way appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Standing on a bridge between downtown Freeport and its east side, I could see why floods in this Illinois city aren’t equal-opportunity disasters.

On the downtown side of the Pecatonica River, the bank was reinforced with a stone wall. The east bank was lower yet had no protection.

The east side was for years the only part of Freeport where Black people could get home loans, residents said. And while floods in Freeport were nothing new, they were getting worse, hitting east side residents again and again.

Experts warn that climate change will exacerbate long-standing inequities. But seeing it in action is particularly sobering. So much more of this is coming. 

Over the past year, I reported on climate relocation with a team of journalists from Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations. A key takeaway of that “Harm’s Way” series: The federal government isn’t prepared to assist the millions of Americans its own experts believe will need to escape the worst impacts of climate change by moving. 

Cheryl Erving, whose east side home in Freeport sustained major flood damage, put it to me this way: “I feel like we’re up against a wall.” She’s living in conditions that she knows are dangerous and doesn’t trust her government to help her move.  

Early in this project, before it had really taken shape, the reporting team spoke to Miyuki Hino, an environmental social scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She told us that no one knew how many people in the U.S. already wanted help to relocate because of climate change. 

Communities seeking this kind of assistance must cobble together funding from programs spread across federal and state agencies. But the federal government doesn’t keep comprehensive records, and the information that does exist is locked away in local and national databases, maintained by multiple agencies that don’t coordinate with each other. 

Hino said academics were trying to paint a clearer picture of how climate-driven displacement is playing out now and what kind of assistance people are getting. But even quantifying the demand for Federal Emergency Management Agency flood buyouts was tough. 

We figured we’d try anyway. 

One of the first things that we did was submit Freedom of Information Act requests to FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, asking for rejected applications to grant programs that could provide climate relocation assistance. We wanted to find out where people wanted help and couldn’t get it. Rejected applications to these programs seemed like a straightforward way to get answers. 

About this series

The federal government knows that millions of Americans will need to move to avoid the most punishing impacts of climate change, but the country offers little organized assistance for such relocation. When communities ask the government for help, they face steep barriers — a particular problem for communities of color.

Read more

While we waited for responses from federal agencies, we started making calls. My colleagues and I ultimately conducted more than 200 interviews for this project. I have 60-plus hours of recorded interviews alone. 

We also compiled thousands of pages of documents we obtained through public-records requests — but not, unfortunately, what we were hoping to get from FEMA and HUD at the start.

After much back and forth with the two agencies and some prodding from Public Integrity’s attorney, we finally received some information from FEMA about a year after we submitted our FOIA requests and just a few weeks before publication. None of it revealed which communities had been denied federal help to relocate. Luckily, we’d submitted records requests to states, too, and those did prove useful. 

Ultimately, we relied on those documents, experts, community organizations and a lot of data to report these stories. 

Journalist Zak Cassel and I compiled data at the county level that showed us how many disasters a county experienced, how much funding it received through FEMA programs, how many FEMA flood buyouts took place there and what the county’s demographics were. Analyzing this data took us months. We teamed up with a researcher at Columbia University, Carolynne Hultquist, to help us do it. 

And ultimately, all of that data work boiled down to just a few sentences in each story. We felt it was worth it to show that the stories we were telling about individuals were part of a broader picture. 

After all, we featured a handful of communities in this series. There are many more places like them. (You can find out more about how we analyzed our data here.)

And what we found is that the places already facing hard choices brought on by climate change are all over the country, some far from the coasts. We weren’t telling stories about pricey oceanside houses, but about people harmed by increasingly flood-prone creeks and rivers, rising wildfire risks, worsening hurricanes or melting permafrost.

And getting out of a situation like that is hard. Home prices plummet. If you can find a buyer, you’re putting someone new at risk. That’s why people seek government buyouts, which turn disaster-stricken homes into open public space.

Many people and organizations who aren’t named in the stories were important to our reporting process. Just a few examples:

Anthropocene Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of communities facing climate change and environmental injustices, connected us with people across the country seeking help to adapt to climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization, shared data and expertise that illuminated the mounting problems confronting communities. 

Jamie Judkins with the Shoalwater Bay Tribe in Washington state helped us understand how tribes navigate federal programs, and University of Miami researcher Carolien Kraan walked us through FEMA datasets. Current and former officials at FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, HUD and various state agencies were also crucial sources. 

In each of the places where we traveled, residents helped us grasp key issues. Particularly helpful to my reporting were Windy Pearson in Freeport and Susan Liley in De Soto, Missouri. 

Investigative reporting relies on people sharing their expertise and experiences so everyone else can understand. To all of the people who took the time to speak to me and the other reporters on this team, a sincere thank you. 

One of my goals as a reporter is to show that decisions made in the rarefied halls of federal agencies have impacts around the country. In telling stories about climate effects and the individuals struggling to adapt to them, I hope we made more people aware of how both the climate crisis and federal policy might affect their own communities. 

Advance warning can make a difference — if people start planning now.

Alex Lubben is a reporting fellow for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School.

The post When climate change makes home unsafe appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

I didn’t know what to expect as I drove the two-lane road from Greenville to New Bern after I landed from South Florida one early morning in March. 

I was there as a reporter to find stories about climate change relocation as part of a year-long project, Harm’s Way, produced by Columbia Journalism Investigations in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations. The focus: increasing numbers of communities across the country are so threatened by climate change that the best option is relocating, but federal programs aren’t up to the massive task. 

Though I’m an editor at Public Integrity, I volunteered to report on this project because of my years covering natural disasters in places including Florida, Oklahoma and Puerto Rico. 

And now, after months of learning everything I could, I’d arrived at this North Carolina town. 

New Bern sits on the banks of the Neuse and Trent Rivers before they feed into the Pamlico Sound. I knew well the intimate relationship this town has with water over the years and especially in 2018, when hundreds of people had to be rescued after Hurricane Florence flooded the town. 

But New Bern’s history with segregation and its expensive historical homes are a reflection of the many inequities present in cities across the country. Water doesn’t discriminate, as some residents told me, but those who have the means recover faster from natural disasters while those who don’t struggle for a long time. 

And it was time to do the kind of reporting that we journalists can only do in person: We knock on doors, ask questions and listen to those kind enough to share their stories with us. 

I spent a lot of time in town on North Hills Drive. Floods have damaged the homes there multiple times since 2010. Many had hoped for buyouts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but those have been slow coming. Some ended up selling their damaged homes to private buyers for little money. As one woman told me when I called: “We are not getting any younger to wait for the government.” 

As I drove around the North Hills Drive area, I noticed many of these homes are well kept, with manicured lawns and dogwood trees. 

But residents here are well aware they live in danger of future flooding. The neighborhood sits in a dip surrounded by a canal and near a creek.

One afternoon, I met an Army veteran who cares for his disabled wife in the house where they raised his children, now adults. After initially considering a buyout, he asked for help elevating his home.

But that has been an uphill battle. After repeated conversations with the city — local agencies are the point of contact for these FEMA programs — he’s still waiting.

About this series

The federal government knows that millions of Americans will need to move to avoid the most punishing impacts of climate change, but the country offers little organized assistance for such relocation. When communities ask the government for help, they face steep barriers — a particular problem for communities of color.

Read more

I couldn’t understand how someone who had served this country in the military couldn’t get support from the government at a time when he and his family needed it the most. 

Down at the end of the street, I saw a home where construction to elevate the structure appeared to have stalled. What happened, I wondered? Was it abandoned?

Julie Thomas, who lives across the street, filled me in. The owner’s son lives there. He uses a ladder to get in and out because there are no steps.   

Thomas, who is in her early 70s, has endured several floods in this house. Florence ruined everything inside.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “Your heart is broken and it feels like there’s no mending.”

She moved back in months after the storm with a rebuild still in process, the floors and walls not yet done. 

Now, she buys only second-hand furniture. Any time she feels ungrateful, she looks down the street to remind herself that someone else has it worse. 

“My heart hurts more than anything to look at situations like this one,” she said. 

Our Harm’s Way project launches today with a story about communities stuck amid repetitive disasters and experts urging the country to act. Next week we’ll publish the story I co-reported about New Bern and other flood-prone places. Watch for that and other parts of our investigation at publicintegrity.org.

This work is time-consuming but it’s worth the time, effort and frankly the frustration and headaches we go through as we try to shed light on issues of inequality that affect people in this country.  

I’m obsessed with connecting the dots and explaining complex issues. More importantly, I love talking to people and telling their stories.  

I wouldn’t have any other way because the result is priceless.

The post Reporting on residents in harm’s way appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, Louisiana — A sliver is all of this islet that remains above water. What hasn’t slipped into the Gulf of Mexico shows the punishing effects of disastrous climate change: trees killed by saltwater, grasslands overtaken by bayous, empty wrecks that were once homes.

“Our house was here,” said Albert White Buffalo Naquin, pointing to the overrun marsh where his family lived. He is chief of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, and 98% of its ancestral land is below water.  

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the state $48.3 million in 2016 to resettle the tribe to higher ground, the first federally funded effort to move an entire community because of climate change. Officials saw a chance to create a model of wholesale voluntary relocation for a country that urgently needs to prepare for many more such projects. 

Six years in, Isle de Jean Charles underscores how challenging this work will be — and how badly the country will fail the ever-growing number of people in harm’s way if it doesn’t figure out how to do it well. 

Tribal leaders contend that the process disenfranchised them. As the process of moving families to the new site gets underway, Naquin and his tribal council are working on a different resettlement and reunification plan — this time, without government help. 

Early missteps undermined trust and shifted who was eligible to participate, according to a year-long investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations. The news organizations conducted interviews with dozens of tribal leaders, island residents, researchers and former and current government officials, and reviewed more than 2,000 government and tribal records.

About this series

The federal government knows that millions of Americans will need to move to avoid the most punishing impacts of climate change, but the country offers little organized assistance for such relocation. When communities ask the government for help, they face steep barriers — a particular problem for communities of color.

Read more

The way the funding was structured prevented the Jean Charles tribe from applying on its own. Instead, members had to work with a state agency, the Office of Community Development, which Naquin, other members of the tribal council and several academics observing the process say failed to implement the tribe’s vision of resettling from the crumbling island and bringing back the citizens dispersed by past disasters. 

Records show that agency officials, in turn, relied on a nonprofit group working with the tribe for information about island residents — and they were caught off-guard to learn, after winning the grant, that additional people needed relocation.

Citizens of the United Houma Nation also live on the vanishing isle. When that tribe’s then-chief learned of the funding, he pressed the state to include his people, too.

After that, the plan changed. Rather than move to the new location all interested members of the Jean Charles tribe, including those driven out decades earlier by disasters and land loss, state officials said only those who live on the island, left after a 2012 hurricane or moved earlier to a place hit by that same disaster would be eligible.

For Naquin — among those locked out by the change — this meant his tribe would not be reunified after all. In 2018, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to bring the project back to its original vision, he urged HUD to revoke the money. The agency didn’t do so. Fair-housing law, HUD said, required that everyone on the island be provided the opportunity to move.

Relocation experts warn that climate resettlement in the U.S. will fall far short without major changes to the federal government’s approach. They said Isle de Jean Charles illustrates the need for an organized effort — a designated federal agency focused on community resettlements — with far more money, fewer bureaucratic hurdles and greater sensitivity to the needs of communities impacted by the United States’ long history of forced relocation and racism. Those are often the places most threatened by the climate crisis. 

That’s particularly true for the hundreds of tribes without federal recognition, largely cut off from federal grants.

A.R. Siders, a climate adaptation researcher at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, said historically marginalized communities shouldn’t have to compete against each other for the right to be saved. But that’s exactly what is happening. An Alaska Native village endangered by flooding and erosion had also vied for the funding ultimately earmarked for Isle de Jean Charles. And once the money arrived, it pitted the two tribes on the island against each other.

“We really could increase the amount of funding going to these kinds of relocation so that it doesn’t have to be such an either-or choice in the future,” Siders said.

There’s little time to waste. Already, communities hard hit by rising seas and intensifying hurricanes, floods and wildfires are finding that the country offers little organized assistance for relocating people together, according to an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners. Those seeking help from a patchwork of programs face steep barriers — particularly communities of color.

The mismatch between need and assistance will get worse if nothing is done. Federal research predicts that more than 13 million Americans may have to move away from vanishing shorelines up and down the coasts over the rest of the century, a figure that doesn’t include the impact of other climate disasters. 

HUD did not respond to requests for comment. 

Pat Forbes, who heads the Louisiana Office of Community Development, was involved in the Isle de Jean Charles project from the start. Forbes acknowledged that it has faced challenges but defended the outcome. Over the next few months, he said, the agency will give out keys to new homes for 37 eligible households on The New Isle, the state’s resettlement site 40 miles from Isle de Jean Charles. Some former island residents living in areas hit by 2012’s Hurricane Isaac will get the rights to build on empty lots there.

Had the state known the island demographics earlier, Forbes insists, the end result would have been the same. “We still would have turned in an application that represented an opportunity for folks living on the island, irrespective of tribal association, to move to a safer place and to try to keep that cohesive culture together.” 

The latest concern is that the property taxes and insurance costs could prove impossibly high for many movers with no resources beyond Social Security payments. Forbes said his agency is trying to find a solution to cover insurance costs, but the annual property taxes — between $735 and about $1,220, depending on the size of the house — would have to be paid by the new owners. 

Community relocation is a messy, complicated, contentious process. Nicholas Pinter, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis, studied 50 relocations stretching from 1882 to present. Only four did he judge “unequivocal” successes, where the communities not only moved to new locations, but also thrived there. All were in the Midwest, and none involved marginalized groups or the threat of climate change. They had influential local leaders who were able to keep their communities united.

Anthony Oliver-Smith, an anthropologist who specializes in disaster relocation and consulted on the Isle de Jean Charles project from 2017 to 2018, has this key takeaway after decades of study: The people relocating must actively participate and have control over the process. Things go badly when they don’t: It starts to feel involuntary. Social ties fray. People give up on the new site and leave. 

Most relocations, he said, get mired in conflict over eligibility and too-limited resources. 

The hope of charting a path forward is exactly why HUD officials decided to fund the Isle de Jean Charles project. They knew it wouldn’t be easy. 

“The point wasn’t that it would necessarily be a success,” said Harriet Tregoning, a former HUD official who initiated the competition that funded the project, “but that we would learn a lot about what to do and what not to do. Because we have a lot of this coming in our future.” 

Since the funding was greenlit, Isle de Jean Charles has been hit by five major hurricanes.

Earlier this year, Chris Brunet, 57, a member of the Jean Charles tribal council who has lived on the island most of his life, took refuge from the afternoon sun under the foundation of his elevated house. In 2021 Hurricane Ida snatched its left side, dented the roof and damaged a wheelchair elevator. For almost a year now, Brunet, who has cerebral palsy, has had to pull himself up and down the stairs. 

A handwritten poster nailed to a house stilt gives his opinion of the situation: “ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES IS NOT DEAD CLIMATE CHANGE SUCKS.”

Brunet opted to move to The New Isle. The decision wasn’t easy, despite the dangers. The island is his home. 

But it’s almost gone.

“There’s less land,” he said, “and more water.”

The disappearing island

Members of the Jean Charles tribe trace their history on the isle back to about 1840, when Pauline Verdin, a Native woman, and her French husband, Jean Marie Naquin, moved there after his family disowned him over their marriage. 

This was the remote swamp, 40 miles as the crow flies from New Orleans. People of Biloxi, Chitimacha and Choctaw descent were settling nearby, casualties of colonial land-grabbing treaties. By 1880, the U.S. government had documented the island as exclusively Indigenous. 

Its population remains mostly Indigenous today, the majority of them members of the Jean Charles tribe. 

But hundreds who lived there have fled. As recently as 1950, the islet was half the size of Washington, D.C. Now it’s half the size of Washington’s National Mall, with around a dozen livable homes left standing.

This loss was caused both by global warming itself and its major trigger. Oil and gas development near the island undermined the land and hastened its descent into the Gulf, researchers say. Climate change, which would have done the same on its own but more slowly, sent more and worse storms. 

Between 1992 and 2021, 15 hurricanes and two floods classified by the federal government as major disasters hit Terrebonne Parish, where the island is located, according to an analysis of federal data by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners. That makes it one of the hardest-hit areas in a hard-hit state.

Naquin, the tribe’s chief, is 75. He left the island because a 1974 hurricane dumped 11 inches of water on his house, built after a 1965 hurricane destroyed his previous home. Earlier, he said, islanders and the parish would come together after a big storm and clean their single road of mud, salvage wood from broken trees and get on with their lives. But in recent decades, every hurricane brought more and more devastation with little outside assistance.

“We lose land, every hurricane we lose land,” he said. “And now all we have is the little bitty strip of houses and the road.”   

Last year, the chief arrived four days after Hurricane Ida to find Isle de Jean Charles deserted. “There was nobody on the island,” he said. “No one.” Only a few families have returned. 

The fate of the island was decided in the early 2000s. That’s when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose not to extend the new, 98-mile long Morganza-to-the-Gulf Hurricane Protection System of levees, locks and floodgates — designed to shield against Category 3 storm surges and floods — to Isle de Jean Charles. According to calculations at the time, it would have cost $100 million to protect Isle de Jean Charles with levees, much more than the price tag to move everyone off it. Army Corps research showed that excluding the island from the levee would increase flooding and worsen storm surges.  

In June 2002, more than 100 island residents gathered at a local fire station with public officials and Army Corps engineers to discuss their options. 

“They’ll have to move me in a box,” one resident shouted, according to press reports. 

Naquin had a different view: “We have to look at an alternate plan to keep the community alive. I hate to say this, but maybe relocation is that alternative.” 

His efforts to resettle his tribe, bringing those displaced by hurricanes back into the fold, began soon afterward. 

Two attempts failed. The Army Corps offered in 2002 to move everyone off the island, then walked it back after some residents declined. Later that decade, the parish government offered to build more than 60 houses for the islanders in a new subdivision in nearby Bourg, a plan that fell apart after resistance from Bourg residents. 

In 2010, the Jean Charles tribe asked the Lowlander Center, a local nonprofit group, to help them in their resettlement efforts. Lowlander, founded by sociologists and disaster experts Shirley Laska and Kristina Peterson, helps lowland communities of coastal and inland Louisiana adapt to climate change and recover from environmental disasters. Peterson met the tribe’s chief in 1992 during the Hurricane Andrew recovery, and they’d stayed in touch. 

Laska’s work as a professor emerita of sociology at the University of New Orleans and the founding director of the university’s Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology opened doors. Peterson was a senior research fellow at that center, before both of them left and founded the Lowlander Center in 2010. 

Naquin hoped they could help the tribe raise money for land. For several years, Lowlander and the tribe worked on a blueprint for resettlement. The idea was to find a place large enough for the dwindling number of people on the island and the hundreds driven off it. There would be a tribal community center. A clinic. Pow wow grounds, traditional gardens, a market.

And then came word of HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition.

The climate change contest

The announcement in June 2014 from President Barack Obama invited state and local governments that experienced a federally declared major disaster in 2011, 2012 or 2013 to “compete for funds to help them rebuild and increase their resilience.” The effort promised nearly $1 billion in funding for innovative projects demonstrating solutions to increasing climate disasters. 

HUD’s Tregoning considered the one-time competition — administered in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation — an opportunity for her agency to overcome institutional inertia and begin to change a system of disaster recovery that no longer works. Instead of dispersing money only after disaster strikes and rebuilding exactly the way things were before as if the same problems won’t reoccur, the country needs a forward-thinking approach, she said. 

“Yes, we’re gonna address the disaster that happened,” Tregoning said. “But how can we do it in a way that builds resilience to future disasters in a community?”

As soon as HUD released the competition rules in September 2014, the Louisiana Office of Community Development got to work. 

The staff had no time to waste. HUD gave applicants 180 days to prepare their first submissions outlining factors such as “recovery needs, relevant risks and vulnerabilities (current and future).” Those who made it to the second round had half that time to develop project proposals and solicit public comments.

“Even a community that has already embarked on this work is likely to find the timeframe challenging,” HUD acknowledged in its notice. Stan Gimont, who oversaw the competition, said in a recent interview that the deadline was standard for HUD.  

Former employees of the Louisiana Office of Community Development said they thought it was flat-out unreasonable. Staff rushed to find cutting-edge ideas as the clock ticked down. 

The proposal for the Isle de Jean Charles resettlement occurred almost by accident. 

On September 26, 2014, emails and interviews show, Forbes — the state agency’s executive director — ran into Lowlander’s Laska at an unrelated press event. The two had known each other for years, since another state agency Forbes previously worked at funded some of her research. Laska told Forbes that her team was working with the Jean Charles tribe on a plan to resettle them. Forbes, thinking of the HUD competition, invited Lowlander and Naquin to a meeting, documents show.

There, according to records, the parties agreed to work together to determine whether tribal relocation would be a viable proposal. 

Over the next five months, the agency, tribe and nonprofit pulled in other partners to help them gather data and put together a grant application. Records and interviews show Lowlander was responsible for providing outreach and demographic data about the island to the agency.

Four current and former employees of the state’s Office of Community Development told Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners that Lowlander officials had led them to believe that all full-time residents of the island were members of the Jean Charles tribe. At one point, deep into the process, the nonprofit provided a report about resettlement best practices that mentioned that the island “is made up almost entirely of Isle de Jean Charles Tribal members.” The line did not set off alarm bells, one of the state employees said, because the agency knew some “campers” ineligible for relocation lived there part time. 

In an interview, Peterson said Lowlander gave the state information about the tribe rather than the island as a whole because the grant was for the tribe to reunify.

“It was not a proposal that was put in for the geography of a space. It was for a tribe to reconnect all of its people,” she said. “When somebody starts arguing, ‘Well, you didn’t tell us that there was Sam or Gertrude or whoever else was living there,’ that becomes very irrelevant when it was for a tribe to reassemble itself.”

But tribal reunification wasn’t what the HUD competition aimed to do, one former HUD official told Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners in an interview for this story. 

State officials say they did not talk to residents on the island to check who was there because they relied on the information from Lowlander.

Years later, researchers brought on by the state to help with the resettlement would tell the Office of Community Development that it should have done its own homework. One of them, the anthropologist Oliver-Smith, said in an interview that state employees recognized the severity of the misstep, calling it the project’s “original sin.” 

But in March 2015, before any of that was apparent, state officials submitted the first application. Three months later, Mathew Sanders, the Office of Community Development policy manager leading the effort, told the Lowlander team that Louisiana had made it to the next phase. 

“The work begins,” Peterson responded in an email. 

The state tasked Lowlander with spearheading the vision for the proposed resettlement, which the tribe expected would allow reunification of current and former island residents. Peterson and her colleagues brought together sociologists, disaster experts, architects, engineers and funders to create a blueprint. 

One of the resulting documents described “a pilot site for climate change relocation with tribal livelihoods enhanced by innovation, teaching and sharing activities while … cultural traditions are rekindled with the tribal members living in one community rather than scattered as they are today.” The document emphasized the importance of community participation in the process.

The team eagerly waited for HUD’s decision. It came on January 21, 2016: Louisiana finished fifth, receiving $92 million for Isle de Jean Charles and another project. 

Four days later, the state Office of Community Development touted its grant as a victory for “this Native American community in critical need of locating [to] a safer home,” and “a resettlement model that is scalable, transferrable and supportive of cultural and social networks.”

Thomas Dardar, then the chief of the United Houma Nation, found out about the award soon after, in passing, from his real estate agent. Dardar said he couldn’t accept that his tribal citizens living on the island would not be included in the relocation. 

“Our Tribal Council, although excited to see some much needed funds come towards the plight of Isle de Jean Charles, is shocked that we were never informed and brought to the table in the discussion as UHN citizens reside there as well,” he wrote in a letter to Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards.

Sanders, the Office of Community Development staffer, shot off an email to Lowlander: “Anything you all can shed light on?”

Peterson acknowledged in her reply the United Houma Nation’s long-standing attempts to address climate impacts on the tribe. That, she said, was separate from the Jean Charles tribe’s efforts. 

“There are other people who are not part of the Tribe that reside on the Island,” she wrote, adding that “some may choose to be part of the project that UHN is working on.” 

Forbes, with the state agency, said in an interview with Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners that he then called Lowlander’s Laska to demand an answer about the island demographics: “Why did you tell me this when it’s otherwise?”

Asked about that call by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners, Laska did not respond. But in an earlier email to the news organizations, she wrote that tribes define their own membership.  

“These are sovereign nations,” Laska said in the email. “We (whites, white bureaucracies) want uniformity across tribes, uniformity across generations of a tribe. Nope. The requirements by the federal government to achieve federal recognition have wreaked havoc on tribes.” 

What the state found when it then sent its own people to talk to residents on the island is that most identified with the Jean Charles tribe, but not all, and the dividing lines are fuzzy. That’s because the tribe seceded from the United Houma Nation decades earlier.

“Two residents didn’t know which tribe they were supposed to be in,” agency contractors wrote in a report. “During our interviews, residents did not bring up tribal distinctions and more often noted that everyone on the Island is related.” 

But the situation upended plans for the resettlement and splintered the partnership between the state, Lowlander and the tribe. 

“The project was not doomed,” said Dakota Fisher, a former planner for the state who worked on the effort, “but the project was doomed to be hard and imperfect for the rest of its life.” 

Fifteen days after the United Houma Nation chief sent his letter, a fact sheet from the state alerted the two tribal chiefs to the project’s change in scope: The “state’s objective is the resettlement of all willing members of the Isle de Jean Charles community, irrespective of any familial, cultural or tribal affiliation.”

A series of tense meetings between state officials, the tribes, the nonprofit and HUD officials who flew in from Washington, D.C., took place in July 2016, records show. In a meeting with tribal chiefs, HUD representatives explained provisions of the Fair Housing Act and the necessity to comply with them, HUD’s Gimont said in an interview. He added that the project had to thread a “pretty fine needle” by resettling one tribe while not unduly limiting participation by other island residents. The state did not see a way to fully do both. 

The day afterward, the Jean Charles chief sent a letter to President Obama arguing that, in effect, government officials were using the Fair Housing Act to discriminate against his non-federally recognized tribe. 

“I am a supporter of the purpose … of the FHA,” Naquin wrote. “However, in this case they do not pertain because we are trying to maintain and revive our tribal identity as written in the grant.” 

For months he and Lowlander advocated to return to the original vision of tribal relocation, records and interviews show. But there was a wedge now between the state and its partners.

State officials brought in a new team of sociologists and anthropologists, as well as their own staff, for community outreach. In 2018, when Lowlander’s contract on the project ended, the nonprofit did not sign a renewal.

To involve residents in the resettlement process, state officials convened a steering committee of tribal and non-Indigenous residents and business owners in 2018. But the committee disbanded after only six meetings, according to progress reports, meeting notes and interviews. Committee members from both tribes as well as others with no tribal affiliation described recurring fights with no resolution. Lora Ann Chaisson, the new principal chief of the United Houma Nation, said the state stopped scheduling the meetings after members pressed for answers about financial aspects of the resettlement, such as property taxes and high insurance costs on the new site. 

The state, for its part, said the committee served its purpose. In an email, Marvin McGraw, the Office of Community Development’s spokesperson, pointed out that the meetings “were established to guide and inform the Master Planning process, review materials, make recommendations and provide continued local, cultural and contextual insight to the process.”

In an interview, Forbes acknowledged the gaps in communication. But he stressed that the state has been transparent about the property taxes and insurance and said the agency is working on solutions to reduce costs.  

Nathan Jessee with Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute researched the Jean Charles tribe’s resettlement and witnessed the unraveling of its plans for the project. He said that ignoring the authority of the Jean Charles tribal council and creating a committee of people at conflict with each other “was really about demobilizing a tribal leadership who were trying to gain support for their resettlement.”

Naquin sent numerous complaints to HUD officials, asking for an investigation and contending that the project violated the agency’s rules. The complaints went unanswered, he said. 

HUD did not respond to requests for comment about the complaints. The agency has also not yet provided documents on the matter that Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners requested in February.

As Naquin and other members of the tribal council fought for the project they’d envisioned, the state moved forward on the revised version it developed. 

In May 2020, on 515 acres of land on higher ground, contractors got to work building the new homes.

‘Is there justice?’

Forbes’ perspective as the head of the state agency overseeing the effort is that his staff went down the only path available to them. The project is a success, by his accounting, because Louisiana is moving people out of a dangerous situation.

Naquin’s perspective as the Jean Charles chief is that the project is yet another disaster for the tribe. Though he’s happy for the people getting new homes, the end result locked hundreds of members out. Tribal leaders had little say in developing the final plan, he said. And Naquin fears that an actual reunification is now impossible, even as he tries to secure new money for that goal and eyes a site near The New Isle.

At the heart of the frustration and conflict is that the HUD grant wasn’t designed for what the tribe was trying to do.

“I think one of the tragedies of the Isle de Jean Charles relocation process is that the community had such a creative vision for the future,” said Siders, the University of Delaware disaster researcher. “You look at that initial proposal, and then see all of the ways that well-meaning, well-intentioned rules, laws, budget constraints, etc., got in the way.”

HUD hoped to learn lessons from Isle de Jean Charles. Multiple residents, government employees and researchers said in interviews that this is the critical one: For resettlement to work at a large scale, the country must approach it differently.

“You have to have flexibility, you have to have room for the community to do things that deviate from the norm in order to deal with whatever that local context is,” Siders said.

Both officials and residents must go into resettlement with the understanding that it’s difficult, she and others said. Some degree of chaos and conflict is normal, and it takes a long time to gauge its success. But it will be less contentious if the agency overseeing efforts empowers and works with communities rather than dictates to them.

Focusing on communities’ right to self-determination is the key to better relocations, said Alaska-based human rights lawyer Robin Bronen. 

Despite the Isle de Jean Charles challenges, HUD is well-equipped to lead such efforts, the Coastal Flood Resilience Project, an association of nonprofit groups, argues in a recent paper on community resettlement. HUD is focused on “comprehensive communities as opposed to just moving people out of disasters,” said one of the paper’s authors, Jeff Peterson, a former Environmental Protection Agency official and member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Obama administration.

At The New Isle, two rows of houses — 37 total — curve like a giant centipede next to an artificial pond. Only those still living on the island in August 2012 qualify. Twenty-five empty lots are prepped for eligible residents who left the island before then; they will have to pay for the home construction themselves.

Around a third of the new site sits inside a floodplain. The New Isle is still among the highest spots in the flood-prone Terrebonne Parish.

When Columbia Journalism Investigations visited in May, construction workers were finishing the facades. The subdivision looked nearly ready for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, as if years of tension and disappointment never happened. 

For the last two years, the Rev. Roch Naquin, the chief’s uncle, has lived in the administrative building on the premises of the church in Montegut where he preaches. He turns 90 in September and hopes to celebrate on The New Isle surrounded by family. More than once, during tense discussions about the resettlement, he would repeat: “While you have the opportunity [to resettle], you should take advantage of it.”

Brunet, his nephew, is moving next door to him. What’s unfolding isn’t the chief’s vision, but Brunet is sure no one would have received help without Chief Naquin’s efforts. 

“I know HUD … gave the $48 million for the relocation. But it is not HUD who was talking about the relocation,” Brunet said. “They funded the relocation, but it’s not them that was advocating it. It was Chief Albert. It’s not the state that was advocating relocation. It was Chief Albert. And it wasn’t the parish that was pushing it. … It was Chief Albert.”

That day in May, Brunet sat on the deck of his hurricane-damaged island home, sorting through debris. Salvageable possessions went into bins. The rest he trashed. Wooden boards driven by hurricane winds into his house stuck out at odd angles, like the remains of a ship wrecked by storm. 

All his memories and connections are tied to this land that saltwater is overtaking. He thought of the people who left. The 15 trees that were once in his yard — oaks, hackberries, persimmons, oranges and pecans, all dead because of the incursion. The garden plots and chickens he and others here used to keep, gone now, too. 

With the elevator not working and part of his home destroyed, Brunet was sleeping in a trailer, waiting for the move out. 

“Is there justice in me going over there? Is preservation the key point of why we’re going over there?” Brunet pondered this. “I have to sit here and say, yes, that’s why Chief Albert was pushing relocation, so that the community … remained as a community, as a people. So OK, that’s the preservation part of it. Now what’s the justice part?”

Clarification, Aug. 22: This story has been updated to clarify Nathan Jessee’s role at Princeton University and the federal government taking notice of the island’s demographics in the 19th century.

CJI research assistants Gabriela Alcalde and Samantha McCabe contributed to this story.

Olga Loginova and Zak Cassel are reporting fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. The Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations, two nonprofit investigative newsrooms, provided reporting, editing, fact checking and other support. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Leaving the island: The messy, contentious reality of climate relocation appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Albert White Buffalo Naquin, chief of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, remembers the time when Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was tens of thousands of acres large. Climate change and oil and gas development have decimated this island, home to members of his tribe, other Indigenous residents and some non-Indigenous people.

For Johnny Tamplet, a white resident of Isle de Jean Charles, the island is a “piece of paradise.” For over 40 years, his family has come to fish here. He moved in. But he is among those resettling because of land loss.

Chris Brunet, a member of the Jean Charles tribe and longtime resident of Isle de Jean Charles, needed more than a decade to make peace with leaving. He’s among those moving to The New Isle, a site built by the state for voluntary resettlement from the island.

The post Hear from those leaving a beloved, disaster-threatened home appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

NEW BERN, N.C. — Janice Crews knew time was not on her side after Hurricane Florence’s record-breaking storm devastated her flood-prone neighborhood on Sept. 14, 2018. 

The retired postal worker acted quickly. She recruited an activist friend, organized neighbors, met with city officials and signed a petition for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy out their homes in the North Hills Drive community. They wanted to move out of the floodplain to higher ground. 

Weeks and then months passed. Crews became more and more anxious. FEMA and the local agencies it coordinated with did not seem to have the same sense of urgency she had: She was a widow in her mid-70s and the only caregiver of a disabled daughter.

“I was devastated. I had a nervous breakdown,” Crews said. “I couldn’t go through another flood.”

She considered her options, all bad, and decided she could no longer wait for the federal government. She sold her home of 18 years, ruined by water and mold, at a substantial loss. 

FEMA eventually agreed that New Bern needed buyouts. But it took almost three years after Florence had flooded the city before the agency’s approval led to an actual purchase. By then, many homeowners who initially asked for help had either moved on their own or decided in frustration that some other anti-flooding measure would have to suffice. 

This is why the country’s largest effort to relocate people from flood zones isn’t working amid climate change. It’s not only denials that lock people out. Often, whatever assistance the government does offer comes too little, too late and doesn’t address the underlying problem: Entire neighborhoods and communities need help moving.

For decades, FEMA has funded voluntary buyouts under its “hazard mitigation” programs that support disaster preparedness initiatives. It’s moved people out of 50,000 properties, with states and municipalities doing key legwork and often sharing the cost. They then demolish the structures and return the land to open space in order to stop the cycle of damage and loss. 

But the federal agency did not design its flood programs with mounting climate disasters in mind. FEMA buyout applications are complicated and the wait times are long — five years or more for the average homeowner, research shows. As millions of Americans discover in the coming decades that they must relocate because of rising sea levels, flooding rivers and intense storms, the mismatch between the buyout process and the need is going to get worse. 

One potent example of that future: In Lumberton, North Carolina, residents eligible for a FEMA buyout after a 2016 hurricane found themselves slammed by another in 2018 before anyone could be moved out.

In a year of reporting on climate relocation, Columbia Journalism Investigations in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations found that the government’s failure to meet the needs of communities facing climate challenges comes at a steep social and economic cost. It worsens inequities because those who can’t afford to wait for help, mostly low-income residents and people of color, are more likely to live in flood zones, research shows.

About this series

The federal government knows that millions of Americans will need to move to avoid the most punishing impacts of climate change, but the country offers little organized assistance for such relocation. When communities ask the government for help, they face steep barriers — a particular problem for communities of color.

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Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners obtained data on FEMA-funded buyouts from 1989 through 2017. Nationwide, the vast majority of counties had fewer than 50 properties bought out over that time, and most had none. 

But among counties hard hit by hurricanes or floods, places with a higher percentage of white residents than the national average received three times as many buyouts per capita.

“Buyouts for individual property owners have been demonstrated to exacerbate inequality, subsidize the wealthy and increase overall social vulnerability — even when they work as they are supposed to,” said Dan Abramson, a professor of urban planning at the University of Washington. “And they often do not.”

FEMA buyouts also were not intended to move entire communities, a type of assistance that climate change makes increasingly necessary. Instead, experts note, they were meant to remove risk to buildings on individual properties. As the federal government selectively acquires homes or residents leave on their own, both those who stay and those who go lose something. What remains are neighborhoods checkerboarded with empty lots.

For areas still suffering from once-legal discrimination in lending and housing, relocation brings even more challenges. In Freeport, Illinois, for instance, residents of a historically Black community feel stranded in the flood zone, doubting they will get enough money to afford to move — yet rules effectively bar them from making repairs to their flood-damaged homes. 

“There’s a possibility for government-funded buyout programs” to address the need for climate relocation, said Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has studied the FEMA programs. “Right now, they are not really up to the task.” 

FEMA declined Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners’ requests to interview senior officials who oversee these programs. In response to written questions, the agency described climate change as a “top priority” and noted the $5 billion in hazard-mitigation grants that it had funded in fiscal year 2021 to help cities and states address the growing need for adaptation and relocation.

“FEMA’s hazard mitigation assistance programs are evolving to better support our nation’s need to mitigate for climate change,” Jeremy Edwards, FEMA’s press secretary, wrote in an email. 

He noted that the agency is launching a new effort, Swift Current, to “substantially speed up” funding to four states for certain homeowners hit by Hurricane Ida in 2021. But he also said that upping the number of buyouts around the country requires local and state agencies to prioritize the work and homeowners to opt in. 

Two years after Crews bought her current home in New Bern and almost four years after Florence, she feels like a stranger in her own house. She misses her old neighborhood, the garden she tended for many years and the neighbors she called friends.  

“I don’t like it here,” she said. “They don’t want anything to do with you.”

Crews’ new place is outside the floodplain. Even so, she doesn’t feel safe in the structure she calls a “piece of junk” because it’s not a brick home like the one she had on North Hills Drive.

The value of Crews’ former home dropped from $132,000 in 2010 to $97,000 in 2016, the year Hurricane Matthew dumped rain on the North Hills Drive neighborhood — flooding it but not as badly as Florence would two years later. 

On April 18, 2019, she sold her home for just $39,500.

She’s frustrated about leaving a home she had already paid for and taking on a new mortgage — at 77 — for a $136,000 home she hates. But after the two hurricanes and numerous other flooding events, she gave up. 

“I feel that I did everything I could to get help,” Crews said. “The government wasn't going to do nothing.”

Falling behind the climate crisis

The river cutting through Lumberton, North Carolina, overflowed as Hurricane Matthew bore down on the city in October 2016, inundating homes on its south and west sides. The floodwaters soon overtook the impoverished city of about 20,000 near the South Carolina border. In some places, said Rob Armstrong, who directs the city’s public works department, they rose as high as eight feet. 

The powerful storm devastated the west Lumberton home where Chris Howard and his wife, Gennifer, have lived since the early 1990s. Four feet of dirty water settled around their one-story bungalow, ruining everything low-lying, bleaching the plants in the yard and killing his peach trees. A city councilor who represents South Lumberton, Howard lost his most prized possessions, including the materials he used to teach Black history programs statewide.

“Everybody in this whole neighborhood ... was flooded out,” he said. “Every individual was impacted.”

The Howards, like many of their neighbors, turned to the government seeking relief. City officials collected about 400 applications from Lumberton residents for FEMA buyouts, elevations and rebuilds and sent them to the official FEMA applicant, the state. State officials submitted just over 100 to FEMA for approval and deemed the remaining 300 ineligible for the federal agency’s aid.

FEMA eventually approved 47 homes for buyouts at just over $6 million after Matthew, agency records obtained by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners show. The agency also approved 20 elevations and 34 home repairs. The Howards were among those who got assistance to rebuild.  

But in Lumberton, as in New Bern, the process dragged on. Officials did not finalize any of the aid until a year and a half later, in mid-July 2018.

Within two months, Hurricane Florence hit. The slow-moving storm hovered over the Lumber River long enough to overwhelm the temporary sandbagging the city had placed around it, pushing the river to an unprecedented 29 feet.

At the time, Howard had just bought flooring, wood trim and sheet rock. He was finally ready to fix up his house, he said, two years after the first hurricane. Florence wrecked the materials he’d bought for repairs. Again, his family lost everything.

“Your chairs, your furniture, gotta be removed — again,” he said. “Where does that leave you psychologically?” 

He and his wife have since decided to switch from a reconstruction to a buyout because the process, he said, “took so long.” When the next storm hits — and Howard knows that it will — he can’t imagine having to wait years longer for FEMA aid to make the same repairs. 

The Howards aren’t alone: 17 other homeowners opted to switch to FEMA buyouts after enduring a second storm rather than continue to elevate or rebuild their houses, city records show. The owners of another 10 homes withdrew from the program altogether. According to Brandon Love, Lumberton’s deputy city manager, some owners, including ones who sought a buyout, sold on the private market — putting new residents into flood-prone houses.

In a changing climate, back-to-back devastating storms will become more likely in Lumberton. Hurricanes are intensifying across the Carolinas. Said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist: “We’re just supercharging these storms.”

Meanwhile, FEMA’s buyouts can’t keep up. 

The Lumberton buyout project approved after Matthew has yet to be completed — three purchases are still pending. The city has just started processing another 50 buyouts under Florence. 

“We’ve had some people die before our program would get to them,” said Wayne Horne, Lumberton’s city manager.

Love put it simply: “It’s just a cumbersome program.”

It sprung from repeated failures to manage U.S. flood risk.

Private insurance companies gave up insuring flood-prone properties over the first half of the 20th century, judging it an unprofitable business line. Congress intervened, creating the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968. 

But instead of reducing flood risk, research showed, the flood-insurance program prompted more development in the floodplain. 

And analyses by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, showed that a small share of insured properties flooded over and over, repeatedly collecting these insurance payments. 

That’s how FEMA buyout efforts came to be. 

Congress authorized the agency in 1988 to reduce its insurance program’s liabilities and lessen the country’s flood risk by buying out flood-prone property. From 1989 to 2018, buyouts accounted for about 75% of FEMA’s $5.4 billion in flood mitigation spending, according to a 2020 GAO report. 

But buyouts have proved difficult to carry out. And the flood-insurance program’s debt is ballooning as climate change worsens: nearly $1 billion in 1997, $17 billion in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and over $20 billion at the end of 2021. That’s the trajectory even though Congress canceled billions of dollars in debt five years ago. 

The same 2020 GAO report found that the number of repetitive-loss properties is increasing, and FEMA’s buyouts are not doing enough to prevent that. 

“We reiterate our previous suggestion that Congress comprehensively reform the program to ensure its solvency and improve national flood resilience,” the GAO wrote. 

It’s a mildly worded warning of an urgent need.

By 2100, the U.S. is projected to see up to twice as many intense rainfall days as it did in the latter part of the 20th century. Sea levels are on track to rise as much as seven feet over the same period. Hurricanes are getting wetter and lingering longer over land. 

All of that means more flooding.

Segregated and submerged

The Pecatonica River was overflowing its banks — again. Mounting rainfall and fast-melting snow fueled a one-two climate punch.

On that night in March 2019, Cheryl Erving had no choice but to evacuate her flooded neighborhood in Freeport, Illinois. A rescue boat, navigating the rising waters by flashlight, motored up to her home. There was only enough room for her to bring a single bag of possessions. The city warned residents this would be their last chance to get out. 

Three years later, the first-grade teacher still hasn’t recovered. She has yet to replace her roof, marred by the hole the storm drilled through it. Every time it rains, water splashes onto her kitchen floor. Raccoons moved into her back porch. The floodwaters sat stagnant in her basement for nearly two weeks — long enough to crack her cement foundation. 

“I don’t know how long it will hold up,” she said of her still-damaged house. “It could collapse.”

Freeport, a city of about 24,000 people in northwest Illinois, has always flooded. But what happened that March night was historic. The Pecatonica River, which runs through the city, rose 17 feet — the highest recorded water level since 1933. In response, FEMA awarded the city a $3.4 million grant to buy out nearly 100 homes, all on the east side of town where Erving lives. 

Erving wanted a buyout after that flood, she said. Her home was battered, and a fair offer would have given her a fresh start. But as time dragged on, she lost trust in the process. She no longer wants to take a buyout. “I don’t know anybody that’s going to,” she said. 

Erving believes the city wants to raze her historically Black community to make way for a golf course.

A long legacy of racist housing practices here and across the country complicates relocation efforts. Communities still suffer the wealth-draining impacts of federal, state and city agencies forcing people of color into and out of neighborhoods. Buyouts strike many on Freeport’s east side as the 21st century version of that history.

Those same discriminatory practices put the area and many other communities of color at higher risk. The federal government’s 1930s-era redlining maps, which graded communities of color as “hazardous” for investment, bear a striking resemblance to current-day flood maps, according to an analysis from Redfin, a Seattle-based real-estate company. 

On a hotter planet, the brunt of new flood risk will fall disproportionately on Black people, a recent study in Nature Climate Change found. 

The federal government will have to reckon with present impacts of past discrimination to keep relocation from continuing that cycle. A 2020 study found that whiter communities are more likely to get buyout offers from FEMA while communities of color, with fewer alternatives, are more likely to accept — even as distrust keeps some residents locked in place.

For Erving, the problem runs deeper than doubts about officials’ intentions. If she takes a buyout at market rate, she likely couldn’t purchase a comparable home nearby. East side properties aren’t worth nearly as much as similar houses on the other side of town, part of a nationwide devaluing of Black homes.

Erving and several of her neighbors received assurances from city officials last year that the buyouts would make them whole. In order to compensate residents in segregated neighborhoods, FEMA can offer homeowners more than fair market value for their properties. Asked how often the agency has done this, FEMA said it did not keep track.

In February 2021, officials from FEMA’s regional office circulated a brochure saying that residents would be offered the market value of their home, plus a “supplemental payment of up to $31,000” so they could afford something comparable outside the floodway. The city said at the time that Erving and her neighbors would likely qualify for a payment close to the maximum allowed. 

But after staff turnover at Freeport City Hall, that message changed. While residents may get a supplemental payment, Wayne Duckmann, who started his job in January as Freeport’s community and economic development director to oversee the buyout program, cautioned that he couldn’t promise them. FEMA noted that supplemental payments can be made at the city and state’s discretion.

“The city wants to provide that supplemental payment if it’s warranted,” Duckmann said. “It’s certainly not in our interest to withhold that payment.”

Erving said she would rather just repair her home, but she can’t do that, either. She doesn’t have the money to fix her busted foundation, and she wouldn’t be allowed to, anyway. Flood zone restrictions that apply only to the east side prohibit it.  

Because the east side is in a federally designated floodway, it must be kept free of any new “encroachments” to allow room for floodwaters. That designation and an obscure FEMA regulation known as the “substantial improvement rule” effectively bar Erving and her neighbors from spending more than 50% of their home value on “improvements.”

Erving’s home, like many others on the east side, is valued at less than $7,000. To fix the foundation would likely cost more than the value of her home. Even replacing the damaged roof is a nonstarter. Erving estimates that to fully repair her house would cost $60,000. 

The floodway regulation was meant to discourage new development in flood-prone places, but some living in Freeport see it differently.

“I believe they did this to keep people from doing what they needed to maintain their homes,” said Charles Hilton, a longtime resident. “That’s the way I always figured it.” 

Much of what made the east side neighborhood feel like home is disappearing. The school that was a refuge for residents, around the corner from Erving’s house, has been shut down. Homes that have fallen into disrepair have been condemned. Black residents said it feels as though the city is waiting them out, eager to have them gone so Freeport’s white residents can relax and play sports there. 

“If we wanted that, we would never have done the large, large, large amount of work to get help from FEMA,” Duckmann said when asked about residents’ concerns. “Turning your back on someone is not going through the hard work and years of public meetings.”

In May, property assessors began visiting homes on Freeport’s east side to determine how much the city would offer residents to purchase their properties. Erving remains conflicted about the prospect: If the offer were good enough, she said, she might reconsider a buyout.  

“I feel like we’re up against a wall,” said Erving, who fears her house might be condemned if she allows assessors inside, leaving her with nowhere else to go. But she decided to do it anyway: “If I don’t let them in, we don’t get anything.”

Delays, red tape and frustration

Founded in 1710 by Swiss merchants, New Bern sits on the banks of the Neuse and Trent Rivers before they feed into the Pamlico Sound off the eastern coast of North Carolina. The location puts this city in the path of danger during the Atlantic hurricane season.

Despite earlier flooding, it wasn’t until 1996, when Hurricane Fran brought a 10-foot storm surge and eight inches of rain, that New Bern first applied for FEMA buyouts. The federal government approved the purchase of 19 properties two years later, as well as elevations for 64 homes, FEMA data shows.

Hurricane Florence was worse. The rivers crested to historic levels. Several hundred people had to be evacuated. 

As floodwaters receded, property owners documented $100 million in residential and commercial damages — 4,325 homes and 300 businesses in and around the city. Most of those affected lived in New Bern’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, where 36% of the population lives at or below poverty level.   

After recovery efforts began, the city circulated a form asking homeowners whether they might want to apply for FEMA buyouts or elevation grants. By the December 2018 deadline, the owners of at least 50 homes checked the box expressing interest in buyouts, documents show. 

Months passed. City staff completed an application asking for “expedited” processing for just five homes, three of which the state ultimately submitted to FEMA in May 2019. A year later, FEMA gave New Bern the green light to make the purchases. None of the 29 homeowners on North Hills Drive who signed the petition immediately after the storm — including Crews — received a buyout in this first phase. 

A few more buyouts are coming: The city got approval from FEMA for 13 more properties in September 2021. But some owners sold to private buyers while another decided to elevate a home instead, according to Keith Acree, a spokesperson for North Carolina Emergency Management. 

None of those remaining buyouts have been finished yet, nearly four years after the hurricane swept through. Seven of those eight pending purchases are in the North Hills Drive area, city officials say. 

One of the completed buyouts was Annette Canady’s childhood home, on Beech Street near a river and creek. Canady waited eight months after she had signed the initial May 2020 sales agreement before finding out what her purchase price would be. This buyout, like the other two, was mostly funded by FEMA, while the city managed the transaction.

The lack of information from the city added more stress, Canady said. She would have been homeless during that time, she said, had it not been for a friend who let her stay in his house for 2 ½ years until the $65,221 deal finally closed in February 2021. 

“I don’t think they handled it right,” she said of the city’s role in the buyout process. 

This was not just any house to Canady, 66, who has two children, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild. She grew up there with her siblings after her parents bought the property in 1963. It was waiting for her after divorce. It was where she played with her kids and grandkids. All that is left is the memories.  

Now she rents, making ends meet on a fixed income. 

“People say, ‘Well, go here or go there,’” Canady said, recounting advice she gets to buy a place. “And I said, ‘You don’t understand. There is nowhere to go.’ There are no houses that you can afford.”

New Bern Mayor Dana Outlaw said he’s disappointed by the small number of buyouts and elevations FEMA approved. Still, records show the federal agency approved the lion’s share of the properties the city asked to purchase.

“I don’t know if some communities have more political clout, or if they are filling out the applications better than we are,” said Outlaw, who did not respond to questions about why the city didn't ask for more buyouts.

Experts note that a lack of resources and expertise at the local level remains one of the biggest obstacles preventing municipalities from participating in FEMA programs.

NRDC’s Weber said that a few cities and states are thinking about “how to do buyouts in a faster and more equitable way,” but what they need is a streamlined way to access resources. “That is something that most places just don’t have.”

Weber and other experts emphasize one major problem is that these programs are competitive. Communities with more resources will always be better equipped to go after funding than their poorer counterparts. 

Mathew Sanders, senior manager at the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts, argues that the federal government should offer funding and other resources directly to flood-prone communities to help them adapt and relocate rather than make them apply for aid. 

“If we think about it more as service delivery, as opposed to say funding availability, then I think we could start moving toward better outcomes,” he said.

Abramson, of the University of Washington, suggests a fundamental reform: Buyout programs must focus not on individual property purchases but on what he calls  “collective aid.” Helping communities move together is more equitable than helping homeowners move alone, he said.

In the North Hills Drive neighborhood, which sits in a dip, surrounded by a canal and near a creek, the risk for future flooding looms large. After Florence, four residents elevated their homes on their own and with the help of charity organizations. Others, including Crews, gave up and sold.

Neighbor Verleria Bryant and her husband, Charles, raised three sons in the three-bedroom house they’ve owned for three decades.

Water from Florence, which reached as high as three feet inside the house, destroyed everything. Interior walls needed replacing. Flood insurance didn’t cover the ruined furniture and appliances. 

In the midst of all this, the Bryants felt pressured to quickly decide on something the city and FEMA would process far more slowly: buyout or elevation?

“We were so emotionally drained that you can’t make that decision in that short period of time,” she said as she sat in her backyard.

The Bryants didn’t know where they could go if they did move. The couple had initially signed the petition asking for a buyout but said they changed their minds and opted for an elevation.

They didn’t get it. The city told Public Integrity it has no record of that request.

Now, still living on North Hills Drive, the couple hopes against hope that the area won’t flood again. Bryant doesn’t understand why no assistance ever reached them.

“That’s why we got the government,” she said, “to help us when we need them.” 

Columbia Journalism Investigations research assistants Gabriela Alcalde and Samantha McCabe contributed to this story.

Mc Nelly Torres is an editor for the Center for Public Integrity. Alex Lubben and Zak Cassel are reporting fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. Public Integrity and Type Investigations, two nonprofit investigative newsrooms, provided reporting, editing, fact checking and other support. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Too little, too late for people seeking climate relief appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

As climate change worsens, areas that were once safe become unlivable. Repetitive flooding, wildfires and other hazards are prompting some Americans to move. Millions more are expected to follow suit in the coming decades — if they can get out.

An investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations, the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations found that the federal government is not prepared for climate relocation needs now, let alone those to come.

Newsrooms around the country joined forces to report on the issue in their own communities.

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The post On the ground: Reporting from the front lines of a climate relocation crisis appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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SMITHFIELD, Va. — When flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 destroyed Betty Ricks’ home, she rebuilt. Several years later, she posed proudly for a Christmas photograph beside her daughter and granddaughter in her new living room.

Then another flood — brought by Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2006 — claimed her house a second time, leaving soggy furniture and appliances jumbled sideways. 

“Everything gone again,” Ricks said. The only thing she salvaged was the photograph, now water-streaked. 

After that storm, she rebuilt her home from scratch once more. Yet more flooding followed.

Now, she and some of her neighbors on Great Spring Road, who live less than 30 miles inland from where the Chesapeake Bay opens into the Atlantic Ocean, see no way out of this dangerous loop but to move. With an increasing number of communities at high risk from worse and more frequent disasters fueled by the changing climate, experts warn that many Americans will find themselves in a similar situation.

But the only way to leave without putting new buyers in the same position — or abandoning their homes altogether — is to seek relocation funds from the federal government.

Twice now, Ricks and her neighbors have asked for that help.

Both times, their application was denied.

Columbia Journalism Investigations in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations spent a year digging into the growing need for climate relocation across the United States. Little organized government assistance exists for preventing the loss of homes and lives before a disaster, the investigation revealed — and there is no comprehensive focus on helping people escape untenable situations like Ricks’.

For decades the federal government has known that climate change will force people in the U.S. to relocate. And the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, recommended in 2020 that the government form a “climate migration pilot program” to help people who want to relocate due to climate change — a recommendation it reiterated in March. 

But in the absence of such a program, communities across the country must try to cobble together funding from across federal agencies through programs that weren’t designed for the climate crisis. 

That leaves people in harm’s way to fend for themselves. Many can’t.

Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners analyzed federal disaster declaration data over the past three decades to identify communities repeatedly hit by major hurricanes, floods or wildfires, events that climate change is worsening.

The analysis revealed dozens of communities across the country in recent years — and hundreds over the last generation — bearing the brunt of successive disasters, from California to North Carolina, Washington state to Texas. Many are located near the Atlantic, Pacific or Gulf coasts, but the impacts are also felt far from the shoreline, in Missouri, North Dakota, Kentucky and elsewhere. No region of the country has been spared.

What unites these pummeled communities is that they are often more socially and economically vulnerable than other places, the analysis revealed.

People of color make up more than half the residents in counties that experienced at least three climate disasters in the past five years. These counties also have a higher proportion of residents who speak limited English and people in poverty than the rest of the country.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster preparedness spending — which includes money to help people relocate — already falls short of the need, experts say. And it’s not flowing out equitably, according to the analysis by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners.

Among hard-hit counties, places with a higher share of residents of color than the national average received about 40% less funding per person. A similar trend held over the last three decades. 

Taken together, the findings highlight how, in the face of climate-driven disasters, communities across the country in the greatest need of government assistance receive less of it — if they get anything at all.

These challenges affect a large and growing number of people. In 2018, the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment warned that more than 13 million people across the country may need to move by the end of the century due to sea level rise. Add the effects of hurricanes, riverine flooding and wildfires, and millions more will need to seek out safer parts of the country — or remain trapped in damaged, dangerous conditions.

Take Smithfield.

Sea levels in this Hampton Roads region are rising faster than anywhere else along the Eastern Seaboard. Additionally, the land along the Virginia coast is slowly sinking, causing high tides to push water farther and farther inland. Along Ricks’ Great Spring Road, amid the region’s coastal floodplain, sudden heavy rains can cause water to rise up to seven feet in just an hour, turning the streets into rivers. 

Ricks has been rescued by boat from her home twice.

The first of her unsuccessful attempts to move to a safer area came in 2010, when she and her neighbors applied for a federal buyout through Isle of Wight County, where Smithfield is located. For decades, FEMA has facilitated the purchase of flood-prone homes. Following the buyouts, the government demolishes the structures, returning the land to open space to stop the cycle of damage and loss.

On Ricks’ application, a hazard mitigation consultant attested that the grant “would eliminate the possibility that another homeowner will suffer the same misfortune as Mrs. Ricks.” 

The state agency denied Ricks’ application for unknown reasons; according to one official, no documentation that could explain the decision could be located.

In 2020, in the wake of more severe storms, Smithfield officials tried again, applying for $920,240 in funding from FEMA to acquire and demolish Ricks’ home and four neighboring properties. The project would be “100% effective in preventing loss of property and life due to future flooding,” the town’s funding paperwork stated.

FEMA denied the request.

The money would have come from FEMA’s newly launched Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which allocated $500 million for disaster and climate change preparedness projects across the country. But Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s acting deputy administrator for resilience, said there wasn’t enough funding to help Smithfield in 2020. 

Instead, assistance went to other communities such as Menlo Park, California, where the government provided $50 million to protect homes and businesses in and around Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley. Across the country, requests for assistance exceeded $3 billion.

“We were oversubscribed,” Salinas said. “There are so many good projects that need to be funded, and communities want to invest in their resilience. They want to be making sure they’re safe today and tomorrow. There’s just not enough money on the streets to [fund them all].”

Ricks sees no way out without that help. She leaves the TV on in her bedroom, checking news broadcasts for warnings about incoming storms. She keeps important papers wrapped in plastic bags in a trunk at the foot of her bed, hoping that will be enough to save them when her home floods again.

Faced with intensifying hazards and a federal government failing to act, she asks a question with no clear answers:

“What am I going to do?”

No one-stop shop for climate relocation

The federal government knows that climate change will displace millions, but it has been slow to respond to the growing threat. A 2020 Office of Inspector General report criticized FEMA’s programs as inadequate. Other reports and experts have repeatedly called on Congress to designate a lead agency to oversee the complex process of relocating communities.

No single agency or program is responsible for helping Americans move to safer parts of the country, however.

“There’s not a one-stop-shop program for this,” Salinas said. “I think right now, what we do offer is pieces of it.”

Vulnerable Americans must navigate a bureaucratic labyrinth, seeking funding from grant programs spread across multiple agencies, including FEMA, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of Agriculture. These programs are narrowly targeted — FEMA might purchase flood-prone homes, for example, while HUD might pay for new infrastructure. None were specifically designed to facilitate the relocation of millions of people.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, for example, is the primary way communities obtain money for home buyouts from the federal government. Launched three decades ago to address ballooning flood losses across the United States, it has acquired about 50,000 properties in flood-prone areas at a cost of $3.4 billion. But this is still a fraction of what will be needed in the coming years.

Taken together, Salinas said, the existing “patchwork quilt” of federal programs can help communities relocate. But tapping into them is difficult at best for small, under-resourced communities on the front lines of climate change. Often, they don’t have the resources to apply at all.

“What’s really frustrating is that every different program has different eligibility requirements and determinations,” said Kelly Main, the executive director of Buy-In Community Planning, a nonprofit that helps communities apply for buyouts. “Just being able to go through all of the different eligibility determinations for each of those programs, if you’re a one-person staff in a small town somewhere on the Gulf Coast, is extremely challenging.” 

That’s the case for Pauline Okitkun, a tribal administrator of the remote village of Kotlik, Alaska. She often works late into the night to secure grant funding for moving homes in her community of about 650 people to higher ground.

Temperatures in Alaska are increasing more than twice as fast as in the continental U.S., according to the most recent National Climate Assessment. In July 2019, Anchorage, the state’s largest city — which sits just 375 miles south of the Arctic Circle — recorded a record-high temperature of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. As Alaska’s permafrost starts to thaw, sinkholes have swallowed homes and destroyed roads, bridges and other infrastructure, and erosion has eaten away at riverbanks. Many houses in Kotlik hang precipitously over the water as the ground beneath them washes away.

Climate change has also caused more intense and frequent flooding in parts of Alaska, including Kotlik, a riverside community near Pastol Bay in the western part of the state. Okitkun remembers a particularly intense flood in 2013, when water and ice tore down power lines, ripped apart sewage pipes, destroyed the evacuation roads and damaged homes in the village. For days afterward, it was hard to tell where the water ended and the land began. 

That’s increasingly the new normal in the region. In 2018, Kotlik flooded five times in nine months, leaving houses teetering on a crumbling riverbank. Without safe housing nearby, some of the remaining homes have become overcrowded. In one case, more than a dozen people are living in a single dwelling. 

“Our winters are shorter. They’re a lot warmer,” Okitkun said. “The ice is a lot thinner.” 

The increased flooding, fast-paced erosion and permafrost thaw were a wake-up call to the community. In 2018, 82% of Kotlik residents said they supported moving to higher ground, according to a local survey. In 2021, the village put forward plans to move 21 homes — about a sixth of the village — to the site of Kotlik’s old airport, as well as bolster the rapidly eroding shoreline, at an estimated cost of at least $20 million. But obtaining the money has been an uphill battle — one that has fallen largely to Okitkun and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, which has helped the village apply for grants.

This is only the beginning. While Kotlik has prioritized the relocation of the most-threatened homes, the rest of the village also is considering moving to more stable ground as conditions deteriorate.

Okitkun’s experience highlights the challenges vulnerable communities face when seeking relocation assistance from the government. Since 2018, Kotlik has applied for nearly two dozen grants from HUD, FEMA, the BIA and other agencies. In March, the Department of Agriculture announced that it would be providing aid to help Alaskan villages, including Kotlik, move buildings and infrastructure away from flood-prone areas. But the timeline for the assistance and how much money Kotlik could receive is still unclear. So far, the village has secured $2.9 million.  That’s less than a fifth of what it needs. Nearly half of Kotlik’s requests for assistance have been rejected.  

Hidden Epidemics

For decades, scientists have warned that climate change would harm our health, spurring an unprecedented rise in deadly heat, infectious disease and disaster-related trauma. But the U.S. public health system, hampered by underfunding and political resistance, is ill-prepared for a crisis that’s already upon us.

Read Hidden Epidemics stories

Here’s why programs related to climate change or hazard mitigation often disadvantage or exclude communities: 

First, the government runs grant applications through a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the projects are worth the federal resources. This is a major hurdle for small towns and villages in Alaska and other parts of the United States, where the number of affected individuals is often small and the cost of infrastructure work can be high. There’s no road access to Kotlik, so equipment and materials must be transported by airplane or boat, increasing costs significantly. 

Funding for certain FEMA and HUD grant programs is allocated according to official damage estimates from federally declared disasters. Despite the history of flooding in Kotlik, the area where it’s located has received only one presidential disaster declaration in the past 50 years — in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The government’s definition of disasters does not recognize certain hazards exacerbated by climate change, such as permafrost thaw and erosion. 

Without official disaster declarations, Kotlik has been ineligible to apply for many federal grant programs.

This is a common challenge in Alaska. Almost 200 Native Alaskan villages suffer from flooding and erosion but do not qualify for federal programs that would help them adapt or recover, according to a 2003 GAO report. That finding was reaffirmed in two subsequent GAO reports, in 2009 and 2022.

Finally, federal grant programs often require local municipalities to pay between 5 and 50% of a project’s cost. That’s prohibitive for many small communities — particularly a village like Kotlik, where the local economy isn’t based primarily on cash and residents rely on traditional subsistence fishing, hunting and gathering. 

Kotlik is not alone in its struggles. 

In Washington state, where rising seas cause repeated flooding, at least four tribal nations are seeking federal help to support relocation efforts and still need millions of dollars in order to move.

In Colquitt, a small community in Georgia, Hurricane Michael leveled a mobile home park in 2018. Officials applied to FEMA for buyouts twice and received no assistance.

In Horry County, South Carolina, a working-class community just up the coast from Myrtle Beach, residents applied for a HUD-funded buyout program, but the process has dragged on for years, leaving homeowners stranded.

The federal government has no comprehensive record of how many communities across the country have sought relocation assistance and failed to receive it. In August 2021, Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners filed public records requests with FEMA and HUD, seeking applications from communities that requested aid and were rejected. A year later, despite repeated inquiries, FEMA provided only some of the information and HUD released no documentation.

Because government assistance programs are so difficult to access, communities often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of disasters on their own. In De Soto, Missouri, residents sit in their cars when it rains, ready to evacuate quickly if the Joachim Creek floods. The Army Corps of Engineers recommended buyouts for about 70 flood-prone properties in 2019. Since then, the city has applied for FEMA buyouts twice, but state and federal officials approved funding for just one property. The homeowner chose to remain in their home. No one in De Soto has been moved out of the flood zone.

With no aid on the horizon, some residents have sold their flood-prone houses at a loss. “Right now they’re selling on this block, but they’re selling for 25 cents on the dollar,” said Ken Slinger, a De Soto resident who lives across the street from the Joachim Creek. A federal buyout would allow him and his wife, Cindy, to move to a safer area, he said. Without one, they can’t afford a comparable home nearby.

Residents who do sell face an emotionally and morally fraught decision. It can feel like their only option, but it leaves new homeowners in a precarious position.

“If we did decide to sell, we wouldn’t sell to anyone who had little kids. We wouldn’t sell to elderly people,” Cindy Slinger said. “You’re selling your house in a floodplain, and you’re selling it so somebody else can move in and be impacted.”

For Okitkun, trying to get the Kotlik community in a position to move to higher ground left her exhausted. “It just took a toll on me,” she said. 
In February 2021, she quit her job as tribal administrator. But no one else stepped in. A few months later, she was back at it, shouldering the work and the stress.

Where the dead don’t stay buried

While Native villages like Kotlik have been struggling for years to obtain government assistance, many other vulnerable communities across the country aren’t even in a position to apply.

The unincorporated community of Ironton, in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, was founded by formerly enslaved people in the late 19th century. Today it remains an almost entirely Black community. Many residents are refinery workers or retirees. All have deep ties to Ironton.

Audrey Trufant Salvant, for example, is a fifth-generation Irontonian. “My family has been there from its conception,” she said, “and I have deep-rooted love for this community.”

But like many small, rural communities of color, Ironton has been overlooked by federal disaster preparedness programs. In the past three decades, 16 major hurricanes hit Plaquemines Parish — six in the past five years alone. Ironton residents can rattle off the names of storms as though they were neighbors: Katrina and Rita came through in 2005, Gustav and Ike in 2008, Isaac in 2012.

Those hurricanes and others prompted an influx of federal dollars across the region. Between 1989 and 2020, Louisiana received more than $3.1 billion in disaster preparedness aid through FEMA, almost one-fifth of the more than $18 billion the government has allocated for these programs nationwide. 

But Ironton has received little federal assistance. As an unincorporated town, there’s no local government — no mayor, town manager or local council — to advocate on the residents’ behalf. 

Ironton’s residents rebuilt the town on their own after the flooding that Katrina and Isaac caused. In 2021, Hurricane Ida ravaged the community once again. Rushing waters knocked homes off their foundations, tossed aside pews inside the local church that was built in 1880 and destroyed the cemetery, where some of Ironton’s founding residents — the first free Black people to live in the community — are buried.

“My mother’s tomb is intact,” said Rev. Haywood Johnson Jr., the church’s pastor. “But my uncle and my aunt, their coffins were floating.” 

Ironton isn’t alone in its inability to access federal assistance programs. 

“Every [buyout] administrator that we’ve talked to tells us about a community that wants to do buyouts and hasn’t been able to, but not usually because they’ve applied to FEMA or HUD and not gotten the money, but because they are unable to apply for the money,” said A.R. Siders, a researcher at the University of Delaware who studies disasters. “They just don’t have the staff or the capacity to do it.” 

In 2021, Virginia’s Department of Emergency Management surveyed 40 communities with vulnerable populations that it identified as being at high risk for climate-driven disasters. In response, local officials expressed frustration and exasperation with the federal grant application process. Several had no idea grants were available, and many said they didn’t have sufficient grant-writing expertise or understanding of what the programs were or how they were supposed to work. 

“Not an expert in grant programs,” one official wrote in his survey response. “Can’t manage all duties and grant applications.” He was, he said, a “one man show.”

Often the hurdles stem from the ways in which communities have long been disenfranchised. Through the end of the 1960s, for example, Plaquemines Parish was governed by Leander Perez, a staunch segregationist who denied free Black towns like Ironton basic services. Until 1980, the town had no running water.

It’s no surprise that historically marginalized communities like Ironton are now the ones suffering the most from climate-driven disasters, said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Across the country, he said, these communities reflect the “racial footprint of infrastructure apartheid” that has persisted throughout America’s history.

“You see those same states, those same counties that 100 years ago you had racial redlining,” Bullard said. “You can see this playing out.”

In Virginia, for example, counties with a greater share of Black residents were much more likely to have experienced a higher number of hurricanes or floods over the past 30 years. That’s according to an analysis performed by Columbia Journalism Investigations and its partners.

North Carolina counties with a higher poverty rate, or a greater share of Black residents, were also more likely to have been hit by a higher number of these disasters. And Texas counties with a greater share of Black or Latino residents were much more likely to have been struck by a higher number of hurricanes, floods or wildfires. 

In the wake of Hurricane Ida, some Ironton residents are considering taking a buyout — not from the government, but from a private company contracted by the Port of Plaquemines Parish, which wants to construct a rail line to move cargo containers through the historic town. The decision about whether to sell is a difficult one, particularly in a community with such historic ties to the area. But having been marginalized for so long, some Ironton residents feel that taking the offer and starting fresh elsewhere might be their only option. 

“We’ve been the sacrificial lambs,” said Salvant, who is determined not to sell. “We take the brunt of the storm, take all of the losses, our homes are destroyed. When the federal funding comes in, they utilize it in the northern part of the parish that was barely impacted.” 

Plaquemines Parish President Kirk Lepine did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Unmanaged retreat

The federal government is slowly acknowledging that vulnerable communities need assistance to move out of the way of climate-fueled disasters. The landmark infrastructure bill passed in November 2021 provides the Bureau of Indian Affairs with $130 million for “community relocation” and $86 million for “tribal climate resilience and adaptation projects.”

This funding is a drop in the bucket, however, compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be needed in the coming decades to help millions of people across the country relocate.

According to a 2020 GAO report, each FEMA buyout between 2008 and 2014 cost the federal government an average of $136,000. 

But the cost of doing nothing can escalate quickly.

In flood-prone areas, for example, the government might need to provide repeated rounds of aid to help residents recover and rebuild, said Jeffrey Peterson, a former Environmental Protection Agency official and member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Obama administration. The “smarter investment,” he said, is for the government to buy out residents — avoiding the need for additional help.

“We could end up spending $500,000 on your house,” Peterson said. “So let’s buy it now for $250,000” and prevent escalating costs.

Mitigation efforts like seawalls may delay encroaching waters, but they also require large upfront investments. And even then they are only an interim solution, Peterson and other experts warn.

“Protection for most of our coastline doesn’t make any sense,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “For a lot of the U.S. coastline, relocation is probably cost-effective.”

Some federal lawmakers have highlighted the need for more action.

“Climate migration is already happening, and it’s going to be a serious challenge for governments around the world during this century if we don’t quickly chart a new course to lower emissions on a global scale,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, among those who requested the 2020 GAO report that called for the creation of a climate migration pilot program.

But politicians’ unwillingness to fully acknowledge the problem is a key obstacle to funding relocation efforts, according to interviews with a dozen former federal officials.

“People’s climate risk is not something that politicians, that elected officials, that even appointed officials, or people running different agencies of governments in towns and cities across the country are eager to know and make public — largely because they believe that they do not have the money to address the climate risks that might be revealed,” said Harriet Tregoning, a former senior HUD official who is now director of the New Urban Mobility Alliance, a coalition focused on urban transportation. “And highlighting climate risk without a plan for addressing those risks, they see as a recipe for undermining everyone’s confidence in the future of that community.”

Alice Hill, who until May was President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Salinas as FEMA’s deputy administrator for resilience, supports developing a federal relocation policy. But doing so is “politically unpalatable,” she wrote in her 2019 book Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption.

The most recent effort to develop a plan for climate relocation came in 2016, when President Barack Obama established an interagency working group to craft a framework for “managed retreat,” a term that describes voluntary, community-led relocation projects. The Trump administration abandoned the project after just two months, and the Biden administration has not relaunched it.

Asked for comment, the White House did not address this directly. Its Council on Environmental Quality provided a list of efforts to defend people from climate-fueled disasters, only a few of which were about relocation, and offered a statement from Chair Brenda Mallory.

“The truth is: we need a wide range of strategies and solutions — across the entire Federal government — to help communities protect themselves from disaster, respond when disaster strikes, and, in some cases, move out of harm’s way,” she wrote. “Through a series of hazard-focused interagency working groups, we are working to get critical investments to the communities that are most vulnerable, support community-led efforts to protect against climate-fueled disasters, improve climate and risk information for communities, improve building standards and codes across the country, and share best practices and policies.”

Without any federal relocation policy in place, scientists say Americans are already in “unmanaged retreat” — families and individuals are taking matters into their own hands and, without government help, fleeing areas vulnerable to climate-driven disasters.

In Paradise, California, the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the worst wildfires in California history, burned down more than 13,000 structures — 95% of the town. At least eighty-five people died. Sarah Bates, a longtime resident, lost her home and everything in it: photo albums, all of her furniture, the record collection she’d compiled during her 40-year stint as a radio DJ, the electric wheelchair she needed to get around.

After the fire, Bates spent her days in Red Cross shelters, then in a motel FEMA paid for. But in the wake of wildfires, government assistance is almost entirely directed toward rebuilding, not relocating. FEMA offers funding for landscaping and home improvements that can mitigate damage from fires, rather than moving people away from the riskiest areas.

“There’s no precedent for wildfire buyouts,” said Robert Barker, a spokesperson for FEMA Region 9, which includes California.

Some Paradise residents were keenly aware that wildfires could decimate the town. A decade earlier, three major wildfires damaged or destroyed nearly 600 structures in Butte County. During one fire, two evacuation routes were blocked by the blaze, leaving only one road out. Residents hit massive traffic jams as they tried to flee.

That left Bates anxiously watching for signs of imminent disaster. Whenever she heard the rumble of an airplane outside, she said, she dropped everything to see if it was on its way to fight a wildfire nearby.

After the Camp Fire, she decided she could no longer stay. She initially moved to North Carolina before eventually settling in central Virginia, funding the move on her own. To get across the country, she spent three days on trains and buses, then hitched a ride from a friend between Nashville and North Carolina. Once she got to the East Coast, she struggled to find affordable housing.

“There’s still people not in housing even now,” Bates said. “And it’s inexplicable to me that the government has not worked out what to do about helping them get rehomed after three years.”

Thousands of other wildfire survivors are also relocating on their own. More than 14,000 people moved out of Paradise after the Camp Fire, according to Peter Hansen and Jacquelyn Chase, researchers at Chico State University who analyzed change of address data to map the migration across the country. More than 4,000 left Butte County and more than 2,600 left California entirely, moving to Oregon, Indiana, Tennessee and other states, the analysis showed.

The movement of people away from local communities can leave cities and regions hollowed out, with fewer resources for the residents and businesses that remain. But even though community relocation may be politically unpopular, experts say public officials can no longer ignore the need to act. 

“The absence of managed retreat is going to be unmanaged retreat,” said Anna Weber, a policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not going to be no retreat at all.”

In April, Valerie Butler, a member of the Smithfield Town Council and one of Betty Ricks’ neighbors, sent an email to the town manager and her fellow council members. In it, she urged her colleagues not to give up on efforts to obtain federal aid for relocation.

“I know the bureaucratic process can be daunting,” Butler wrote. But Smithfield was facing another hurricane season, and residents were frightened. “Can you imagine,” she wrote, “being in your home, a place of protection and safety, when it rains each time and your kids ask you, ‘is the boat going to have to come [and] get us.’

“This is heartbreaking. Resolving this situation should be a priority.”

CJI research assistants Gabriela Alcalde and Samantha McCabe contributed to this story. Carolynne Hultquist, a disaster researcher at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, contributed to the data analysis.

Julia Shipley, Alex Lubben, Zak Cassel and Olga Loginova are reporting fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. The Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations, two nonprofit investigative newsrooms, provided reporting, editing, fact checking and other support. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Trapped in harm’s way as climate disasters mount appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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SMITHFIELD, Va. — Cuando las inundaciones provocadas por el huracán Floyd en 1999 destruyeron la casa de Betty Ricks, ella la reconstruyó. Varios años después, posó orgullosa para una fotografía navideña junto a su hija y su nieta en su nueva sala.

Luego, otra inundación — provocada por la tormenta tropical Ernesto en 2006 — destrozó su casa por segunda vez, dejando los muebles empapados y los electrodomésticos revueltos por todos lados. 

“Todo se destruyó de nuevo”, dijo Ricks. Lo único que salvó fue la fotografía, esta vez manchada por el agua. 

Después de esa tormenta, volvió a reconstruir su casa desde cero. Sin embargo, se produjeron más inundaciones.

Ahora, ella y algunos de sus vecinos de Great Spring Road, que viven a menos de 30 millas tierra adentro del lugar en el que la bahía de Chesapeake se abre al océano Atlántico, no ven otra salida a este peligroso ciclo que la de mudarse. Con una cifra cada vez mayor de comunidades en alto riesgo de sufrir catástrofes más frecuentes y peores, alimentadas por el cambio climático, los expertos advierten que muchos estadounidenses se encontrarán en una situación similar.

Pero la única manera de marcharse sin poner a nuevos compradores en la misma situación — o abandonar sus casas por completo — es solicitarle fondos para reubicación al gobierno federal.

Ricks y sus vecinos ya han pedido esa ayuda dos veces.

En ambas ocasiones, la solicitud fue denegada.

Columbia Journalism Investigations, en colaboración con el Center for Public Integrity y Type Investigations, investigó por un año la creciente necesidad de reubicación producto del cambio climático en todo Estados Unidos. La investigación reveló que existe poca ayuda gubernamental organizada para prevenir la pérdida de hogares y vidas ante una catástrofe — y que no existe un enfoque integral para ayudar a las personas a escapar de situaciones insostenibles como la de Ricks.

Desde hace décadas, el gobierno federal sabe que el cambio climático obligará a comunidades en Estados Unidos a reubicarse. Y la Oficina de Control y Fiscalización del Gobierno, brazo investigador del Congreso, recomendó en 2020 que el gobierno formara un “programa piloto de migración climática” para ayudar a las personas que quieran reubicarse debido al cambio climático — una recomendación que reiteró en marzo. 

Pero a falta de un programa de este tipo, las comunidades de todo el país deben intentar reunir fondos de todas las agencias federales, mediante programas que no fueron diseñados para la crisis climática. 

Eso deja a las personas en riesgo con la única posibilidad de valerse por sí mismas. Muchas no pueden.

Columbia Journalism Investigations y sus socios analizaron los datos de las declaraciones federales de catástrofe de las últimas tres décadas para identificar las comunidades que se han visto afectadas en repetidas ocasiones por grandes huracanes, inundaciones o incendios forestales, acontecimientos que el cambio climático está agravando.

El análisis reveló que docenas de comunidades de todo el país en los últimos años — y cientos en la última generación — se han visto afectadas por sucesivas catástrofes, desde California hasta Carolina del Norte, y desde el estado de Washington hasta Texas. Muchas se encuentran cerca de las costas del Atlántico, el Pacífico o el Golfo, pero los impactos también se sienten lejos de la costa, en Missouri, Dakota del Norte, Kentucky y otros lugares. Ninguna región del país ha quedado inmune.

Lo que une a estas comunidades afectadas es que suelen ser más vulnerables social y económicamente que otros lugares, según reveló el análisis.

Las personas de color constituyen más de la mitad de los residentes en los condados que han sufrido al menos tres desastres climáticos en los últimos cinco años. Estos condados también tienen un mayor porcentaje de residentes que tienen un dominio limitado del idioma inglés y de personas en situación de pobreza que el resto del país.

El gasto de la Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA, por sus siglas en inglés) en materia de preparación para catástrofes — que incluye dinero para ayudar a la gente a reubicarse — ya no logra satisfacer las necesidades, según los expertos. Y no está fluyendo de forma equitativa, indica el análisis de Columbia Journalism Investigations y sus socios.

Entre los condados más afectados, los lugares con mayor proporción de residentes de color que el promedio nacional recibieron alrededor de un 40% menos de fondos por persona. Se mantuvo una tendencia similar en las últimas tres décadas. 

En conjunto, las conclusiones ponen de manifiesto cómo, ante las catástrofes provocadas por el clima, las comunidades de todo el país con mayor necesidad de ayuda gubernamental reciben menos — si es que reciben algo.

Estos retos afectan a un número elevado y creciente de personas. En 2018, la más reciente Evaluación Nacional del Clima del gobierno advirtió que más de 13 millones de personas en todo el país podrían tener que mudarse a finales de siglo debido al aumento del nivel del mar. Si se añaden los efectos de los huracanes, el desbordamiento de ríos y los incendios forestales, millones de personas más tendrán que buscar zonas más seguras del país — o quedarán atrapadas en condiciones perjudiciales y peligrosas.

Un ejemplo: Smithfield.

El nivel del mar en esta región de Hampton Roads está subiendo más rápido que en cualquier otra parte del litoral este. Además, la tierra en la costa de Virginia se está hundiendo lentamente, haciendo que las mareas altas empujen el agua cada vez más hacia el interior. A lo largo de la carretera Great Spring Road de Ricks, en medio de la llanura aluvial costera de la región, las fuertes lluvias repentinas pueden hacer que el agua suba hasta siete pies (cerca de dos metros) en sólo una hora, convirtiendo las calles en ríos. 

Ricks ha sido rescatada en bote de su casa dos veces.

El primero de sus intentos infructuosos de mudarse a una zona más segura se produjo en 2010, cuando ella y sus vecinos solicitaron una adquisición federal a través del condado de Isle of Wight, donde se encuentra Smithfield. Durante décadas, la FEMA ha facilitado la adquisición de viviendas en zonas propensas a las inundaciones. Tras las adquisiciones, el gobierno derriba las estructuras, devolviendo el terreno a un espacio abierto para detener el ciclo de daños y pérdidas.

Sobre la solicitud de Ricks, un consultor de mitigación de riesgos atestiguó que la subvención "eliminaría la posibilidad de que otro propietario sufra la misma desgracia que la Sra. Ricks". 

La agencia estatal denegó la solicitud de Ricks por razones desconocidas; según un funcionario, no se pudo localizar ninguna documentación que explicara la decisión.

En 2020, a raíz de más tormentas severas, funcionarios de Smithfield lo intentaron de nuevo. Solicitaron 920,240 dólares de financiación a la FEMA para adquirir y demoler la casa de Ricks y cuatro propiedades vecinas. El proyecto sería "100% efectivo en la prevención de la pérdida de propiedades y vidas debido a futuras inundaciones", decía la documentación de financiación de la ciudad.

La FEMA denegó la solicitud.

El dinero habría procedido del recién estrenado programa Construyendo Infraestructuras y Comunidades Resilientes (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, en inglés) de la FEMA, que les asignó 500 millones de dólares a proyectos de preparación para catástrofes y cambio climático en todo el país. Pero Victoria Salinas, viceadministradora en funciones de la FEMA para la resiliencia, dijo que no había fondos suficientes para ayudar a Smithfield en 2020. 

La ayuda se destinó en cambio a otras comunidades, como Menlo Park, California, donde el gobierno aportó 50 millones de dólares para proteger las viviendas y las empresas de Palo Alto y sus alrededores, el corazón de Silicon Valley. En todo el país, las solicitudes de ayuda superaron los 3,000 millones de dólares.

"Tuvimos un exceso de solicitudes", dijo Salinas. "Hay muchos proyectos buenos que necesitan financiación, y las comunidades quieren invertir en su resiliencia. Quieren asegurarse de que están a salvo hoy y lo estarán mañana. Sencillamente, no hay suficiente dinero en la calle para [financiarlas a todas]".

Ricks no ve salida alguna sin esa ayuda. Deja la televisión encendida en su habitación, atenta a los programas de noticias en busca de avisos sobre futuras tormentas. Guarda sus documentos importantes en bolsas de plástico en un baúl al pie de su cama, con la esperanza de que eso sea suficiente para salvarlos cuando su casa vuelva a inundarse.

Ante la intensificación de los peligros y la inacción del gobierno federal, hace una pregunta sin respuestas claras:

"¿Qué voy a hacer?"

No hay una ventanilla única para la reubicación debido al cambio climático

El gobierno federal sabe que el cambio climático desplazará a millones de personas, pero se ha demorado en responder a la creciente amenaza. Un informe de la Oficina del Inspector General de 2020 criticó los programas de la FEMA por considerarlos inadecuados. Otros informes y expertos le han pedido en repetidas ocasiones al Congreso que designe una agencia principal que supervise el complejo proceso de reubicación de las comunidades.

Sin embargo, ningún organismo o programa tiene la responsabilidad de ayudar a los estadounidenses a mudarse a zonas más seguras del país.

"No hay un programa de ventanilla única para esto", dijo Salinas. "Creo que ahora mismo lo único que ofrecemos son partes de ello".

Los estadounidenses vulnerables deben recorrer un laberinto burocrático, buscando financiación de programas de subvención repartidos entre múltiples agencias, como la FEMA, el Departamento de Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano (HUD, por sus siglas en inglés), el Cuerpo de Ingenieros del Ejército, la Oficina de Asuntos Indígenas (BIA, por sus siglas en inglés) y el Departamento de Agricultura. Estos programas tienen un objetivo muy limitado: la FEMA puede comprar casas en zonas propensas a las inundaciones, por ejemplo, mientras que el HUD puede pagar nuevas infraestructuras. Ninguno fue diseñado específicamente para facilitar la reubicación de millones de personas.

El Programa de Subvenciones para la Mitigación de Riesgos de la FEMA, por ejemplo, es la principal forma en que las comunidades reciben dinero del gobierno federal para la adquisición de viviendas. El programa, lanzado hace tres décadas para lidiar con las crecientes pérdidas por inundaciones en todo Estados Unidos, ha adquirido unas 50,000 propiedades en zonas propensas a las inundaciones con un costo de 3,400 millones de dólares. Pero esto sigue siendo apenas una fracción de lo que se necesitará en los próximos años.

En conjunto, dijo Salinas, la "mescolanza" existente de programas federales puede ayudar a las comunidades a reubicarse. Pero aprovecharlos es, en el mejor de los casos, difícil para las comunidades pequeñas y con pocos recursos que están en primera línea del cambio climático. A menudo, no cuentan con los recursos necesarios para solicitarlos.

"Lo que es realmente frustrante es que cada programa tiene diferentes requisitos y determinaciones de elegibilidad", dijo Kelly Main, directora ejecutiva de Buy-In Community Planning, una organización sin fines de lucro que ayuda a las comunidades a solicitar adquisiciones. "El simple hecho de lograr pasar todas las diferentes determinaciones de elegibilidad para cada uno de esos programas, si tienes una plantilla de un solo trabajador en una pequeña ciudad en algún lugar de la Costa del Golfo, es extremadamente complicado". 

Ése es el caso de Pauline Okitkun, una administradora tribal de la remota aldea de Kotlik, Alaska. A menudo trabaja hasta altas horas de la noche para conseguir subvenciones que permitan trasladar las viviendas de su comunidad, de unos 650 habitantes, a zonas más altas.

Las temperaturas en Alaska están aumentando más del doble de rápido que en el territorio continental de Estados Unidos, según la más reciente Evaluación Nacional del Clima. En julio de 2019, Anchorage, la ciudad más grande del estado — que se encuentra a apenas 375 millas al sur del Círculo Polar Ártico — registró una temperatura récord de 90 grados Fahrenheit. A medida que el permafrost de Alaska comienza a descongelarse, los hundimientos del terreno se han tragado casas y han destruido carreteras, puentes y otras infraestructuras, y la erosión ha carcomido las riberas. Muchas casas de Kotlik han quedado colgando abruptamente sobre el agua a medida que se desvanece el suelo bajo ellas.

El cambio climático también ha provocado inundaciones más intensas y frecuentes en algunas zonas de Alaska, como Kotlik, una comunidad ribereña cercana a la bahía de Pastol, en la parte occidental del estado. Okitkun recuerda una inundación especialmente intensa en 2013, cuando el agua y el hielo derribaron el tendido eléctrico, destrozaron las tuberías de alcantarillado, destruyeron las vías de evacuación y dañaron las viviendas de la aldea. Durante los días siguientes, fue difícil saber dónde terminaba el agua y dónde empezaba la tierra. 

Ésa es cada vez más la nueva normalidad en la región. En 2018, Kotlik se inundó cinco veces en nueve meses, lo cual dejó las casas tambaleándose en una ribera que se está desmoronando. Al no existir viviendas seguras en las cercanías, algunos de los hogares restantes padecen condiciones de hacinamiento. En un caso, más de una docena de personas viven en una sola vivienda. 

"Nuestros inviernos son más cortos. Son mucho más cálidos", dijo Okitkun. "El hielo es mucho más delgado". 

El aumento de las inundaciones, la rápida erosión y el descongelamiento del permafrost fueron una llamada de atención para la comunidad. En 2018, el 82% de los residentes de Kotlik dijeron que apoyaban el traslado a terrenos más altos, según una encuesta local. En 2021, la aldea propuso planes para trasladar 21 viviendas — aproximadamente un sexto de la aldea — al sitio del antiguo aeropuerto de Kotlik, así como para reforzar el litoral, que se está erosionando rápidamente, con un costo estimado de al menos 20 millones de dólares. Pero conseguir el dinero ha sido una ardua batalla — una batalla que ha recaído en gran medida en Okitkun y en el Consorcio de Salud Tribal de Alaska, que ha ayudado a la aldea a solicitar subvenciones.

Esto es solo el comienzo. Aunque Kotlik ha priorizado la reubicación de las viviendas más amenazadas, el resto de la aldea también está considerando la posibilidad de trasladarse a un terreno más estable a medida que las condiciones se deterioran.

La experiencia de Okitkun pone de manifiesto los retos que enfrentan las comunidades vulnerables a la hora de solicitar ayuda al gobierno para su reubicación. Desde 2018, Kotlik ha solicitado casi dos docenas de subvenciones del HUD, la FEMA, la BIA y otros organismos. En marzo, el Departamento de Agricultura anunció que brindaría ayuda para que las aldeas de Alaska, incluida Kotlik, trasladaran sus edificios e infraestructuras lejos de las zonas propensas a las inundaciones. Pero aún no está claro el calendario de la ayuda, ni la cantidad de dinero que podría recibir Kotlik. Hasta ahora, la aldea ha conseguido 2.9 millones de dólares.  Eso es menos de una quinta parte de lo que necesita. Casi la mitad de las solicitudes de ayuda de Kotlik han sido rechazadas.  

A continuación se explica por qué los programas relacionados con el cambio climático o la mitigación de riesgos suelen perjudicar o excluir a las comunidades:

• En primer lugar, el gobierno somete las solicitudes de subvención a un análisis de costos y beneficios para determinar si los proyectos merecen recursos federales. Se trata de un gran obstáculo para los pequeños pueblos y aldeas de Alaska y otras partes de Estados Unidos, donde el número de personas afectadas suele ser reducido y el costo de las obras de infraestructura puede ser elevado. No hay acceso por carretera a Kotlik, por lo que el equipo y los materiales deben transportarse por avión o barco, lo cual aumenta considerablemente los costos. 

• La financiación de determinados programas de subvenciones de la FEMA y el HUD se asigna en función de las estimaciones oficiales de los daños causados por las catástrofes declaradas por el gobierno federal. A pesar del historial de inundaciones en Kotlik, la zona en la que se encuentra sólo ha recibido una declaración presidencial de catástrofe en los últimos 50 años — en respuesta a la pandemia de COVID-19. 

La definición gubernamental de catástrofe no reconoce ciertos peligros exacerbados por el cambio climático, como el descongelamiento del permafrost y la erosión. 

Sin declaraciones oficiales de catástrofe, Kotlik no ha podido solicitar muchos programas de subvenciones federales.

Esto es un obstáculo común en Alaska. Según un informe de la GAO de 2003, casi 200 aldeas nativas de Alaska sufren inundaciones y erosión, pero no pueden acogerse a los programas federales que las ayudarían a adaptarse o recuperarse. Esta conclusión se reafirmó en dos informes posteriores de la GAO, en 2009 y 2022.

• Por último, los programas de subvenciones federales suelen exigirles a los municipios locales que paguen entre el 5% y el 50% del costo del proyecto. Esto es prohibitivo para muchas comunidades pequeñas — especialmente una aldea como Kotlik, donde la economía local no se basa principalmente en el dinero en efectivo y los residentes dependen de la pesca, la caza y la recolección tradicionales de subsistencia. 

Kotlik no es el único sitio que padece estas dificultades. 

En el estado de Washington, donde la subida del mar provoca repetidas inundaciones, al menos cuatro naciones tribales están buscando ayuda federal para apoyar los esfuerzos de reubicación, pero todavía necesitan millones de dólares para poder trasladarse.

En Colquitt, una pequeña comunidad de Georgia, el huracán Michael arrasó un parque de casas móviles en 2018. Los funcionarios le solicitaron dos veces a la FEMA la adquisición de viviendas y no recibieron ninguna ayuda.

En el condado de Horry, Carolina del Sur, una comunidad de clase trabajadora situada en la costa de Myrtle Beach, los residentes solicitaron un programa de adquisición financiado por el HUD, pero el proceso se ha alargado durante años, lo cual ha dejado atascados a los propietarios de viviendas.

El gobierno federal no tiene un registro exhaustivo de cuántas comunidades de todo el país han solicitado ayuda para la reubicación y no la han recibido. En agosto de 2021, Columbia Journalism Investigations y sus socios presentaron solicitudes de registros públicos ante la FEMA y el HUD, en busca de solicitudes de comunidades que pidieron ayuda y fueron rechazadas. Un año más tarde, a pesar de las reiteradas peticiones, la FEMA sólo proporcionó parte de la información y el HUD no facilitó ninguna documentación.

Dado que es tan difícil acceder a los programas de asistencia del gobierno, las comunidades a menudo se encuentran con que tienen que lidiar con las consecuencias de las catástrofes por sí mismas. En De Soto, Missouri, los residentes se resguardan en sus coches cuando llueve, preparados para evacuar rápidamente si el arroyo Joachim se desborda. El Cuerpo de Ingenieros del Ejército recomendó la adquisición de unas 70 propiedades propensas a las inundaciones en 2019. Desde entonces, la ciudad ha solicitado dos veces la adquisición por parte de la FEMA, pero los funcionarios estatales y federales sólo aprobaron la financiación para una propiedad. El propietario decidió permanecer en su casa. Nadie en De Soto ha sido trasladado fuera de la zona de inundación.

Como no se vislumbra ayuda alguna, algunos residentes han vendido, con pérdidas, sus casas en zonas propensas a las inundaciones. 

"Ahora mismo se están vendiendo en esta cuadra, pero se venden a 25 centavos por dólar", dijo Ken Slinger, un residente de De Soto que vive al otro lado de la calle del arroyo Joachim. Una adquisición federal le permitiría a él y a su esposa, Cindy, mudarse a una zona más segura, dijo. De otra manera, no pueden permitirse una vivienda comparable en las cercanías.

Los residentes que logran vender enfrentan una decisión emocional y moralmente tensa. Puede parecer su única opción, pero deja a los nuevos propietarios en una posición precaria.

"Si decidiéramos vender, no le venderíamos a nadie que tuviera niños pequeños. No le venderíamos a personas mayores", dijo Cindy Slinger. "Vendes tu casa en una llanura aluvial, y la vendes para que otra persona se instale en ella y se vea afectada".

A Okitkun, intentar que la comunidad de Kotlik esté en condiciones de trasladarse a un terreno más alto, la dejó exhausta. "Me afectó mucho", dijo. En febrero de 2021, dejó su trabajo como administradora tribal. Pero nadie más ocupó su lugar. Unos meses más tarde volvió nuevamente a su puesto, asumiendo el trabajo y el estrés.

Donde los muertos no permanecen enterrados

Mientras que aldeas nativas como Kotlik llevan años luchando por obtener ayudas del gobierno, muchas otras comunidades vulnerables de todo el país ni siquiera están en condiciones de solicitarlas.

La comunidad no incorporada de Ironton, en la parroquia de Plaquemines, Louisiana, fue fundada por antiguos esclavos a finales del siglo 19. Actualmente sigue siendo una comunidad compuesta casi en su totalidad por personas de raza negra. Muchos residentes son trabajadores de la refinería o jubilados. Todos tienen profundos lazos con Ironton.

Audrey Trufant Salvant, por ejemplo, es una irontoniana de quinta generación. "Mi familia ha estado ahí desde su fundación", dijo, "y tengo un amor muy arraigado por esta comunidad".

Pero, al igual que muchas pequeñas comunidades rurales de personas de color, Ironton ha sido ignorada por los programas federales de preparación para desastres. En las últimas tres décadas, 16 grandes huracanes han afectado la parroquia de Plaquemines, seis apenas en los últimos cinco años. Los habitantes de Ironton pueden recitar los nombres de las tormentas como si fueran vecinos: Katrina y Rita pasaron en 2005, Gustav y Ike en 2008, Isaac en 2012.

Esos huracanes y otros provocaron una afluencia de ayudas federales en toda la región. Entre 1989 y 2020, Louisiana recibió más de 3,100 millones de dólares en ayudas para la preparación para catástrofes a través de la FEMA, casi una quinta parte de los más de 18,000 millones de dólares que el gobierno ha destinado a estos programas en todo el país. 

Pero Ironton ha recibido poca ayuda federal. Al ser un pueblo no incorporado, no hay gobierno local — ni alcalde, ni administrador municipal, ni consejo local — que defienda a los residentes. 

Los habitantes de Ironton reconstruyeron el pueblo por su cuenta tras las inundaciones que provocaron Katrina e Isaac. En 2021, el huracán Ida asoló la comunidad una vez más. Los torrentes de agua desprendieron las casas de sus cimientos, tiraron los bancos de la iglesia local construida en 1880 y destruyeron el cementerio, donde están enterrados algunos de los residentes fundadores de Ironton — las primeros personas negras libres que vivieron en la comunidad.

"La tumba de mi madre está intacta", dijo el reverendo Haywood Johnson Jr., pastor de la iglesia. "Pero los ataúdes de mi tío y mi tía estaban flotando". 

Ironton no es la única comunidad que no puede acceder a los programas de ayuda federal. 

"Todos los administradores [de adquisiciones] con los que hemos hablado nos mencionan alguna comunidad que quiere adquisiciones y no ha podido hacerlo, pero no normalmente porque se lo hayan solicitado a la FEMA o al HUD y no hayan conseguido el dinero, sino porque no pueden solicitarlo", dijo A.R. Siders, un investigador de la Universidad de Delaware que estudia las catástrofes. "Simplemente no tienen ni el personal ni la capacidad para hacerlo". 

En 2021, el Departamento de Gestión de Emergencias de Virginia realizó una encuesta en 40 comunidades con poblaciones vulnerables que identificó como de alto riesgo de catástrofes provocadas por el clima. En respuesta, los funcionarios locales expresaron su frustración y exasperación con el proceso de solicitud de subvenciones federales. Varios no tenían ni idea de que había subvenciones disponibles, y muchos dijeron que no tenían suficiente experiencia en la redacción de subvenciones, ni entendían qué eran los programas o cómo se suponía que funcionaban. 

"No soy experto en programas de subvenciones", escribió un funcionario en su respuesta a la encuesta. "No puedo gestionar todas las tareas y solicitudes de subvención".

A menudo los obstáculos se derivan de las formas en que las comunidades han sido privadas de derechos durante mucho tiempo. Hasta finales de la década de 1960, por ejemplo, la parroquia de Plaquemines estuvo gobernada por Leander Pérez, un segregacionista acérrimo que les negó los servicios básicos a los pueblos de personas negras libres como Ironton. Hasta 1980, la ciudad no tuvo agua corriente.

No es de extrañar que comunidades históricamente marginadas como Ironton sean ahora las que más sufren las catástrofes provocadas por el clima, dijo Robert Bullard, profesor de planificación urbana y política medioambiental de la Universidad del Sur de Texas, quien es miembro del Consejo Asesor sobre Justicia Medioambiental de la Casa Blanca. En todo el país, dijo, estas comunidades reflejan la "huella racial del apartheid de infraestructuras" que ha persistido a lo largo de la historia de Estados Unidos.

"Ves esos mismos estados, esos mismos condados en los que hace 100 años había una discriminación racial", dijo Bullard. "Puedes ver cómo se desarrolla esto".

En Virginia, por ejemplo, los condados con una mayor proporción de residentes de raza negra tenían muchas más probabilidades de haber sufrido un mayor número de huracanes o inundaciones en los últimos 30 años. Eso es lo que indica un análisis realizado por Columbia Journalism Investigations y sus socios.

Los condados de Carolina del Norte con un mayor índice de pobreza, o con una mayor proporción de residentes de raza negra, también tenían más probabilidades de haber sufrido un mayor número de estas catástrofes. Y los condados de Texas con una mayor proporción de residentes negros o latinos tenían muchas más probabilidades de haber sufrido un mayor número de huracanes, inundaciones o incendios forestales. 

Tras el paso del huracán Ida, algunos residentes de Ironton están considerando la posibilidad de aceptar una adquisición — no del gobierno, sino de una empresa privada contratada por el Puerto de la parroquia de Plaquemines, que quiere construir una línea de ferrocarril para trasladar contenedores de carga a través de la histórica ciudad. La decisión de vender o no es difícil, sobre todo en una comunidad con tantos lazos históricos con la zona. Pero al haber sido marginados durante tanto tiempo, algunos residentes de Ironton creen que aceptar la oferta y empezar de nuevo en otro lugar podría ser su única opción. 

"Hemos sido los chivos expiatorios", dijo Salvant, que está decidido a no vender. "Nos llevamos la peor parte de la tormenta, asumimos todas las pérdidas, nuestras casas quedan destruidas. Cuando llegan los fondos federales, los utilizan en la parte norte de la parroquia, que apenas se vio afectada". 

El presidente de la parroquia de Plaquemines, Kirk Lepine, no respondió a las múltiples solicitudes de comentarios.

Una retirada sin coordinación

El gobierno federal está reconociendo poco a poco que las comunidades vulnerables necesitan ayuda para alejarse del camino de las catástrofes provocadas por el clima. El histórico proyecto de ley de infraestructuras aprobado en noviembre de 2021 le otorga a la Oficina de Asuntos Indígenas 130 millones de dólares para "reubicación de comunidades" y 86 millones para "proyectos tribales de resiliencia y adaptación al cambio climático".

Sin embargo, esta financiación es mínima en comparación con los cientos de miles de millones de dólares que se necesitarán en las próximas décadas, para ayudar a millones de personas en todo el país a reubicarse.

Según un informe de la GAO de 2020, cada adquisición de la FEMA entre 2008 y 2014 le costó al gobierno federal un promedio de 136,000 dólares.

Pero el costo de no hacer nada puede aumentar rápidamente.

En las zonas propensas a las inundaciones, por ejemplo, el gobierno podría tener que otorgar repetidas rondas de ayuda para que los residentes se recuperen y reconstruyan, dijo Jeffrey Peterson, un ex funcionario de la Agencia de Protección Ambiental y miembro del Consejo de Calidad Ambiental de la Casa Blanca durante la administración de Obama. La "inversión más inteligente", dijo, es que el gobierno adquiera las propiedades de los residentes — evitando así la necesidad de ayuda adicional.

"Podríamos terminar gastando 500,000 dólares en tu casa", dijo Peterson. "Comprémosla ahora por 250,000 dólares" y se evitaría el aumento de los costos.

Los esfuerzos de mitigación, como los diques, pueden retrasar la invasión de las aguas, pero también requieren grandes inversiones iniciales. E incluso así, sólo son una solución provisional, advierten Peterson y otros expertos.

"La protección de la mayor parte de nuestro litoral no tiene ningún sentido", dijo Solomon Hsiang, profesor de políticas públicas de la Universidad de California en Berkeley. "Para gran parte del litoral estadounidense, la reubicación es probablemente lo más rentable". 

Algunos legisladores federales han subrayado la necesidad de tomar más medidas.

"La migración climática ya está ocurriendo, y va a ser un tremendo desafío para los gobiernos de todo el mundo durante este siglo, si no trazamos rápidamente un nuevo rumbo para reducir las emisiones a escala global", dijo el senador Sheldon Whitehouse, demócrata de Rhode Island, que estuvo entre quienes solicitaron el informe de la GAO de 2020 donde se pidió la creación de un programa piloto de migración climática.

Pero la falta de voluntad de los políticos para reconocer plenamente el problema es un obstáculo clave para financiar los esfuerzos de reubicación, según las entrevistas con una docena de antiguos funcionarios federales.

"El riesgo climático de la gente no es algo que los políticos, que los funcionarios elegidos, que ni siquiera los funcionarios designados, o las personas que dirigen los diferentes organismos de los gobiernos en pueblos y ciudades de todo el país tengan muchas ganas de conocer y divulgar, en gran medida porque creen que no tienen el dinero para enfrentar los riesgos climáticos que podrían revelarse", dijo Harriet Tregoning, una ex funcionaria de alto nivel del HUD que ahora es directora de la New Urban Mobility Alliance, una coalición enfocada en el transporte urbano. "Y destacar el riesgo climático sin un plan para afrontar esos riesgos, lo ven como una receta para socavar la confianza de todos en el futuro de esa comunidad".

Alice Hill, que hasta mayo era la candidata del presidente Joe Biden para sustituir a Salinas como viceadministradora de resiliencia de la FEMA, es partidaria de desarrollar una política federal de reubicación. Pero hacerlo es "políticamente desagradable", escribió en su libro de 2019 Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption (Construyendo un futuro resiliente: Cómo prepararse para las próximas perturbaciones climáticas).

La iniciativa más reciente para desarrollar un plan de reubicación climática se produjo en 2016, cuando el presidente Barack Obama creó un grupo de trabajo interinstitucional que elaboraría un marco para la "retirada controlada", un término que describe los proyectos de reubicación voluntarios y dirigidos por la comunidad. La administración Trump abandonó el proyecto después de apenas dos meses, y la administración Biden no lo ha relanzado.

Al indagar sobre esto, la Casa Blanca no abordó el tema directamente. Su Consejo de Calidad Ambiental proporcionó una lista de iniciativas para defender a las personas ante las catástrofes provocadas por el clima, de las cuales sólo unas pocas se referían a la reubicación, y ofreció una declaración de la presidenta Brenda Mallory.

"La verdad es que necesitamos una amplia gama de estrategias y soluciones — en todo el gobierno federal — para ayudar a las comunidades a protegerse de las catástrofes, a responder cuando éstas ocurren y, en algunos casos, a escapar del peligro", escribió. "Mediante una serie de grupos de trabajo interinstitucionales enfocados en las amenazas, estamos colaborando para hacer llegar las inversiones críticas a las comunidades más vulnerables, apoyar los esfuerzos liderados por las comunidades para protegerse de los desastres provocados por el clima, mejorar la información sobre el clima y los riesgos para las comunidades, mejorar las normas y códigos de construcción en todo el país y compartir las mejores prácticas y políticas".

Sin ninguna política federal de reubicación, científicos afirman que los estadounidenses ya se encuentran en una "retirada no controlada": las familias y los individuos están tomando cartas en el asunto y, sin ayuda del gobierno, están huyendo de las zonas vulnerables a los desastres provocados por el clima.

En Paradise, California, el Camp Fire de 2018, uno de los peores incendios forestales de la historia de California, quemó más de 13,000 estructuras — el 95% del pueblo. Murieron al menos 85 personas. Sarah Bates, residente desde hace mucho tiempo, perdió su casa y todo lo que había en ella: álbumes de fotos, todos sus muebles, la colección de discos que había recopilado durante sus 40 años como DJ de radio, la silla de ruedas eléctrica que necesitaba para desplazarse.

Tras el incendio, Bates pasó sus días en los refugios de la Cruz Roja y luego en un motel pagado por la FEMA. Sin embargo, tras los incendios forestales, la ayuda gubernamental se destina casi exclusivamente a la reconstrucción, no a la reubicación. La FEMA ofrece financiación para la mejora de jardines y viviendas que puedan mitigar los daños de los incendios, en lugar de alejar a la gente de las zonas más arriesgadas.

"No hay precedentes de adquisiciones gubernamentales debido a incendios forestales", dijo Robert Barker, un portavoz de la Región 9 de la FEMA, que incluye a California.

Algunos residentes de Paradise estaban muy conscientes de que los incendios forestales podían diezmar el pueblo. Una década antes, tres grandes incendios forestales dañaron o destruyeron casi 600 estructuras en el condado de Butte. Durante un incendio, dos rutas de evacuación quedaron bloqueadas por las llamas, dejando sólo una vía de escape. Los residentes se encontraron atrapados en enormes embotellamientos al intentar huir.

Eso dejó a Bates muy ansiosa, a la espera siempre de señales de un desastre inminente. Cada vez que oía el ruido de un avión en el exterior, dijo, dejaba todo lo que estaba haciendo para salir a ver si se dirigía a combatir un incendio forestal cercano.

Tras el Camp Fire, decidió que no podía quedarse más tiempo. Al principio se trasladó a Carolina del Norte antes de establecerse en el centro de Virginia, financiando la mudanza por su cuenta. Para cruzar el país, pasó tres días en trenes y autobuses, y luego le pidió a un amigo un aventón entre Nashville y Carolina del Norte. Una vez que llegó a la Costa Este, tuvo dificultades para encontrar una vivienda asequible.

"Todavía hay gente que no tiene vivienda, incluso ahora", dijo Bates. "Y me resulta inexplicable que el gobierno no haya encontrado qué hacer para ayudarlos a reubicarse en un nuevo hogar después de tres años".

Otros miles de supervivientes de los incendios forestales también se están reubicando por su cuenta. Más de 14,000 personas se mudaron de Paradise tras el Camp Fire, según Peter Hansen y Jacquelyn Chase, investigadores de la Universidad Estatal de California en Chico, que analizaron los datos de cambios de dirección para trazar un mapa de la migración en todo el país. Más de 4,000 personas abandonaron el condado de Butte y más de 2,600 abandonaron California por completo, trasladándose a Oregon, Indiana, Tennessee y otros estados, según el análisis.

El desplazamiento de las personas fuera de las comunidades locales puede dejar a las ciudades y regiones vacías, con menos recursos para los residentes y las empresas que se queden. Pero aunque la reubicación de las comunidades pueda ser políticamente impopular, los expertos dicen que los funcionarios públicos no pueden seguir ignorando la necesidad de tomar medidas. 

"Ante la ausencia de una retirada coordinada habrá una retirada no controlada", dijo Anna Weber, analista de políticas del Natural Resources Defense Council. "No es que no va a producirse ninguna retirada".

En abril, Valerie Butler, miembro del Consejo Municipal de Smithfield y una de las vecinas de Betty Ricks, les envió un correo electrónico al administrador municipal y a sus colegas del consejo. En él, instó a sus colegas a no cejar en sus esfuerzos por obtener ayudas federales para la reubicación.

"Sé que el proceso burocrático puede ser abrumador", escribió Butler. Pero Smithfield enfrentaba otra temporada de huracanes, y los residentes estaban asustados. "¿Se imaginan", escribió, "estar en sus casas, un lugar de protección y seguridad, cuando cada vez que llueve sus hijos les preguntan: '¿va a tener que venir el bote a buscarnos?' Eso es desgarrador. Resolver esta situación debe ser una prioridad".

Las asistentes de investigación del CJI Gabriela Alcalde y Samantha McCabe contribuyeron a este artículo. Carolynne Hultquist, investigadora de catástrofes del Centro para la Red Internacional de Información sobre Ciencias de la Tierra de la Universidad de Columbia, contribuyó al análisis de los datos.

Julia Shipley, Alex Lubben, Zak Cassel y Olga Loginova son becarios de cobertura informativa de Columbia Journalism Investigations, una unidad de investigación periodística de la Columbia Journalism School. El Center for Public Integrity y Type Investigations, dos redacciones de investigación sin fines de lucro, proporcionaron información, edición, verificación de datos y otros apoyos. El Fund for Investigative Journalism brindó financiación adicional para este artículo.

La versión en español de este reportaje fue traducida por Univision Noticias.

The post Atrapados en la zona de peligro: sin ayuda para reubicarse, una catástrofe tras otra appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

To investigate the impact of climate-driven disasters on communities and whether they’re receiving the assistance they need, we compiled data from federal agencies to assess 1) how many climate-fueled disasters a county had experienced, 2) how much disaster preparedness funding they had received through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and 3) what each county looked like demographically. 

Our county-by-county data included disaster information from several sources: 

• Federal disaster declaration data by county was our primary data source for the number of disasters a county experienced. We included only major disaster declarations for wildfires, hurricanes and floods. Climate scientists told us that, though climate change is likely impacting tornadoes, mudslides and some other types of disasters, it is certainly worsening hurricanes, floods and wildfires. 

Disaster declarations do not cover every event a community has experienced. They help distinguish between minor and major incidents, but research shows that presidential disaster declarations can be politically influenced. 

• Because experts told us that it was particularly difficult to receive a major disaster declaration for wildfires, we included the “risk to potential structures” values from the Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities database.

• Because sea-level rise and coastal flooding do not yet trigger disaster declarations, we used the FEMA National Risk Index’s “coastal flooding, annualized frequency” value, which estimates the number of times a county is likely to experience a coastal flood over the course of a year. 

About this series

The federal government knows that millions of Americans will need to move to avoid the most punishing impacts of climate change, but the country offers little organized assistance for such relocation. When communities ask the government for help, they face steep barriers — a particular problem for communities of color.

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To find communities that were interested in relocating, some experts told us to consider places hit by multiple disasters over a 30-year period — the typical home-mortgage term. Others told us that communities hit multiple times over the past five years were more likely to be interested in relocating now. We reviewed data over both time spans. 

We ultimately defined hard-hit counties as those that had three or more federally declared major wildfire, hurricane or flooding disasters in the last five calendar years (from 2017 to 2021), because we’re primarily interested in places that are currently facing intensifying disasters. Because the FEMA spending data was provided by fiscal year, we also looked at the demographics of counties that were hard hit over the five fiscal years ending in 2020. 

FEMA has moved more people out of flood zones through its buyouts than any other federal agency, acquiring some 50,000 properties since the Hazard Mitigation Assistance programs began funding buyouts in 1989. 

To measure that spending, we used FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance projects data. We calculated the total spent in each county and the per-person tally. 

FEMA noted a limitation to its dataset: In some cases, projects were carried out in multiple counties. The FEMA staffer who manages this dataset said there were relatively few such projects and the primary county listed is a good estimate for the amount spent in each county. 

Side note: FEMA’s data included a grant of $518 million in Greene County, New York, which the county had no record of receiving. We suppressed that grant from the total amount for Greene, leaving the county with 17 other grants totaling about $4.6 million over the three-decade period. 

We also obtained a dataset through a Freedom of Information Act request of completed FEMA buyouts by address from the start of the Hazard Mitigation Assistance programs in 1989 through 2017. The data contained some inconsistencies, such as misspelled place names. After correcting those issues, we totaled buyouts by county. This information is searchable in the dataset embedded in our story. 

To assess communities’ ability to relocate, we added several demographic measures to our data: 

• Variables from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index that experts told us were relevant to our research. Those included the poverty rate, the percentage of people in a county without a high school diploma and percentage of nonwhite residents. 

• Race and ethnicity variables from the 5-year 2019 American Community Survey. 

How we used this data

The data helped us identify communities for field reporting, focusing on those that were hard hit by disasters, had received little assistance through FEMA’s programs and appeared, based on demographic and socioeconomic data, less likely to be able to relocate without government assistance.

This led us to focus on certain communities in Louisiana and the Carolinas pummeled by hurricanes, counties in California hard hit by wildfires and communities in the Midwest repeatedly hit by river flooding. 

We also analyzed the demographic data alongside the disaster and spending data to determine whether federal aid was disproportionately benefiting certain types of communities.

For that finding, we compared FEMA hazard mitigation spending over the five fiscal years ending in fall 2020, the most recent time frame with robust data, to disaster declarations over that same period. 

We also analyzed FEMA spending over the entire period for which any hazard mitigation project data is available (1989 through 2021). The findings were similar for both time spans.

Additionally, we worked with Carolynne Hultquist, a disaster researcher at Columbia University, to perform a regression analysis across various states. This assessed the relationship between climate disasters over a 30-year timeframe to the demographic makeup of the counties within those states. This allowed us to say, for example, that in Virginia, counties with a greater share of Black residents were much more likely to have experienced a higher number of hurricanes or floods over the past 30 years.

Our searchable county-by-county dataset is here.

The post How we found communities in harm’s way appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.