Louisiana Likely To Be Site Of 1st US Large-Scale Climate Migration Starting With Katrina

[hatrack]

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St. Tammany became a staging area for emergency relief efforts and a repository for debris from New Orleans. It also became a refuge for evacuees, hosting more than anywhere except Jefferson parish, which abuts the city to the west. As the immediate crisis passed, many decided to stay rather than take another chance on the Big Easy. “Within a year or two you started to see that the housing that could come up most quickly was in St. Tammany,” said Battle, whose firm is based in Slidell, the parish’s largest city. “That was the place to go to rebuild.”

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Louisiana could be the first state in the US to witness large-scale climate change migration—not only a mass flight from specific catastrophes like Katrina or August’s Hurricane Laura, but a gradual accretion of decisions, made by one family at a time, to move to higher ground. Some of these migrants will choose lower-risk places like St. Tammany as their destination, as a combination of sea level rise and land subsidence cause the Mississippi Delta region to lose about a football field’s worth of land every hour and a half. Already, the population is falling in high-risk parishes and growing in lower-risk ones, according to a major report the state produced last year: Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments, or LASAFE. Others will be relocated to destinations explicitly designed to accommodate climate migrants.

Since Katrina, the state has undertaken what could be the world’s most ambitious coastal adaptation planning process. It includes a $50 billion, 50-year “master plan” to upgrade protective infrastructure and ecosystems, and LASAFE, which aggregated the results of a series of community-level planning workshops. It also includes the wholesale relocation of one community at exceptionally high risk: Isle de Jean Charles, whose residents are often referred to as America’s first climate refugees. Mass population movement is a pervasive theme of these programs. But the task of mitigating further damage, especially to New Orleans itself, has been so all-consuming that communities on the receiving end of migration are only just beginning to grapple with the challenges and opportunities ahead.

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By 2030, one projection in the report estimated, the parish’s current pace of development will consume half of its open land. To develop affordably and safely, the LASAFE report recommended that St. Tammany concentrate its future development in the lowest flood risk areas (defined as those outside the 100-year floodplain), which occupy a majority of the parish’s land but tend to be underdeveloped. It also included a pitch for a compact, mixed-use, flood-resistant pilot neighborhood designed by the Urban Land Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank, as well as a $11.5 million drainage system intersected by hiking trails.

The drainage system is currently being designed, but as for the report’s other recommendations, the parish appears to be moving in the opposite direction, Russell said. As local officials push to expand the parish’s tax base as much as possible, low-cost development outweighs considerations about flood risk in the permitting process, she said. Those looking for safety in St. Tammany could find themselves right back in the flood zone.

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https://qz.com/1895269/louisianas-population-is-moving-to-escape-climate-catastrophe/

[underpants]

1. I remember asking (and reading a bit about) how this could change the politics in

Texas and Georgia. It’s my understanding that that is where most or a lot of the people migrated to.

[mitch96]

2. I wonder if that GD socialism is helping them out? You KNOW the rich are getting theirs........ nt