One Suggested "Safe City" As Climate Impacts Unfold: Asheville, NC
ack in 2006, when Scott Shuford was Asheville’s planning director, he reluctantly accepted a friend’s invitation to attend a meeting about the impact of climate change on local governments. “I didn’t see how a two-degree temperature change could affect the community,” he recalled, referring to the predicted rise in earth temperatures in years to come. “But I agreed to attend, thinking it would only be about 15 minutes. “After about an hour-and-a-half I came out of the meeting drenched in sweat.”
All the plans he had drafted up to that day suddenly seemed to have overlooked an unsettled future fraught with unanticipated challenges. Those two degrees of temperature change meant greater threats of weather extremes — of torrential rains, devastating floods, and landslides, and of their opposites, extended drought and wildfire.
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Florida State University sociologist Mathew Hauer estimates that many of these climate migrants will come from such coastal cities as Miami, New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, New York City, and Boston. The reason: Sea levels by the end of this century are expected to rise between one and eight feet — enough to displace as many as 13 million coastal dwellers, according to Hauer’s calculations. That total would more than double even the so-called Great Migration of Blacks fleeing racial bigotry in the south in the first half of the 20th century.
Others will come to the Western North Carolina mountains from inland parts of the deep south to escape increasingly suffocating summer temperatures, which may climb above current daily averages by as much as 10 degrees during this century, some scientists say. Experts say the coronavirus pandemic may accelerate this migration because many people have adapted to working over the internet, no longer tethered to a physical office. “We know that people have migrated because of climate since, well, since there were people,” said Shuford, who is now with CASEconsultants International, an Asheville firm that advises governments, technical groups and corporations on dealing with climate change.
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https://avlwatchdog.org/come-hell-or-high-water-asheville-is-climate-winner/