When I moved to Atlanta in February 2006, some of the first people I met in the city were recent transplants from Louisiana.
I have a deep affection for Louisiana, where I spent childhood summers visiting my maternal grandparents, so I viewed those encounters as connections to my past. Some of those people have moved on, but the ones who stayed in Atlanta were a harbinger of America’s next great migration.
Six months earlier, Hurricane Katrina had swept through the bayou, decimating New Orleans and the coastlines and sending displaced residents to other places, including Atlanta.
One year later, almost half the adults from the New Orleans metro area had not returned home. Most of them were living in Texas but a fair number (3.4% of previous New Orleans residents) had settled in Georgia, according to a 2014 study published in the population research journal “Demography.” The majority of those who came to Georgia came to metro Atlanta and stayed.
This marked a significant moment in a movement that demographer and sociologist, Mathew Hauer, has predicted will eventually include 350,000 to 550,000 climate migrants coming to metro Atlanta as sea levels continue to rise in coastal cities.
Extreme weather events such as hurricanes, wildfires, drought, coastal flooding and heat waves are changing how we live and many of us are unaware of or are in denial about what lies ahead.
In this critical moment, with Georgia residents still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Helene and the state hosting Florida evacuees from Hurricane Milton, state and local leaders should feel compelled to jump-start the glacial pace at which we are addressing the challenges brought on by climate change.
Hauer spent almost a decade directing the Applied Demography Program at the University of Georgia and his research is cited in “On the Move” by Abrahm Lustgarten, a detailed examination of how extreme weather will force many Americans to leave the cities they call home.
Lustgarten has relied on Jairo Garcia, Atlanta’s former director of climate policy, to walk him through the city’s climate change efforts, beginning in 2017 when Garcia viewed Hauer’s research and realized the city would serve as a refuge for the entire southeastern region.
“Atlanta was not prepared then,” Garcia said, “And it is not prepared now to receive this number of climate immigrants.”
There has always been climate migration, but never quite at the pace or scale that we are likely to see in the coming decades. Even 10 years ago, the resettlement of people due to extreme weather had little precedent in America. Before Hurricane Katrina, there was Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which permanently displaced about 40,000 residents of Dade County, Florida. Most of them moved to the neighboring county.
But the South and the Southeast are home to the most climate-vulnerable counties, according to the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index. So moving to the next county or even to the next state is increasingly like trading one extreme weather event for one that feels less extreme — hurricanes for heat waves, storm surges for flash floods, large wildfires for smaller wildfires.
Atlanta recently became the sixth largest metro in the U.S. even without the anticipated climate migration, bringing added pressure to our ongoing infrastructure challenges — including inadequate water supply, troubled stormwater drainage, lack of affordable housing, underfunded and underperforming public transportation, and horrible traffic.
Solutions to these issues are delayed by bureaucracy and budgets but these are things that must change quickly to accommodate an influx of people, and as Lustgarten notes we will only see improvements in the places where political will and adequate funding intersect.
At the state level, leaders haven’t prioritized climate action and have often stymied efforts to address climate change. In Atlanta, city leaders have too often opted for climate solutions that favor economic growth and are supported by business leaders and real estate developers rather than protecting people living in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Local climate activists say the term resilience, which most every state and municipality has used to indicate some form of climate strategy, is increasingly meaningless, a catchall for scattered plans that likely do not include a road map for managing rapid in-migration.
On Monday, the Atlanta Regional Commission released data showing the top 10 previous states of residence for in-migration to the 21-county Atlanta region. Florida, California and Texas claimed the top three spots. These are the most populous states in the nation, but they are also among the most climate-vulnerable states.
The northern half of Georgia sits in what Lustgarten called the heart of the sweet spot, the ideal livable climate for humans. Over the next 50 years, as the planet continues to warm, scientists predict ideal living conditions will inch northward.
Now is the time to ask if we have the political will at every level to plan for the possibility of a metro area forever changed by climate migration? If not, the sweet spot may not be so sweet.
Read more on the Real Life blog (www.ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog/) and find Nedra on Facebook (www.facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
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