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Copyright © 2006 Earth Policy Institute
Lester R.
Brown
Those of us who track the effects of global
warming had assumed that the first large flow of climate refugees
would likely be in the South Pacific with the abandonment of Tuvalu
or other low-lying islands. We were wrong. The first massive
movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the
Gulf Coast of the United States.
Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in late
August 2005, forced a million people from New Orleans and the small
towns on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts to move inland either
within state or to neighboring states, such as Texas and Arkansas.
Although nearly all planned to return, many have not.
Unlike in previous cases, when residents
typically left areas threatened by hurricanes and returned when
authorities declared it was safe to do so, many of these evacuees
are finding new homes. In this respect, the U.S. hurricane season of
2005 was different. Record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico
surface waters helped make Hurricane Katrina the most financially
destructive hurricane ever to make landfall anywhere.
In some Mississippi Gulf Coast towns,
Katrina’s powerful 28-foot-high storm surge (8.5 meters) did not
leave a single structure standing. There was nothing for evacuees to
return to. The destruction of housing and infrastructure in St.
Bernard Parish, a low-lying 40-mile-long peninsula (64 kilometers)
extending southeast from New Orleans, rendered most of it
uninhabitable. The Katrina storm surge that raised the water level
in Lake Pontchartrain so high that it breached the levees and
flooded New Orleans left much of the city unfit to live in. Even
today, a year later, large parts of the city are without basic
infrastructure services such as water, power, sewage disposal,
garbage collection, and telecommunications. Interestingly, the
country to suffer the most damage from a hurricane is also primarily
responsible for global warming.
Many evacuees were able to return in a
matter of days, but many more were not. New Orleans’ population
before Katrina struck was 463,000. Claritas, a private demographic
data-gathering and analysis firm, reported that after the hurricane
New Orleans’ population shrank to 93,000. By January 2006, it had
recovered to 174,000. By July 2006, the city still had only 214,000
residents, less than half of its pre-Katrina population.
Three Louisiana coastal parishes
(counties) also registered substantial population declines. The
population of St. Bernard Parish plummeted from 66,000 residents to
15,000 in July 2006. South of New Orleans, the population of
Plaquemines Parish declined from 29,000 to 20,000. Densely populated
Jefferson Parish, also bordering New Orleans on the south, dropped
from 453,000 to 411,000, a loss of 42,000.
Mississippi’s three coastal counties each
lost population. The July tabulation showed Hancock County had lost
8,000 residents. Harrison County, which includes the town of
Gulfport, lost 12,000, and Jackson County 4,000. (See data.)
As of July 2006, New Orleans, the three
parishes, and the three counties in Mississippi had lost a total of
375,000 residents because of destruction from Katrina. Some evacuees
are still returning, but the flow has slowed to a near trickle. We
estimate that at least 250,000 of them have established homes
elsewhere and will not return. They no longer want to face the
personal trauma and financial risks associated with rising seas and
more destructive storms. These evacuees are now climate refugees.
While the July numbers tell us how many
people have not returned home, they do not capture the personal
trauma of exposure to a disaster that claimed 1,300 lives or the
sense of loss from being abruptly uprooted from home and community,
and separated from schools, jobs, and friends. Assessing Katrina’s
effects, the American Psychological Association notes that many of
the storm’s victims experience post-traumatic stress disorder. This
manifestation of extreme stress is similar to that of troops
returning from Iraq.
Hanging over the future of the
hurricane-prone coastal regions of the U.S. southeast is the
difficulty in getting property insurance. In the wake of the last
two hurricane seasons, including the 2004 season when four
hurricanes crossed Florida, reconstruction is still ongoing,
insurance costs are climbing, and private insurance companies are
withdrawing from high-risk coastal areas.
The movement of insurers out of high-risk
regions started after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992,
destroying 60,000 homes and bankrupting some 11 local insurance
companies. In response, governments in hurricane-prone states,
including Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, each created a
state-supported insurance company for homeowners unable to get
private insurance. Florida’s state insurer, Citizens Property
Insurance Corporation, ran a deficit of $516 million in 2004. An
analysis of risks and costs in late 2005 showed that premiums
charged to property owners must be raised 80 percent to ensure
Citizens’ future viability.
These deficits were repeated in Louisiana and
at the national level with the National Flood Insurance Program,
which ran a $23 billion deficit in 2005. The bottom line is that
rates must rise as the risk rises. This applies not only to property
insurance, but also for firms seeking to insure against business
interruption losses.
After a point as storm risks multiply and
insurance rates rise, real estate prices start to decline. To cite
an extreme example, how much is a building lot worth in St. Bernard
Parish, now largely abandoned, or in the low-lying parts of New
Orleans? Some of the businesses in these hard-hit areas that are not
tied directly to local customers, such as consulting firms, software
companies, or publishing houses, have moved to more secure
locations. New Orleans entrepreneur, Ken Murray, who founded Parker,
Murray and Associates, a sales and marketing company, is among those
who have moved their firms to Dallas.
Katrina took a heavy toll in the
Louisiana and Mississippi coastal regions, but there are 35 million
people living along the hurricane-prone coast that stretches from
North Carolina to Texas. Half of these live in Florida: 10 million
on the Atlantic coast and 7 million on the Gulf coast.
As rising seas and more powerful hurricanes
translate into higher insurance costs in these coastal communities,
people are retreating inland. And just as companies migrate to
regions with lower wages, they also migrate to regions with lower
insurance costs.
The experience with more destructive storms in
recent years is only the beginning. Since 1970, the Earth’s average
temperature has risen by one degree Fahrenheit, but by 2100 it could
rise by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius).
More destructive storms are an early
manifestation of global warming. The longer term risk is that rising
temperatures will melt glaciers and polar ice caps, raising sea
level and displacing coastal residents worldwide. The flow of
climate refugees to date numbers in the thousands, but if we do not
quickly reduce CO2 emissions, it could one day
number in the millions.
Copyright
© 2006 Earth Policy Institute
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Lester R. Brown, Plan
B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in
Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2006).
Lester R. Brown, “Troubling New Flows of
Environmental Refugees,” Eco-Economy
Update, 8 January 2004.
Lester R. Brown, “China Losing War with
Advancing Deserts,” Eco-Economy
Update, 5 August 2003.
Janet Larsen, “U.S. Mayors Respond to
Washington Leadership Vacuum on Climate Change,” Eco-Economy
Update, 3 May 2006.
Janet Larsen, “Deserts Advancing, Civilization
Retreating,” Eco-Economy
Update, 27 March 2003.
Danielle Murray, “Ice Melting Everywhere,”
Eco-Economy
Indicator, 24 February 2005.
Claritas Inc., "New Hurricane Katrina-Adjusted Population and
Household Estimates," table, 1 August 2006.
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center, Earth Sciences Directorate, "Global
Temperature Anomalies in .01 C," http://data.giss.nasa.gov/.
Kerry Emanuel, “Increasing Destructiveness of
Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years,” Nature,
vol. 436 (4 August 2005), pp. 686-688.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis; Impacts,
Adaptation, and Vulnerability; and Mitigation. Contributions of
Working Group I, II, and III to the Third Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press). Text and summaries of
each report available at http://www.ipcc.ch/.
Munich Re, Hurricanes - More Intense,
More Frequent, More Expensive: Insurance in a Time of Changing Risks
(Munich, Germany: 2006). Report available at http://www.munichre.com/.
U.S. Census Bureau, "Special Population Estimates for Impacted Counties in
the Gulf Coast Area," table, 7 June 2006.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change
http://www.ipcc.ch/
Munich
Re
http://www.munichre.com/
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