North: The Future of Post-Climate America Event Recap
By Angelina Baicu | Photos by Ting Wei Li
On Thursday, March 19th, the Boston University Initiative on Cities, alongside the Institute for Global Sustainability and the Department of Earth & Environment, welcomed author, professor, and urban planner Dr. Jesse M. Keenan to a discussion of his recent book “North: The Future of Post Climate America.” In it, Keenan covers the impact of climate change on human mobility and urban adaptation. Keenan, a globally recognized expert in the built environment, examines how climate risks, economic stresses, and public health issues are driving population shifts.
Joining Keenan for the discussion are experts in sustainable development: Nina Schlegel and Benjamin Sovacool. Schlegel currently serves as executive director and co-founder of the Global Center for Climate Justice. She is an environmental justice advocate with extensive experience in nonprofits, local and state government, and international solidarity groups. Sovacool, the director of Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability, is currently the lead author for the IPCC sixth assessment report on mitigation and is involved in the seventh assessment on energy justice and climate adaptation.
At the beginning of the conversation, Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities and moderator of the event, invites Keenan to present on his work and the future of post-climate America. In it, he identifies both push factors—such as physical risk exposure and declines in human health and welfare—and pull factors—like reduced vulnerability and economic costs—that influence migration patterns. An overview of the history of sunbelt migration, as provided by Keenan, helps to shed light on the factors endangering Americans today. Initially, the growth of the Sunbelt was driven by a preference for warmer climates and cheaper housing. However, recent cost burdens, such as higher energy prices and taxes, have reduced the marginal willingness to pay for hot, humid weather, indicating a shift in preferences.
“These [climate displacement] receiving zones are shaped by a lot of different reasons. Sometimes it’s affordability, sometimes it’s economic opportunity, sometimes they just happen to have a sufficient housing stock from which people can access.”
Keenan then provides a more comprehensive analysis of human mobility, citing specific giving and receiving zones as places from which people facing displacement come and to which they go. “These receiving zones are shaped by a lot of different reasons. Sometimes it’s affordability, sometimes it’s economic opportunity, sometimes they just happen to have a sufficient housing stock from which people can access,” Keenan reflects. He argues that there is a spectrum of people undergoing both local relocation and transcontinental climate migration, and that these demographics lead to competing perspectives among interested and affected parties.
As a result, one might be led to ask, how has local government and broader policy adapted to meet these new demands? Not well enough, according to Keenan. “Fun fact, about 1% of the population in recent years has been displaced by climate change, at least temporarily. And about 500,000 people a year in recent years have been permanently displaced by natural disasters.” Despite these staggering statistics, fewer than 500 of the 9,000 government entities that could address this issue have adaptation plans, and even fewer (fewer than a dozen) have made strategic investments. By highlighting the limited federal adaptation policy and the potential for fiscal stress and bond defaults, Keenan emphasizes the need for strategic public investments to support resilience and decarbonization efforts.
With the presentation portion concluded, the event moved on to its discussion panel. Sovacool was the first to speak and presented his ideas for expanding this research beyond mainland America to include both Hawaii and Alaska in its analysis. Keenan corroborated these thoughts with continued interest in discussing Alaskan permafrost and how rapid climate change will lead to inevitable thawing and subsequent migration of residents. Schlegel then provided insightful responses on how the book deconstructs what resilience truly means to those experiencing the disastrous consequences of climate migration. The panelists agreed on the growing disconnect between policy transitions and the individuals the policy is supposed to help, which, unfortunately, places a huge burden on those affected. “It’s a tremendous discredit to them […] when it’s not their burden to bear,” Schlegel states.
The panel concluded by opening up the floor to questions, opening with the following: “How does climate migration exacerbate issues of race and inequality across America?” An audience member responded by reiterating that climate change overall has a tendency to stress existing health outcomes for racial and lower-income groups, among other disparities. Schlegel then emphasized the need to invest in collectivist solutions that benefit people universally, rather than creating enclaves and further alienating them. The final takeaway from this event can best be summarized by Sovacool’s response to the question “what do you think we can take away from Keenan’s work”, where he says “we have all the technologies we need to fight climate change, what we lack is the political, economic, and social will to use them.”