Climate Experts: We Need a Better Managed Retreat

Last week, I attended Columbia Climate School’s Managed Retreat Conference, which brought together hundreds of leading researchers, practitioners, and advocates working on climate change, adaptation, and migration in the United States and internationally.

Managed retreat is the purposeful, planned, and voluntary relocation of people and homes away from disaster-vulnerable coasts and floodplains. It’s most often applied after a natural disaster, when a local government offers homeowners the “pre-disaster” value of their damaged house to relocate instead of rebuild. These buyouts help cut costs for future disaster recoveries by reducing the number of at-risk homes, move Americans out of harm’s way, and many purchased properties are (re)converted into natural climate barriers such as wetlands and dunes.

The process seems straightforward for governments, in theory. Buy a damaged home following a hurricane or flood, demolish the house and restore the land, relocate the homeowners to safer ground. But in practice, implementing managed retreat is anything but easy. Conversations at the conference revolved around the incredibly complex social, economic, and political decisions related to implementation of the approach.

A.R. Siders, an expert on managed retreat, perhaps best captured these challenges during a presentation on housing, buyouts, and justice. “How do we decide which local governments receive funding for managed retreat?,” Siders asked. “Which communities—or households within a community—receive buyout offers? Who should probably accept a buyout offer? And who benefits from the vacated land?”

Many of these tough choices stem from the fact that there’s not enough federal funding for managed retreat, given the massive scale of the problem. Worse, most of what’s available is through a hodgepodge of grant programs housed across different government agencies.

Some researchers’ recommendation that smaller and lower-resource cities and towns “look for multiple or alternative sources of funding” isn’t helpful. These communities are already struggling to apply for and receive financial and technical assistance from DC; suggesting they cobble together funding from multiple federal agencies is frustrating at best.

And even when money does come through, it takes an average of five years for short-staffed municipalities to negotiate and complete a buyout, according to research from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

What’s clear from all this is that local governments need more help building up and sustaining capacity to navigate managed retreat processes. That capacity should come from within the community, especially in Native American and other historically marginalized communities that have experienced forced displacement and may be suspicious of buyout processes. Instead of dropping in officials from Washington or the state capital, it’s more effective to hire and/or train full-time local staff on buyout programming, as they better understand their community’s social, economic, and historical ties to the land.

Despite these challenges, it was encouraging to learn that some states are actually setting aside more funds for buyout programming. In New York, voters approved the 2022 Environmental Bond Act, which will allocate up to $250 million for buyouts of flood-damaged properties. Next door, in New Jersey, lawmakers have set up a sustainable source of annual funding for the Blue Acres buyout program through a portion of the state’s Corporate Business Tax. And in Washington state, the Floodplains by Design program provides millions every year in unrestricted funding for climate adaptation programming.

We also heard about how to reform managed retreat, in order to make the process more holistic, efficient, and equitable. It’s increasingly apparent, for example, that the federal government should allow for proactive retreat by separating its buyout funding from post-disaster recovery. With this change, Congress should then fund communities to plan for buyouts in advance, by locating the most at-risk homeowners, talking to them about their options, and completing buyout paperwork all before a disaster hits.

Looking at the end of the process, practitioners and researchers are increasingly focused on post-buyout relocations. New Jersey’s Smart Move program is indicative, as it will spend $30 million to subsidize development of affordable housing in neighborhoods at lower flood risk for buyout program participants. And researchers such as Cornell professor Linda Shi are tracking how receiving communities in the Northeast and Midwest are understanding and preparing for a possible influx of Americans moving due to climate impacts elsewhere, as well as how private companies can drive socioeconomic growth in “climate havens” through where they chose to do business.

These are all positive steps forward. Yet, as many conference speakers noted, there remains a need for significantly more federal help, with multiple calls for a national adaptation strategy and a whole-of-government approach to plan and implement managed retreat and other resilience-related strategies. So it’s promising that the Biden Administration has recently signaled a shift towards proactive relocation. Last year, the White House granted the Bureau of Indian Affairs $75 million to experiment with helping three climate-vulnerable Native American communities relocate to safer areas, and just last week the administration announced major new investments in climate resilience and adaptation, including “planning and preparing for community-led relocation.”

I left last week’s conference with the key takeaway that U.S. policymakers need to drastically rethink how to fund and implement managed retreat amid worsening climate impacts. Small, poor, rural, and tribal communities, in particular, need help in identifying resources for proactive relocation, applying for and receiving that assistance, and then doing the work. For the frontline communities that are hit first and worst, these changes can’t come fast enough.