Muddling the Message Around ‘Climate Havens’

Article/Op-Ed in Bloomberg CityLab
Oct. 31, 2024

FLH’s Tim Robustelli and Yuliya Panfil wrote an article for Bloomberg CityLab highlighting inadequate information from the state and federal government on western North Carolina’s flood risk, which may have diminished Asheville residents’ perception of their own vulnerability to extreme weather like Hurricane Helene. Asheville’s flood risk has always been high despite a perception of its relative safety from climate change, which is in part fueled by out-of-date FEMA flood risk assessments and a lack of North Carolina flood disclosure laws.

Asheville was never a climate haven. It has always been prone to the kind of flooding that Helene brought. But over the last couple of years, omissions by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, local legislators and insurers, combined with a narrative that Appalachia is climate-safe, significantly downplayed these risks and amplified a tragedy that is still unfolding more than a month after the storm hit.
For the last several years, New America’s Future of Land and Housing Program has studied the dynamics of domestic climate migration, including the reasons why so many Americans are actively moving into harm’s way and why those displaced by natural disasters so often end up in places no less vulnerable than the ones they had left. What we’ve found is an oversimplified narrative that presents coastal areas as dangerous and inland areas as safe. This new kind of climate disinformation has the potential to threaten the well-being of millions of Americans, and throws a major wrench in climate adaptation efforts. What we need is a clear-eyed assessment of the different types of climate risks, communicated clearly to the residents living in vulnerable areas.

Read the CityLab OpEd here.

Related Topics
Housing and Climate Change