Managed retreat increasingly seen as necessary in response to climate change’s fury

Abstract

As climate change causes seas to rise and fuels ever-stronger storms and droughts, humanity faces a stark choice. Communities can seek shelter from rising waters and battering storm surges by building fortifications such as the sea walls planned in Boston or Miami. Or people can figure out how to live with the new climate reality, such as by perching homes on 10-foot stilts on the North Carolina coast to stay high and dry above surging storm waves. Or they opt for a third option that’s increasingly getting attention: “managed retreat” away from the problem area. Managed retreat is “the purposeful, coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm’s way,” according to assistant public policy professor A. R. Siders of the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center in Newark, who’s an expert on the topic (1). In 2016, Louisiana won a $48 million federal grant to resettle the roughly two dozen families from Isle de Jean Charles to a site 40 miles north. Most of the isle has vanished under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Image credit: Shutterstock/Andy Levin. Although moving a group of people is not a new concept, managed retreat presents numerous complex challenges—legal, logistical, ethical, political, financial, and architectural. Communities, and community cultures, aren’t easily transported and retained. But all indications are that researchers, policymakers, and the general public will need to confront these challenges with increasing frequency in the coming decades. Simply retreating to higher ground in the face of nature’s fury is hardly new. Prehistoric tribes regularly packed up settlements along riverbanks when periodic floods struck. In modern times, the earliest well-documented relocation of an entire town in the United States dates back to 1881, says geologist and flood risk expert Nicholas Pinter of the University of California, Davis. Residents of Niobrara, …