Climate Migration and Buy Out
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‘It’s happening now’: how rising sea levels are causing a US migration crisis
The Guardian, April 7, 2022
On an overcast February morning, Larry Ralston, the 62-year-old treasurer of the Quinault Nation, drove his silver Ford SUV down a network of Taholah’s unmarked gravel roads, telling me about what this place used to look like, before climate change permanently reconfigured the landscape.
Parked on a rock face overlooking the Pacific, he nodded toward a moss-covered boulder towering out of the water. As a kid in the 60s, Ralston said, he was able to trek by foot to the rock. And now? He reckons the water is 30ft deep. Back then the ocean didn’t seem like a menace – at least not an existential one. That’s no longer the case: some 660 Taholah residents who border the ocean now find themselves living in an increasingly dangerous flood zone. The only solution is for everyone – and everything – in the village to move uphill.
Already, about 15 million American homes are at risk of flooding, and the threat is only going to get worse. A report released in February by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) projected that sea level along the US coastline would rise by 10 to 12in, on average, in the next 30 years – an uptick that would make damaging flooding occur 10 times more often than it does today.
Already, about 15 million American homes are at risk of flooding, and the threat is only going to get worse. A report released in February by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) projected that sea level along the US coastline would rise by 10 to 12in, on average, in the next 30 years – an uptick that would make damaging flooding occur 10 times more often than it does today.
“It’s important to understand in these communities that sea level rise is happening now,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer with Noaa’s National Ocean Service and the country’s top scientist studying sea level rise. “Its impacts are happening now, and those impacts will grow worse in the next 30 years. Minor-nuisance flooding will be replaced by flooding that’s more damaging to economies and to infrastructure.”
Harris county [,TX] is a sprawling region of 4.7 million people, about half of whom live in Houston. Much like Taholah, it is caught in climate change’s crosshairs. Hurricanes are becoming more common in the area, bringing with them enough rainwater to flood the state’s bayou systems. Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston in 2017 and took the lives of at least 88 in Texas, was the third “500-year flood” within the last three years. Worse yet, the Texas coast has sunk about 2ft within the last century, due in part to excessive groundwater pumping, making the state more vulnerable to flooding.
Until the last few years, buyouts in Harris county were all voluntary and favored affluent and white recipients, mirroring a national trend. In 2020, still reeling from Hurricane Harvey, the county secured funding through Fema and state agencies to introduce a new mandatory buyout program for around 400 mostly residential properties spread throughout eight areas.
It’s estimated the mandatory program will affect about 2,000 people, about 13% of the local populace. In Allen Field, many of the homes that fall under the mandatory buyout guidelines are on Darjean Street, where Mendoza’s family still lives.