Since 2016, 1.2 Million Americans On Average Have Been Displaced by Natural Disasters Each Year
In the fall of 2015, the Valley Fire tore through Lake County in Northern California. Gina Waldon watched from her home in Middletown as the fire raged through the canyons and forests nearby. By the time the fire was contained, Waldon’s home had burned down and her husband’s business was lost. “We barely got out with the clothes on our back and the animals,” she said.
Five years later, fires are burning again across the West. But this time, Waldon is living far from the flames, in a home in Wyoming that feels like a sanctuary. Her displacement is one of more than 1 million that have occurred on average in recent years in the U.S. as a result of disaster. That figure is likely to grow as climate change increases the severity of wildfires, hurricanes, and coastal flooding. Although it’s difficult to predict the number of people who may be displaced by disasters like hurricanes and wildfires in the future, six feet of sea level rise alone could force 13.1 million Americans to move by 2100.
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In the U.S., it is hard to track the scale of this movement, which is often called retreat or climate migration among researchers and climate adaptation practitioners. “Most climate displacement that is happening in the U.S. and U.S. territories today is ad hoc and is a household decision often of whether to stay or whether to go immediately following a sudden-onset disaster,” said Victoria Herrmann, the president and managing director of The Arctic Institute and an expert on climate adaptation and migration.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, there have been an average of 1.2 million disaster-related displacements annually since 2016 in the U.S. But the number of displacements is not equal to the exact number of people who have been displaced, as some individuals may be displaced multiple times within a year. Little data exists on how many displaced people return home rather than move to new locations. Despite the data gaps, evidence suggests that some people displaced by disasters move within the same region. Many who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina found refuge in Houston, for example.
“Migration is a decision that includes not just climate,” Herrmann said. “It’s a combination of a push factor away from a place that a household once called home but has seen, probably, multiple disasters, and a pull of where they can find work that fits their skillset and often where they already have family, or where they have some type of social connection.”
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https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/09/as-wildfires-flooding-and-hurricanes-grow-more-frequent-climate-migration-begins/
