Back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2019, the University of Minnesota-Duluth held a two-day conference with a timely theme: “Our Climate Futures: Meeting the Challenges in Duluth.” The keynote was delivered by Jesse M. Keenan, an urban planner whose research focuses on climate adaptation and the built environment. Keenan had been crunching the numbers and studying the projections on future climate migration — or “climigration” — in the United States; and he had begun speculating about where climate migrants would go. One place they might go, he told the audience, is Duluth. Yes, the city had suffered decades of post-industrial decline in the late 20th century, but what matters now, as the country adapts to new climate realities, is that Duluth is an upper Midwestern city, far from the eroding coastlines of the Southeast and the blistering heatwaves of the Southwest. The cost of living is relatively low, the education and healthcare sectors robust. Perhaps most important of all, the city is located at a latitude of 46° north on the western shores of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes and one of the largest sources of freshwater on the planet...
Other northern cities have been making similar cases. The mayor of Buffalo, New York, declared that the former industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie — a sort of easterly twin to Duluth— will be a “climate refuge.” The chief sustainability officer of Cleveland, also on Lake Erie, described the Ohio city as a “haven,” where the “climate refugee crisis is bound to catalyze further growth.” And a Milwaukee public radio reporter asked, “Could Wisconsin become a climate haven?” America’s Rust Belt has emerged as the geographic focal point in a growing conversation about how the nation’s demography will shift as places like Phoenix, Dallas, and Miami — Sunbelt cities that are still some of the fastest-growing in the country — experience ever deadlier weather that threatens to destabilize housing markets and jeopardize entire industries, such as agriculture and real estate development.
The questions raised by such a reversal of migratory patterns are as complex as they are urgent. In the coming decades, as rising seas and rising temperatures drive large-scale domestic migration, which places will lose population, and which places will see sizable gains? Which groups will be the first to flee, and which will struggle to find safety? America’s political leaders and policy makers ought to be grappling with these questions right now...
... Already, inaction on the part of governments and industries has foreclosed the most optimistic climate adaptation scenarios; several years ago, as Lustgarten writes, leading scientists came to the gloomy consensus that the world was “hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected.” In his 2019 talk, Jesse Keenan qualified his optimism about “climate-proof Duluth” by conceding that no place will ever be immune from the impacts of a changing climate; too much has changed already. But if the challenges are immense, even historically unprecedented, we still have the ability to respond, to shape our future. At the end of his sobering book, Jake Bittle offers this hope:
"The world is already being remade, but its future shape is far from set in stone. The next century may usher us into a brutal and unpredictable world, a world in which only the wealthiest and most privileged can protect themselves from dispossession, or it may usher us into a fairer world — a world where one’s home may not be impregnable, but where one’s right to shelter is guaranteed. Both worlds are possible. We still have time to choose between them.”