Why a paper about relocating coastal communities hit a nerve

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora, and you’re listening to Science Friday. It’s not every day that a scientific paper in Nature Sustainability breaks into the zeitgeist. But that is what happened back in May. Climate researchers, some local to New Orleans, wrote that due to rising sea levels, coastal Louisiana had crossed the point of no return and that government should be making plans now for places like New Orleans to relocate.

Over the last few months, this reignited a debate that’s been happening along the Gulf Coast for decades. So as the effects of climate change intensify, how should we be thinking about relocation?

Here to talk to us about this is Jessica Dandridge-Smith, executive director of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. Jessica, welcome to Science Friday.

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you for joining us. I want to know, did this paper really make it into conversation in New Orleans?

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: Oh, my goodness. I think when it immediately hit The Guardian, it was a part of every single outlet overnight. And I think it’s good reasons and bad reasons, but I think it did elevate conversations that have been, maybe suppressed for a long time. So yes, and everyone is talking about it. Whether you’re a scientist or not, whether you’re in the climate, environmental justice space or not, everyone has been talking and asking about this article.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’ve worked on sustainability around water. In your whole career, how do you think about relocation?

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: Yeah, I think relocation is complicated. It’s not, to anyone’s surprise who knows anything about Louisiana that we are, swamp, marshland and frankly, that we’re sinking. Every single year, we think about 2 centimeters annually just in Orleans Parish. And we lose about a football field of land every 100 minutes.

So we are an incredibly vulnerable area of the United States of America. I think that I’ve been a part of several study groups and workshops, and what we’ve seen is every time they’ve done relocation efforts, they’ve, not only failed to meet the homeowners’ need, they failed to meet the community that is receiving individuals.

An example in Louisiana is a place called Isle de Jean Charles, an Indigenous group of individuals. And their land is completely being lost to sea level rise. And the State tried to do this, manage retreat program and move them.

And basically, they lost connection with one another. They didn’t get the value of the home that they thought they were going to get. Where they moved was not necessarily better than where they started. So you have to be really mindful of what people are willing to tolerate.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you think there needs to be a plan for relocation for New Orleans?

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: Oh, yes. And I think that’s every city, too. I want to be clear that New Orleans, we’re kind of like the poster child for all of these issues.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But you’re not alone. Yes.

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: We are 100% not alone. And to answer your question, yeah, I’ve worked with a couple of different groups. And what we discussed is, one, have to figure out what does a receiving community look like, and what are people willing to leave for.

The second thing is that receiving community needs an influx of cash to say, we’re going to be able to expand our water treatment system, our sewage treatment, our electrical grid. We’re going to be able to handle more people with City Hall, police force. All of the things that make a city run properly, you need to be able to have that built out to take on an extra 100,000, let alone a million people.

So you have to start planning ahead of time and saying, I’m going to find a city that is willing to plan with me 30 years out. And frankly, under the social economic challenges that the United States is facing, that’s a lot to ask for a city.

And I’ll say this in closing, too, is that Louisiana culture, and particularly, New Orleans culture, is not replicable or replaceable. And so it’s not a simple conversation of me just packing up my bag and leaving. And just to make you laugh, New Orleanians are a very unique group of people. We love to dance in the street. We love loud music. We love our foodways.

And after Katrina, a lot of people came down to New Orleans to be helpful and they were like, guys, it’s 6 o’clock. Can you turn off the music? And we’re like, no. We’re not going to turn off the music, but you can leave.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, I think that’s the interesting part, to me, is just like, what makes a place a place, and how do we think about preserving that while also being realistic about the way the world is going to change?

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: Yeah, and I think that there is a belief that you can’t do both, that it’s either or. And I think there is a gray that we can live in. I mean, first of all, as a New Orleanian, I always think that we’re the most special place– ever. We have jazz. We have second-line music. We have masking Indians. We have Mardi Gras. We have our Cajun food and Creole food.

But I think below that is a conversation around people from all over the world, for over 300 years that managed to figure out how to live amongst one another. You have former enslaved people. You have Jewish communities. You have Sicilians. You have, now, Vietnamese and now, Palestinian communities. People who have lived through many challenges that now, know how to celebrate together. That’s something that’s not easy to replicate and replace.

And so when you’re talking about how to approach this in the future, I think that you have to be able to be realistic. Yes. And I think that there is room for innovation and room for conversations around changing building codes, and where you can build should definitely be a conversation. I think that people have to stop looking at science from a surface level and say, well, it’s going to be 10 feet of water, and then just, it’s a wash.

People are not a wash. This isn’t the first challenge humans will be met with, and it will never be the last. So the question isn’t about where should we go or who’s worth saving, but what we can do to maintain as much of our human integrity and cultural reverence as possible.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Jessica Dandridge-Smith is the executive director of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. Jessica, thank you so much for joining me.

JESSICA DANDRIDGE-SMITH: Thank you so much. This is a great conversation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How do we lean into that gray area? How do we plan for the reality that climate change will make some places difficult to live in without abandoning those places today? When does relocation make sense versus preservation?

That’s something my next guest has thought a lot about. Dr. A.R. Siders is a social scientist at the University of Delaware studying climate adaptation. Siders, thanks for being here.

A.R. SIDERS: Thanks for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So we’ve been talking about New Orleans, but of course, this goes for other communities that are extra vulnerable to climate impacts. How do you plan for the future without shuttering these places today?

A.R. SIDERS: Absolutely. We have to be thinking about the future and thinking about right now at the same time. And it’s not an either/or. It is a conversation around innovation. It’s a conversation around how we make choices about the kind of places we want to build.

Because sometimes one of the things we lose sight of is that the places that we live in are changing all the time, both because of climate change and because of all kinds of other things– because of technology, because of social changes. I was promised hoverboards in the future. Now, we’ll have AI. We’ll have something, it’ll be different.

And so the trick isn’t how do we take what we have today and preserve it exactly. The trick is, as we think about climate change, as we think about everything else that’s changing, is to think about what kind of future do we want to build for the next generation, for the next several generations? And then what are the decisions we make today that help that future?

And that’s a really different conversation than saying, do we save a place or not save a place? It’s not about do we save it. It’s about how do we try to shape it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, give me some examples. I mean, what are the options?

A.R. SIDERS: Yeah. Well, this is an area where we have options on the table right now and lots of them. So classically, when we think about places that are dealing with flooding and hurricanes especially, we tend to talk about the options of resisting the water, so trying to hold the water back. These are levees, dune systems, things that try to put a barrier between a home and the water.

Then you’ve got accommodation which is, say, elevating the homes. The water can come and go, but it does less damage because your home, at least, maybe your car gets damaged, but not your house. Then we have avoiding, which is, let’s not build in the places that we are going to flood. Let’s not put new buildings there and new schools.

And then there’s relocation, which is, we have things there. Maybe it made sense to build there in the past, but now, because of the way the land is changing, the way the climate is changing, or the way the town wants to develop in the future, it no longer makes sense to have homes or businesses in this place, and we need to relocate them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have we ever done relocation in a good way?

A.R. SIDERS: This gets tricky because everyone defines in a good way, in a different way. We’ve definitely done relocation. We’ve definitely done it in lots of different ways, and there are some places that have done it and have more people happy around it than others.

So when we look at examples that are done, I’m going to put well in air quotes here, you look at things like Valmeyer, Illinois or Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, where they moved large sections of the town away from flood-prone areas, but they still maintained their sense of community.

And I love the example of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin here because when they relocated their business district, they didn’t just relocate it away from the river, they also made it solar powered, which in the early ’80s in Wisconsin was really innovative at the time. So they were moving towards something. They were building towards a better future for their community, one that was more resilient, but also, more affordable.

And they had a vision for the city that wasn’t just I don’t want to flood anymore. It was something bigger. And I think that’s the piece that we so often miss is, not what are we trying to prevent, but what are we trying to actively build and what are we trying to maintain.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In an ideal world, how is this relocation done? Who organizes it? Who funds it?

A.R. SIDERS: This is going to be tricky if we start talking about a place as a scale of New Orleans. So most of the relocations that have happened in the United States tend to be smaller scale. You’re talking towns, at the biggest, not large cities.

So ideally, you want a lot of people involved at the local level. You want this to come out of the mayor. You want this to come out of the parishes. You want this to come out of the communities. You want them to have a say in what it is they care about and what they want to try to build towards.

Funding can come from almost anywhere. Funding can come from the private sector. It can come from the city. It can come from the state. It can come from the federal government. And honestly, it’s probably going to be a combination of all of the above.

But you want that vision to be driven by something locally, because it’s about what kind of future they want to build for their grandkids, for, not even the next generation, but the generation after that. And that needs to be locally driven as they’re thinking about that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Siders. thanks for joining me today.

A.R. SIDERS: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. A.R. Siders is an associate professor in the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. Thank you for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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