ENVIRONMENT

NY Times -  At the end of 2022, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international nonprofit, counted 543,000 Americans who fled their homes to escape a disaster and had not yet returned. As the country’s 20th-century infrastructure becomes increasingly incompatible with the 21st-century climate, this number will grow. When it does, the fates of entire regions, and particularly coastal areas, will fracture along economic fault lines.

With the Resettlement Administration long gone, no federal agency bears responsibility for helping the most threatened and remote communities relocate if they wish to do so. Policymakers have essentially abandoned those Americans who need to move to safety in the wake of losing their land to rising seas and worsening storms.

This failure is especially striking because since the middle of the 20th century, the United States has almost always offered some form of compensation (however paltry) when its citizens’ land is taken. But most rural communities on the front lines of climate change are not granted the same consideration. While climate change is not eminent domain, the distinction hardly matters from the perspective of a displaced community.

Wealthy, dense cities such as New York, London and Venice have spent billions on elaborate infrastructure that will shield many residents (but by no means all) from extreme weather. But rural towns and villages generally lack the resources to build enormous sea walls or levees to hold back storms and the rising tide. Many of these communities will have no choice but to relocate. They could either do so on their own terms (if the government would help them), or wait until disaster renders their homes unlivable and their options much more dire.