New Data On Domestic Migration, Climate Hazards Show Americans Are Trading Flood Risk For Fire Risk

“It was often said […] that in the theater you have to be at the right aesthetic distance in order to experience the play. If you’re too close, you see the safety pins on the costumes and it ruins the effect, and if you’re too far away everything is miniaturized and so you can’t accept it. And I think that […] the apocalypse is what happens for all those things that are happening at a distance – it incapacitates us because they’re outside our own sensory horizon, either by being much too long or much too short.”

-Elaine Scarry

Introduction

There are several reasons experts consider climate change an existential threat. In one sense, climate change is a clear and present danger to human existence, threatening to trigger multiple, co-occurring mass extinction events within the 21st century in many worst-case scenario forecasts. But in a more philosophical sense, climate change forces existentialist examinations upon the world’s stakeholders, provoking questions on the relationships between belief, action, and urgency, and whether catastrophe in the far-off future really matters today.

While a majority of Americans believe climate change is real – 72% of surveyed adults believe global warming is happening, and 58% believe it is mostly caused by human activities – whether that belief translates into action is a separate question. In an interesting study published in Climatic Change in June 2020, researchers found a near-perfect linear relationship between belief in the human origins of climate change and pro-environmental actions like saving energy and support for the Paris Climate Agreement. But it is easy to understand how individual actions like recycling or turning off a light switch benefit the environment. Assessing broader impacts of where people choose to live and how they affect climate change and disaster risk is harder. And recent trends in migration to climate-vulnerable areas suggest Americans don’t perceive risk in the same way mitigation specialists do – or just don’t care.

Whether climate change will lead to massive shifts in domestic migration within the United States – from disaster-prone coastal areas to so-called “climate havens” in the middle of the country – is a subject of open debate. Around the world, millions of climate refugees have already fled their homes due to increased natural disaster risk, both potential and actualized, likely never to return again. But in America, where the effects of climate change are less pronounced, there has been little research on how domestic migration is affected by natural hazard risk.

To see how climate-induced natural hazard risk and domestic migration interact, Climate Crisis 247 conducted a novel analysis of the latest data on temperature from the National Centers for Environmental Information of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, natural hazard risk from FEMA, and population change due to migration from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population and Housing Unit Estimates program. We determined which natural hazard risks Americans are fleeing from, and which natural hazard risks they are flocking to, opting for temperate winters and low cost of living over increased risk of disaster and death.

Americans Are Moving to Counties FEMA Considers “High Risk” of Natural Disaster

In its mission to coordinate disaster response and preparedness, FEMA classifies all U.S. counties via five levels of natural hazard risk: very low, relatively low, relatively moderate, relatively high, and very high. Risks are based on total economic damage, and vary by specific hazard from county to county.

Different regions face different climate-related hazard risks. The Atlantic coast is hit by dozens of hurricanes each year, while the South suffers from extreme heat, and the West frequent wildfires. Media coverage of these events highlight small-scale migration responses to local disasters – Californians fleeing fire zones in late summer – but large-scale migration data shows that many of the fastest-growing counties are also the most disaster-prone.

Over the last several years, Americans have overwhelmingly moved south and southwest to the Sun Belt, pulled by low cost of living, new housing construction, and warm year-round weather. The Villages metro area in Florida grew 22.0% due to net migration from 2020 to 2023, the most of any metropolitan statistical area. Large cities with the greatest influxes of new residents include Jacksonville, Austin, Tampa, and Raleigh, while northern cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston lost residents. The West also experienced rapid growth, with metro areas like Boise, Oklahoma City, and Provo adding over 30,000 new residents each due to net migration.

Many of the fastest growing regions are in the middle of disaster-prone areas that will only become more hazardous as climate change intensifies. Moving patterns are well-delineated by disaster type and suggest that Americans may be migrating in response to some hazards while overlooking others. To see which natural hazards Americans are fleeing from or flocking to, we calculated population change due to net migration for all counties across the five FEMA risk categories for 18 different natural hazards:

Overall, the population of counties defined by FEMA as having “very high” natural hazard risk fell 1.7% due to net migration from 2020 to 2023, suggesting that Americans are leaving the places most prone to disaster. Over the same period, the population of counties with “very low” risk rose 1.6%. But a more granular look at population change by specific disaster type shows that moving patterns may be more influenced by some hazards than others.

Counties considered “relatively high” risk of coastal flooding, for example – places like St. Charles Parish in New Orleans or counties along the New Jersey shore – contracted by 4.5% due to net migration, the most of any natural hazard risk category.

But Americans are also flocking en masse to hot, wildfire-prone areas in the West and Southwest, where increasing development amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars in additional projected economic damage due to heat and wildfire activity. The population of counties with “relatively moderate” to “very high” heat risk – where the average daily maximum temperature in summer is 84.7°F to 106.6°F – grew 1.7% due to net migration, while the population of counties with “relatively moderate” to “very high” wildfire risk grew 1.8%, the most of any natural hazard risk category.

These patterns suggest that Americans may heed warnings of flood risk, but take more abstract, stochastic risks like heat and wildfire less seriously. The population of New Orleans is still smaller than it was before Hurricane Katrina, yet heat wave hotspots like Maricopa County, Arizona, are growing at more than three times the national rate. And while, due to both natural and manmade factors, Katrina was one of the most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history, in an average year extreme heat kills more Americans than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined. According to data from the NOAA Storm Events Database , there were 874 direct deaths from excessive heat from 2019 to 2023, compared to 330 from tornadoes, 326 from flash floods, and 98 from hurricanes. According to one estimate by local public health officials, there were 378 heat-caused deaths in Maricopa County in 2022 alone.

Local Differences In Natural Hazard Risk Relocation

While nationwide domestic migration trends show large influxes of movers to disaster-prone areas, more granular data suggest that Americans may give greater consideration to natural hazard risk when moving within the same city. In one recent study , researchers found that families who sold their flood-prone homes to the government through a special FEMA-administered program usually relocated to areas with lower flood risk within a 20-minute drive of their original homes. When staying local, Americans may be more likely to factor disaster risk into their relocation decisions.

In our analysis, the intra-metro interplay between FEMA natural hazard risk and population change at the census tract level bears out similar patterns. In 68 metropolitan statistical areas, there is a statistically significant correlation between natural hazard risk and population change. In 49 of those cities, the correlation is negative, implying that, in general, residents are moving into neighborhoods with lower natural hazard risk within cities.

In Flagstaff, for example, there is an extremely strong delineation between the fast-growing, low-hazard northern half of Coconino County and the population-declining, high-hazard south. Flagstaff’s population is trending north, away from pronounced wildfire risk and into lower hazard areas. In the Olympia metropolitan area, tracts within the downtown flood zone created by the Puget Sound are fast losing residents, while tracts in the lower-risk northwestern part of the city are growing.

In some cities, however, residents old and new are mirroring national trends and moving in droves to high-hazard areas. In the Atlantic City metro area, safer inland neighborhoods are ceding residents to high-risk tracts with beachfront property along the Jersey Shore. In Greeley, Colorado, the population is shifting west to the outer suburbs of Weld County, where residents face greater risk of wildfire, ice storm, and severe winter weather.

Conclusion

There is open debate among academics and risk analysts as to whether the rising threat of climate-related disasters will significantly influence migration within the United States. There is also a growing body of research into how natural hazard risk acts as a sort of “disamenity” push factor in migration, in competition with conventional pull factors like low cost of living, low unemployment, and temperate year-round weather.

Our research suggests that it depends on the hazard. Americans may be fleeing from low-lying coastal areas where flood risk is becoming more tangible with every storm surge or king tide. But in fast-growing regions where the primary hazard is heat or wildfire, the invisible, chance natures of these natural disasters make them all the more destructive. And for the many vulnerable, at-risk Americans moving to these areas, they are all the more deadly.

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