The Inupiat of Alaska recently created an entirely new word, usteq, to describe a catastrophic combination of permafrost thaw, flooding, and erosion that can lead to total land collapse. For the almost 600 inhabitants of Shishmaref, an Inupiat Eskimo village on a barrier island in the Chukchi Sea, usteq poses a threat to every dimension of daily life: housing, food security, public infrastructure, culturally significant landmarks. In 2016, the community voted for the third time in 43 years to relocate, but a lack of financial support from the state and federal governments continues to thwart the effort.
The global climate crisis has already displaced millions of people in the U.S., with many millions more at risk in the coming decades from flooding, sea level rise, wildfires, droughts and other extreme-weather events and disasters. Many of the most vulnerable are underprivileged, minority or Indigenous communities that have already suffered historical displacements. Land rights in the U.S.—and around the world—are associated with a long legacy of racial and economic injustice, making forced relocation not only the biggest but one of the most fraught human rights challenges of the climate crisis.
From June 22 to 25, researchers, policymakers, community leaders and artists from around the world came together to map an atlas of fair and equitable approaches to climate-related relocation and adaptation of at-risk communities during the Columbia Climate School conference, “At What Point Managed Retreat? Resilience, Relocation, and Climate Justice.” Panelists agreed that socially just solutions would require, at a minimum, taking historic drivers of climate change risk into account, prioritizing people over property, and giving at-risk communities the right to self-determination.
“We are trying to flip the script, really think about the needs of households instead of focus on property values,” said Eric Wilson, deputy director of land use and buildings in the Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency in New York City. “How do we continue to build intergenerational wealth, especially in communities that had it extracted, through redlining, forced displacement, predatory mortgages, gentrification?”
The history of injustice affecting Black, Indigenous and other minority land rights in the U.S. and Canada is long and brutal, and remains largely unaddressed. As is well documented, when the early American colonies spread west, Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities were removed from their traditional lands to locations more vulnerable to environmental change and divorced from cultural and kinship ties, ancestral burial grounds, and subsistence economic systems—moves that were almost uniformly disastrous for the displaced. The U.S. government then routinely undercut the land treaties it signed with native communities and still today does not recognize many tribes’ right to self-government.
Black communities have likewise been systematically stripped of land rights since the earliest days of emancipation, when newly freed slaves were offered 40 acres and a mule, a promise that was never fulfilled. Seneca Village, the site of the largest community of African American land owners in pre-civil war New York, was seized by eminent domain in the 1850s and razed to create a lush green space for the wealthy residents of the city: Central Park. These are just some sweeping early examples. In more recent times, Black and Brown communities have been displaced by the effects of predatory mortgage lending, redlining and gentrification, as well as higher burdens of environmental pollution.
Self-Determination
Managed retreat is a term that generally describes a purposeful movement of people and buildings away from disappearing coastlines to safer ground, instead of attempting to protect against storms and erosion with structural engineering fixes such as storm walls, homes on stilts or natural shoreline restoration projects.
But for some of today’s climate-vulnerable communities, the language of “managed retreat” is itself a loaded gun, because it suggests threats to autonomy. “People and communities don’t want to be managed, they want agency,” said Aranzazu Lascurain, assistant university director at the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center of NC State University, in a panel titled “Relocation, not just a new address.” It was a theme echoed by other speakers.
Due to catastrophic flooding in 2011, Lake St. Martin First Nation residents were forcibly moved to a nearby abandoned military site by the Canadian government, who ignored their requests for relocation to a more culturally appropriate and less expensive site. Lesser annual flooding of farmland and homes, caused by water diversion infrastructure built without consultation of the tribes, had already impoverished the community when the 2011 flood swamped their homes. In 2021, the majority of the tribe moved back to its village on the shores of Lake St. Martin, a decade after they were removed. A class action lawsuit against the government of Manitoba for their handling of the disaster brought a pittance: $90.
The case highlights a few patterns that are common in the Canadian government response to climate-related disaster and relocation, said Sarah Kamal, co-founder of the Climate Migration and Refugees Project and MA candidate at the University of British Columbia, in a panel on “Migration as Adaptation.” These patterns include an ad-hoc approach, an unequal government reaction to Indigenous versus non-Indigenous disaster (an investigation showed that non-Indigenous groups received financial assistance faster), a failure to listen to Indigenous perspectives, and a higher cost associated with these failures. Any efforts to help communities relocate should prioritize Indigenous and local systems of knowledge, as well as local cultures, relationships and language, said Kamal, or they risk failure.
Some communities, including members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribes who live on the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, say they have no intention of relocating because of their deep cultural ties to the land and interest in self-determination. “We have been here since time immemorial, and we intend to stay,” said Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar of Isle de Jean Charles, though about the majority of her tribal community has already chosen to relocate.
Rather than relocate, or as interim approaches, some coastal tribes are taking measures to restore their coastlines and marshes or innovate ways to protect housing and food security. Rosina Philippe, president of the First People’s Conservation Council and vice president of the Lowlander Center, said her tribal community is building forests of fruiting trees on highland areas to avoid flood damage, a lesson learned from Hawaiian communities, and considering transitioning to houseboats.
If adaptation in place is not an option, many communities will seek to relocate as a group to places that will allow them to retain their cultural identity, such as neighboring tribal lands. “If relocation means you can no longer maintain the culture, that’s not conducive to moving,” said Philippe.
People Over Property
Today, buyouts are the main form of assistance offered to communities that need to relocate, but there are structural obstacles to success for many at-risk communities. For one, the application process for a buyout requires some bureaucratic savvy. Given that funds are limited, if you don’t know how to “game the system,” it is difficult to win a grant for relocation, said Elizabeth Marino, of Oregon State University in a session entitled, “Climate Change, Displacement, Colonialism and Contradiction.”
Another significant barrier to success of buyouts for vulnerable communities is the issue of valuation. Coastal properties in cities tend to be very valuable but in some rural areas, such as Alaskan native communities, they are often cheap, which makes it difficult for buyouts based on fair market value to cover new living arrangements. In Alaska, fair market value can be hundreds of thousands of dollars less than what it costs to build new housing elsewhere in native tribal territory.
One solution floated by panelists would be to eliminate cost-match or cost-share requirements for most FEMA funding. FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance program generally requires a 25% cost match, meaning that communities must provide $1 of funding for every $3 in aid contributed by FEMA.
Retention of land title is one policy innovation that has so far been successfully used in Louisiana to aid in the buyout process. When 37 of the Isle de Jean Charles’ 42 families were offered resettlement 40 miles north of their original community, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allowed them to keep the original titles to their land. They will not be allowed to live on, sell or rent the land, but their property claims include mineral rights.
This alleviated concerns among many island residents that they would lose their ties to land that has been in their families for generations, as well as suspicions that the relocation plan was less motivated by an interest in their safety and more by an interest in redeveloping their property for recreation and oil and gas development.
Indeed, these fears are not unfounded. A conflict between relocation and redevelopment in planning and policy goals at different state agencies is one major obstacle to successful adaptation, said Marla Nelson in the Department of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. Nelson has been engaged in a multi-year research project in Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana, whose people are facing an existential threat from rising waters.
Nelson’s work found that while local governments had begun a retrenchment in services to long-term residents—closure of schools and businesses—the coastal master plan also emphasized increased recreational development in these communities, as well as efforts to preserve its character as a working coast for oil and gas and other industries.
This tension is a real obstacle to successful conversations about managed retreat and buyouts, but policy flexibility can allow for innovations like land title retention. “We need more flexibility when working with these communities to be able to relocate in a way that puts them in a better position and enables them to hold onto what is dear to them,” said Nelson.
Ultimately, successful retreat will require putting people before property, panelists uniformly agreed. “The reason that relocation is so difficult is the idea that property is so sacrosanct,” said Elizabeth Marino. Instead, people must be the priority.
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