Floods in the midwest, hurricanes in Appalachia: there were never any climate havens
A few years ago, while visiting a tiny village, I toured a grand old community hall scheduled to be demolished after a historic flood. Across the street, a phantom row of eight buildings had already come down. Next to go was this beloved structure, built with local lumber by the craftsman grandfathers of the people who still lived there. One of the two local officials escorting me had been married here, she told me. There was a plan to repurpose the six soaring arches, the other official said, gazing towards the ceiling. “The other part of it, knocking the rest of it down … ,” he trailed off, emotionally. “I won’t be in town to see that.”This village isn’t located on the rapidly eroding Gulf coast, or any coast. It isn’t on the edge of a drought-stricken wildland. It isn’t anywhere typically named as existentially threatened due to the impacts of climate change. Forever altered by floods, the village of Rock Springs, in my home state of Wisconsin, is instead located smack in the middle of what’s often been called a “climate haven”.As wildfire resculpted the geography of Los Angeles and snow piled up on the levees of New Orleans in early 2025, the question of where US residents could live to avoid climate disaster echoed from sea to shining sea. “The LA-to-NYC Migration Has Begun” became one of New York magazine’s most-read online articles in the weeks after LA’s initial conflagration. The Shade Room, a celebrity gossip blog with an Instagram following that dwarfs that of TMZ, reposted a question that quickly generated 6,500 comments: “Where is the perfect place to live and not worry about natural disasters?”It’s an issue I’ve thought a lot about in my years reporting on the climate crisis. Following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City in 2012, walking the obliterated streets of Staten Island and Far Rockaway and Red Hook, interviewing residents who stayed and those who left, I learned up close what climate-driven displacement looked like. Soon I found myself learning from scholars all over the globe about climate migration, and how it mostly plays out internally – inside national borders, not across them.The devastated neighborhood of Rockaway Beach in Queens, three days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in 2012. Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty ImagesIt was around this time a decade ago that marketing campaigns and media discourse began claiming that portions of the United States were potential climate havens. While media outlets published stories of US residents moving across the country to places like New Hampshire and Buffalo, a cottage industry sprang up to advise stakeholders of all kinds on where to develop, build, insure, invest and move. An ostensibly noble goal, these efforts can fuel the sense that there are places where the wealthy and powerful enough can wall themselves off from danger while the rest of us contend with disaster. Such a concept is not only exclusionary – it’s entirely wrongheaded. Yet it lingers on.Rock Springs, Wisconsin, was my first stop on a series of cross-country road trips to communities uprooted by the climate crisis, about which I’m writing a book. The journey included towns that had bought plots of land to relocate to after hurricanes, neighborhoods hollowed out by riverine floods, former communities that had burned off the surface of the earth. From the heartland, to the Carolinas, to California and back again, I’ve confronted an enduring truth: there were never any climate havens.A ‘climate haven’ battered by the climate crisisTwo years before Hurricane Helene ripped a path from the Gulf coast through Appalachia, wiping out power for at least 100,000 homes across western North Carolina, I drove across the state in an exceedingly rare snowstorm. I found myself waiting out the weather in Asheville. As inconveniences go, I couldn’t complain. Asheville is home to famously bustling districts of independent shops and restaurants, world-class art deco architecture and the grounds of the largest residence in America, the Biltmore estate.While the city had long drawn people from all over, it wasn’t always very safe, a shop clerk told me in Biltmore Village – a shopping district of pebbledash cottages that once housed workers who finished the estate. Hurricanes had roared up here from the Gulf coast before. “Not the Atlantic,” she stressed, “the Gulf!” She offered up memories of 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes, Ivan and Frances, caused 11 deaths, unleashed multiple mudslides, damaged more than 16,000 homes, and collapsed road and residential embankments across western North Carolina. Nearby, I walked past a new retail strip on the village’s north-east edge, finished in pebbledash like the cottages but huge in scale, elevated up 13 stairs. It was a structure built for floods.Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, on 28 September 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina. Photograph: Sean Rayford/Getty ImagesA few months later, in June 2022, Asheville made a list of 10 cities reported by CNBC as “possible climate havens”. In the 13-minute TV segment, Tulane University real estate professor Jesse Keenan listed 10 cities with “strengths” to “onboard climate migrants”. In 2023, USA Today reported on a different list of 12 cities Keenan and his team have developed “that could be best bets”, on which Asheville again appeared. Those communities were selected, the outlet paraphrased Keenan, “because of some combination of their geographies, economies and what they’ve done to get ready for the changes that lie ahead”.At the end of September 2024, the cottages of Biltmore Village once more drowned, but that was the least of it. At least 9,000 homes were damaged in Buncombe county alone. Three million cubic yards of debris littered the city, of which only 10% has so far been cleared. In Helene’s wake, the Washington Post reported that Asheville had previously been called a climate haven, citing those earlier reports but without naming Keenan as their original source. The Post did, however, go on to quote Keenan directly. “There’s no such thing as a climate haven,” he told the paper. “There are ‘sending zones’ and there are ‘receiving zones.’ And Asheville is no doubt becoming – and has already been – a receiving zone.”As Keenan sees it, the confusion has largely been a problem of “clickbait journalism”. “I’ve never used the words or the phraseology associated with climate havens,” he tells the Guardian. “And neither have my colleagues.” He says the media have conflated places where climate-related immigration has already been observed with “places where some scholars think there’s a lower comparative risk that in the future may represent a potential”.“So they lump these things together,” Keenan continues, “and it produced these lists, and ‘climate havens’ gets born out of this.”Climate crisis-caused internal displacementDespite the popularity of the phrase “climate refugee”, climate-driven migrants are not offered the legal protections of refugee status. Significant numbers of international migrants who’ve been touched by climate disasters have certainly already come to the US, and will continue to do so. But, as I reported for Rolling Stone in 2020, the myth of hordes of “climate refugees” crowding US borders and outcompeting Americans for resources has xenophobic roots in US defense strategy and, according to a group of migration scholars writing in Nature Climate Change in 2019, is “without an empirical scientific basis”.Yet the “climate refugee” misnomer masks another fact well-established in the research: most people uprooted by the climate crisis move within their own countries. The first scientifically reliable climate migration estimate, published in 2018 by the World Bank, looked at South America, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia and found the climate crisis could cause 140 million people to move within their borders by 2050 – a figure later updated to 216 million.Migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are stopped by the Tunisian maritime national guard during an attempt to get to Italy, near the coast of Sfax, Tunisia, on 18 April 2023. Photograph: APJust before I made it to Asheville in the middle of the blizzard in January 2022, I made a stop in Cincinnati, Ohio. I wanted to know why the city had positioned itself as a climate haven in its municipal climate plan. Originally the language had been more “climate refugee”-centric, the city’s sustainability manager, Oliver Kroner, told me at a cafe in the Over-the-Rhine district. But the business they helped formulate the climate plan wanted to focus on the climate-haven framing, he said. In 2025, Kroner, now director of Cincinnati’s environment and sustainability office, told the Guardian that the city continues efforts to encourage smart housing development and upgrade to green infrastructure. “We continue to believe Cincinnati is well-positioned to receive new residents and businesses who seek to minimize their climate risk,” he says.Balancing the needs of various stakeholders is difficult and necessary work. Yet despite good intentions, the current public framing of our collective climate future largely serves business interests and those who would rather not address the root problem. Such was the case with “climate-proof Duluth”.A ‘climate-proof’ Minnesota city?The University of Minnesota Duluth commissioned Keenan on a marketing and economic development project to explore the viability of the city – located in northern Minnesota on the shores of Lake Superior – as a potential climate destination. Keenan worked with a team of students at Harvard University’s graduate school of design, where he was then a lecturer, and presented findings at the UMD campus during a two-day event series called Destination Duluth: The Fact and Fiction of a Shared Climate Future, in 2019. Duluth had a secure freshwater source, inland location and cooling lake breezes off of Superior. In the presentation, Keenan suggested potential marketing slogans for the city, including “Duluth – not as cold as you think”, “The most climate-proof city in America” and “Duluth: 99% climate-proof”. As part of the project, these slogans, designed with different imagery and colorways, were tested on social media among Nielsen marketing cohorts, targeting people in areas identified as “sending zones” – places that could lose population to cities like Duluth.“Some of it was just pure humor, like ‘climate-proof Duluth’,” Keenan says now. “That was just a joke. I got a good laugh out of it from people. At the time when I presented it, it was taken as a literal slogan. It was not – it was supposed to be a moment of humor to kind of think about how absurd all this is.”A snow plow travels up a hill in Duluth, Minnesota, on 1 December 2019. Photograph: Star Tribune/Getty ImagesThe slogan stuck, however, and the campaign connected to it has had far-reaching implications. The New York Times dedicated a feature to Keenan’s work on Duluth in April 2019, shortly after his presentation. It opens with an anecdote about how Keenan receives daily emails asking for advice about where to move: “So, what does Dr Keenan suggest to these advance planners? Maybe climate-proof Duluth.” The phrase and variations of it also appeared in reporting by Reuters and Minnesota Public Radio. Inspired by Keenan’s work, the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s business school produced its own report in 2022 that interviewed local stakeholders about the city as a possible “climate refuge”. The report notes that Keenan argues “that there could be significant benefits to shrinking cities, such as Duluth and other rust-belt communities, to encourage climate migration”. But the authors conclude the economic benefits of climate migration remain “speculative”, acknowledging what they called a “solid body of research” that suggests “an influx of migrants” often results in “segregation and hostility towards immigrants” and a depression in wages for low-wage workers.In his 2019 presentation, Keenan noted that there had been a net increase of just 56 residents in Duluth from 2010 to 2016. In 2023, the New York Times ran another feature on the city with the headline “Out-of-Towners Head to Climate-Proof Duluth”. Over the previous five years, the report cited the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Duluth had received nearly 2,500 new residents. Unfortunately for them, Duluth has not lived up to its slogan. In December 2022, the “Blue Blizzard”, called a “generational storm” by the Minnesota department of natural resources, dumped up to two and half feet of exceptionally wet and heavy snow, formed in warm temperatures. The weight of the snowfall destroyed 100,000 acres of forest surrounding the city. Tens of thousands of Duluth-area residents lost power for up to a week.Keenan is well aware of the local climate risks. He enumerates Duluth’s multiple unique vulnerabilities when we speak, and laments that migration to the city has spurred climate gentrification. He comes back to his original presentation, in which the slogan is also presented in a more tempered form: “Duluth: the most climate proof city in America (sort of)”.“Which was really the joke, right?” Keenan says. “Like, of course it’s ‘sort of’ – there’s a lot of ambiguity behind that, because nobody can be climate proof. But nonetheless, I made a mistake.”Monetizing climate-driven migrationBack in 2014, Alaska, the Pacific north-west and the midwest were identified in the New York Times as “places that will fare much better than others”. Since then, record hot weather, worst-in-world air quality and bomb cyclones have proven such predictions wrong. From 2011 to 2024, “99.5% of congressional districts experienced at least one federally declared major disaster due to extreme weather”, according to data released in February 2025 by Rebuild by Design, at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.Working to understand which populations may move, and where they might land, can help communities. Shoring up infrastructure, services and capacity in areas that already receive people of all backgrounds will benefit the public. Understanding which parts of our cities and neighborhoods might be most vulnerable to environmental damage can help us locally decide where to build housing and infrastructure – and where to remove them. But the purveyors of speculative information are often working with clients concerned with generating and protecting wealth at a global scale.There are numerous “climate intelligence firms”, as journalist and author Abrahm Lustgarten told NPR in 2024, “gathering this data and analyzing it and trying to find some meaning in it and then selling that meaning to plenty of customers who are out there trying to understand and capitalize on those change[s]. And that includes the insurance industry, foremost, real estate, absolutely, transportation industry, health care industry, they’ve all got very significant vested interests in understanding what’s happening, regardless of the politics of the conversation around climate change.”Flooding in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, on 11 July 2023. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty ImagesOne such firm is AlphaGeo, which promises on its website homepage to “Future Proof Your Geography”, and touts its work with Zurich Insurance Group. Adviser to AlphaGeo Greg Lindsay summed up the strategy at a summer 2023 conference at Columbia University. “Entities like Blackstone are now commissioning homebuilders to build entire communities of single-family rentals from scratch to address the shortage of affordable housing,” he said, referencing what’s recognized as the globe’s largest private equity and alternative investment firm. “Now, should we be building these communities in Phoenix? And should we be building them in Florida, where the demand is? Or should we be trying to convince Blackstone of the long-term wealth to be created in this building of resilient communities in, say, I don’t know, Vermont, if you can get the housing permits to build there?” Just weeks later, in July 2023, Vermont floods unfolded to an extent virtually unseen since the advent of modern flood control, closing 100 roadways across the small state. More than 3,100 homes were damaged enough to receive assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and a year later at least 200 households were interested in relocating.Lindsay tells the Guardian that the Vermont case mirrors Asheville’s in many ways. Both places have been marketed as climate havens and are relatively resilient on scales of vulnerability, he says, but were recently hit by major disasters. According to Rebuild by Design, from 2011 to 2024, Vermont ranked among the 10 states with the highest disaster count.“People want to assume that ‘climate havens’ means nothing bad will ever happen to you, and carry on your life as if nothing will ever happen to you,” he says. “And really we have to rethink the whole discourse. Are people willing to take adaptation measures beforehand? Is there actual public capacity for rebuilding and assistance and whatnot?”At a 2021 launch event for his book Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, AlphaGeo founder Parag Khanna pulled up a map with the upper midwest highlighted. “Of course you see the Great Lakes region right there smack in the middle of a nice deep green zone – that means it’s increasingly suitable for human habitation, even as temperatures rise.” (Khanna did not respond to an interview request for this article.) The event was hosted by the Council of the Great Lakes Region, an economic development group, that promoted the launch as previewing “what scenarios might unfold for the ‘climate oasis’ Great Lakes region”.“Weather extremes in 2024 ended any notion that Wisconsin is a haven,” an article headlined on the front page of the Green Bay Press Gazette in January 2025.December 2023 to February 2024 was the warmest winter since the state began keeping records in 1895. Warmer weather brings more rain over snow, rapidly melting snow and heavier precipitation in general – unleashing more floods in the already flood-prone midwest.Relocating entire towns to mitigate climate riskIn fact, massive and repeated flooding in south-west Wisconsin has long rendered it a testing ground for large-scale community-led relocation.Back in 1978, residents of the village of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin – following the latest in a history of catastrophic floods and facing requirements from the relatively new National Flood Insurance Program – decided to pick up and move its entire Main Street business district away from the Kickapoo River that ran through the middle of town. After years of community-level work, they secured a nearly $1m grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The village was able to buy out businesses and residences in its floodplain and fund the relocation of its downtown to a higher-elevation ridgetop nearby.Historic flooding along the Kickapoo River caused severe damage to downtown Soldiers Grove in July 1978. Photograph: Wisconsin department of military affairsThirty years later, after back-to-back historic floods in 2007 and 2008, a neighboring village on the Kickapoo River decided to follow suit. Eventually, the municipality of Gays Mills built a new development just outside town on a hillside plot to which residents could voluntarily relocate.I had reported in this region of south-west Wisconsin a number of times. But when I returned after another round of record flooding in 2018, I was surprised to find that four other villages in the region had plans to at least partly relocate infrastructure and buildings, and develop new residential space outside their floodplains – including Rock Springs. While making plans to demolish its old community hall, Rock Springs moved forward with a plan that moved the village hall, library and an event space to a new building up a hill and out of the floodplain. New apartment buildings and duplexes went up in the village’s higher-elevation areas too, after older damaged homes near the river came down.The Wisconsin villages bear out a broader phenomenon. Communities and neighborhoods from the Carolinas to Texas and Alaska have relocated or initiated relocation plans due to climate-related disasters in much the same way Soldiers Grove did decades ago. Meanwhile, since that time, individual government buyouts for homes and businesses damaged in environmental disasters have proliferated to nearly every US state. Most often, federal funds via the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fema or the Small Business Administration are funneled to a state or local agency that designs its own program to purchase properties damaged in disasters such as hurricanes, so that residents can move out of the risky area. A 2023 analysis of thousands of buyouts from 1990 to 2017 published in Environmental Research Letters shows that nearly 75% of those who received a buyout relocated within 20 miles of their former residence – and most still reduced their exposure to climate risk.Climate migration will largely look like people moving from one neighborhood to another, across town, to the next county over, to a nearby city. Preparing for these shifts in a way that serves existing communities is the only responsible way forward.But the idea of a handful of “climate havens” in a country as large as the United States is incorrect and elitist at its base. Only select, privileged populations – white-collar retirees, recent college graduates with numerous job options, child-free healthy young people or the just plain wealthy – can typically pick their destination like a baby name from a curated list. Most people have more obligations and needs attached to where they already live: kids in school, ageing parents, extended family, careers, college courses, medical care, disability services, custody requirements, personal and cultural memories. Most people forced to move in such situations, as data suggests, prefer to stay as close to home as possible.A decade in, we see how easy it is for decision-makers to slip into the “climate haven” mindset. Now, as we witness the Trump administration slash and gut the very workers and agencies that direct and fund disaster recovery, we must think differently. Living justly means living alongside uncertainty, adapting to it, and resisting attempts to “future-proof”. While relocation and migration will be necessary, it is good news that there are no climate havens to which we might flee. Indigenous cultures show us that connection to community and local ecosystems will be among our most vital tools in facing climate crises. Every place, if we make it, can become a haven from the way it used to be.
Analysts and investors have long trumpeted ‘climate-proof’ US communities, but recent disasters show the need for a different way of thinkingA few years ago, while visiting a tiny village, I toured a grand old community hall scheduled to be demolished after a historic flood. Across the street, a phantom row of eight buildings had already come down. Next to go was this beloved structure, built with local lumber by the craftsman grandfathers of the people who still lived there. One of the two local officials escorting me had been married here, she told me. There was a plan to repurpose the six soaring arches, the other official said, gazing towards the ceiling. “The other part of it, knocking the rest of it down … ,” he trailed off, emotionally. “I won’t be in town to see that.”This village isn’t located on the rapidly eroding Gulf coast, or any coast. It isn’t on the edge of a drought-stricken wildland. It isn’t anywhere typically named as existentially threatened due to the impacts of climate change. Forever altered by floods, the village of Rock Springs, in my home state of Wisconsin, is instead located smack in the middle of what’s often been called a “climate haven”. Continue reading...
A few years ago, while visiting a tiny village, I toured a grand old community hall scheduled to be demolished after a historic flood. Across the street, a phantom row of eight buildings had already come down. Next to go was this beloved structure, built with local lumber by the craftsman grandfathers of the people who still lived there. One of the two local officials escorting me had been married here, she told me. There was a plan to repurpose the six soaring arches, the other official said, gazing towards the ceiling. “The other part of it, knocking the rest of it down … ,” he trailed off, emotionally. “I won’t be in town to see that.”
This village isn’t located on the rapidly eroding Gulf coast, or any coast. It isn’t on the edge of a drought-stricken wildland. It isn’t anywhere typically named as existentially threatened due to the impacts of climate change. Forever altered by floods, the village of Rock Springs, in my home state of Wisconsin, is instead located smack in the middle of what’s often been called a “climate haven”.
As wildfire resculpted the geography of Los Angeles and snow piled up on the levees of New Orleans in early 2025, the question of where US residents could live to avoid climate disaster echoed from sea to shining sea. “The LA-to-NYC Migration Has Begun” became one of New York magazine’s most-read online articles in the weeks after LA’s initial conflagration. The Shade Room, a celebrity gossip blog with an Instagram following that dwarfs that of TMZ, reposted a question that quickly generated 6,500 comments: “Where is the perfect place to live and not worry about natural disasters?”
It’s an issue I’ve thought a lot about in my years reporting on the climate crisis. Following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City in 2012, walking the obliterated streets of Staten Island and Far Rockaway and Red Hook, interviewing residents who stayed and those who left, I learned up close what climate-driven displacement looked like. Soon I found myself learning from scholars all over the globe about climate migration, and how it mostly plays out internally – inside national borders, not across them.
It was around this time a decade ago that marketing campaigns and media discourse began claiming that portions of the United States were potential climate havens. While media outlets published stories of US residents moving across the country to places like New Hampshire and Buffalo, a cottage industry sprang up to advise stakeholders of all kinds on where to develop, build, insure, invest and move. An ostensibly noble goal, these efforts can fuel the sense that there are places where the wealthy and powerful enough can wall themselves off from danger while the rest of us contend with disaster. Such a concept is not only exclusionary – it’s entirely wrongheaded. Yet it lingers on.
Rock Springs, Wisconsin, was my first stop on a series of cross-country road trips to communities uprooted by the climate crisis, about which I’m writing a book. The journey included towns that had bought plots of land to relocate to after hurricanes, neighborhoods hollowed out by riverine floods, former communities that had burned off the surface of the earth. From the heartland, to the Carolinas, to California and back again, I’ve confronted an enduring truth: there were never any climate havens.
A ‘climate haven’ battered by the climate crisis
Two years before Hurricane Helene ripped a path from the Gulf coast through Appalachia, wiping out power for at least 100,000 homes across western North Carolina, I drove across the state in an exceedingly rare snowstorm. I found myself waiting out the weather in Asheville. As inconveniences go, I couldn’t complain. Asheville is home to famously bustling districts of independent shops and restaurants, world-class art deco architecture and the grounds of the largest residence in America, the Biltmore estate.
While the city had long drawn people from all over, it wasn’t always very safe, a shop clerk told me in Biltmore Village – a shopping district of pebbledash cottages that once housed workers who finished the estate. Hurricanes had roared up here from the Gulf coast before. “Not the Atlantic,” she stressed, “the Gulf!” She offered up memories of 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes, Ivan and Frances, caused 11 deaths, unleashed multiple mudslides, damaged more than 16,000 homes, and collapsed road and residential embankments across western North Carolina. Nearby, I walked past a new retail strip on the village’s north-east edge, finished in pebbledash like the cottages but huge in scale, elevated up 13 stairs. It was a structure built for floods.
A few months later, in June 2022, Asheville made a list of 10 cities reported by CNBC as “possible climate havens”. In the 13-minute TV segment, Tulane University real estate professor Jesse Keenan listed 10 cities with “strengths” to “onboard climate migrants”. In 2023, USA Today reported on a different list of 12 cities Keenan and his team have developed “that could be best bets”, on which Asheville again appeared. Those communities were selected, the outlet paraphrased Keenan, “because of some combination of their geographies, economies and what they’ve done to get ready for the changes that lie ahead”.
At the end of September 2024, the cottages of Biltmore Village once more drowned, but that was the least of it. At least 9,000 homes were damaged in Buncombe county alone. Three million cubic yards of debris littered the city, of which only 10% has so far been cleared. In Helene’s wake, the Washington Post reported that Asheville had previously been called a climate haven, citing those earlier reports but without naming Keenan as their original source. The Post did, however, go on to quote Keenan directly. “There’s no such thing as a climate haven,” he told the paper. “There are ‘sending zones’ and there are ‘receiving zones.’ And Asheville is no doubt becoming – and has already been – a receiving zone.”
As Keenan sees it, the confusion has largely been a problem of “clickbait journalism”. “I’ve never used the words or the phraseology associated with climate havens,” he tells the Guardian. “And neither have my colleagues.” He says the media have conflated places where climate-related immigration has already been observed with “places where some scholars think there’s a lower comparative risk that in the future may represent a potential”.
“So they lump these things together,” Keenan continues, “and it produced these lists, and ‘climate havens’ gets born out of this.”
Climate crisis-caused internal displacement
Despite the popularity of the phrase “climate refugee”, climate-driven migrants are not offered the legal protections of refugee status. Significant numbers of international migrants who’ve been touched by climate disasters have certainly already come to the US, and will continue to do so. But, as I reported for Rolling Stone in 2020, the myth of hordes of “climate refugees” crowding US borders and outcompeting Americans for resources has xenophobic roots in US defense strategy and, according to a group of migration scholars writing in Nature Climate Change in 2019, is “without an empirical scientific basis”.
Yet the “climate refugee” misnomer masks another fact well-established in the research: most people uprooted by the climate crisis move within their own countries. The first scientifically reliable climate migration estimate, published in 2018 by the World Bank, looked at South America, sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia and found the climate crisis could cause 140 million people to move within their borders by 2050 – a figure later updated to 216 million.
Just before I made it to Asheville in the middle of the blizzard in January 2022, I made a stop in Cincinnati, Ohio. I wanted to know why the city had positioned itself as a climate haven in its municipal climate plan. Originally the language had been more “climate refugee”-centric, the city’s sustainability manager, Oliver Kroner, told me at a cafe in the Over-the-Rhine district. But the business they helped formulate the climate plan wanted to focus on the climate-haven framing, he said. In 2025, Kroner, now director of Cincinnati’s environment and sustainability office, told the Guardian that the city continues efforts to encourage smart housing development and upgrade to green infrastructure. “We continue to believe Cincinnati is well-positioned to receive new residents and businesses who seek to minimize their climate risk,” he says.
Balancing the needs of various stakeholders is difficult and necessary work. Yet despite good intentions, the current public framing of our collective climate future largely serves business interests and those who would rather not address the root problem. Such was the case with “climate-proof Duluth”.
A ‘climate-proof’ Minnesota city?
The University of Minnesota Duluth commissioned Keenan on a marketing and economic development project to explore the viability of the city – located in northern Minnesota on the shores of Lake Superior – as a potential climate destination. Keenan worked with a team of students at Harvard University’s graduate school of design, where he was then a lecturer, and presented findings at the UMD campus during a two-day event series called Destination Duluth: The Fact and Fiction of a Shared Climate Future, in 2019. Duluth had a secure freshwater source, inland location and cooling lake breezes off of Superior. In the presentation, Keenan suggested potential marketing slogans for the city, including “Duluth – not as cold as you think”, “The most climate-proof city in America” and “Duluth: 99% climate-proof”. As part of the project, these slogans, designed with different imagery and colorways, were tested on social media among Nielsen marketing cohorts, targeting people in areas identified as “sending zones” – places that could lose population to cities like Duluth.
“Some of it was just pure humor, like ‘climate-proof Duluth’,” Keenan says now. “That was just a joke. I got a good laugh out of it from people. At the time when I presented it, it was taken as a literal slogan. It was not – it was supposed to be a moment of humor to kind of think about how absurd all this is.”
The slogan stuck, however, and the campaign connected to it has had far-reaching implications. The New York Times dedicated a feature to Keenan’s work on Duluth in April 2019, shortly after his presentation. It opens with an anecdote about how Keenan receives daily emails asking for advice about where to move: “So, what does Dr Keenan suggest to these advance planners? Maybe climate-proof Duluth.” The phrase and variations of it also appeared in reporting by Reuters and Minnesota Public Radio. Inspired by Keenan’s work, the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s business school produced its own report in 2022 that interviewed local stakeholders about the city as a possible “climate refuge”. The report notes that Keenan argues “that there could be significant benefits to shrinking cities, such as Duluth and other rust-belt communities, to encourage climate migration”. But the authors conclude the economic benefits of climate migration remain “speculative”, acknowledging what they called a “solid body of research” that suggests “an influx of migrants” often results in “segregation and hostility towards immigrants” and a depression in wages for low-wage workers.
In his 2019 presentation, Keenan noted that there had been a net increase of just 56 residents in Duluth from 2010 to 2016. In 2023, the New York Times ran another feature on the city with the headline “Out-of-Towners Head to Climate-Proof Duluth”. Over the previous five years, the report cited the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Duluth had received nearly 2,500 new residents. Unfortunately for them, Duluth has not lived up to its slogan. In December 2022, the “Blue Blizzard”, called a “generational storm” by the Minnesota department of natural resources, dumped up to two and half feet of exceptionally wet and heavy snow, formed in warm temperatures. The weight of the snowfall destroyed 100,000 acres of forest surrounding the city. Tens of thousands of Duluth-area residents lost power for up to a week.
Keenan is well aware of the local climate risks. He enumerates Duluth’s multiple unique vulnerabilities when we speak, and laments that migration to the city has spurred climate gentrification. He comes back to his original presentation, in which the slogan is also presented in a more tempered form: “Duluth: the most climate proof city in America (sort of)”.
“Which was really the joke, right?” Keenan says. “Like, of course it’s ‘sort of’ – there’s a lot of ambiguity behind that, because nobody can be climate proof. But nonetheless, I made a mistake.”
Monetizing climate-driven migration
Back in 2014, Alaska, the Pacific north-west and the midwest were identified in the New York Times as “places that will fare much better than others”. Since then, record hot weather, worst-in-world air quality and bomb cyclones have proven such predictions wrong. From 2011 to 2024, “99.5% of congressional districts experienced at least one federally declared major disaster due to extreme weather”, according to data released in February 2025 by Rebuild by Design, at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.
Working to understand which populations may move, and where they might land, can help communities. Shoring up infrastructure, services and capacity in areas that already receive people of all backgrounds will benefit the public. Understanding which parts of our cities and neighborhoods might be most vulnerable to environmental damage can help us locally decide where to build housing and infrastructure – and where to remove them. But the purveyors of speculative information are often working with clients concerned with generating and protecting wealth at a global scale.
There are numerous “climate intelligence firms”, as journalist and author Abrahm Lustgarten told NPR in 2024, “gathering this data and analyzing it and trying to find some meaning in it and then selling that meaning to plenty of customers who are out there trying to understand and capitalize on those change[s]. And that includes the insurance industry, foremost, real estate, absolutely, transportation industry, health care industry, they’ve all got very significant vested interests in understanding what’s happening, regardless of the politics of the conversation around climate change.”
One such firm is AlphaGeo, which promises on its website homepage to “Future Proof Your Geography”, and touts its work with Zurich Insurance Group. Adviser to AlphaGeo Greg Lindsay summed up the strategy at a summer 2023 conference at Columbia University. “Entities like Blackstone are now commissioning homebuilders to build entire communities of single-family rentals from scratch to address the shortage of affordable housing,” he said, referencing what’s recognized as the globe’s largest private equity and alternative investment firm. “Now, should we be building these communities in Phoenix? And should we be building them in Florida, where the demand is? Or should we be trying to convince Blackstone of the long-term wealth to be created in this building of resilient communities in, say, I don’t know, Vermont, if you can get the housing permits to build there?” Just weeks later, in July 2023, Vermont floods unfolded to an extent virtually unseen since the advent of modern flood control, closing 100 roadways across the small state. More than 3,100 homes were damaged enough to receive assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and a year later at least 200 households were interested in relocating.
Lindsay tells the Guardian that the Vermont case mirrors Asheville’s in many ways. Both places have been marketed as climate havens and are relatively resilient on scales of vulnerability, he says, but were recently hit by major disasters. According to Rebuild by Design, from 2011 to 2024, Vermont ranked among the 10 states with the highest disaster count.
“People want to assume that ‘climate havens’ means nothing bad will ever happen to you, and carry on your life as if nothing will ever happen to you,” he says. “And really we have to rethink the whole discourse. Are people willing to take adaptation measures beforehand? Is there actual public capacity for rebuilding and assistance and whatnot?”
At a 2021 launch event for his book Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, AlphaGeo founder Parag Khanna pulled up a map with the upper midwest highlighted. “Of course you see the Great Lakes region right there smack in the middle of a nice deep green zone – that means it’s increasingly suitable for human habitation, even as temperatures rise.” (Khanna did not respond to an interview request for this article.) The event was hosted by the Council of the Great Lakes Region, an economic development group, that promoted the launch as previewing “what scenarios might unfold for the ‘climate oasis’ Great Lakes region”.
“Weather extremes in 2024 ended any notion that Wisconsin is a haven,” an article headlined on the front page of the Green Bay Press Gazette in January 2025.
December 2023 to February 2024 was the warmest winter since the state began keeping records in 1895. Warmer weather brings more rain over snow, rapidly melting snow and heavier precipitation in general – unleashing more floods in the already flood-prone midwest.
Relocating entire towns to mitigate climate risk
In fact, massive and repeated flooding in south-west Wisconsin has long rendered it a testing ground for large-scale community-led relocation.
Back in 1978, residents of the village of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin – following the latest in a history of catastrophic floods and facing requirements from the relatively new National Flood Insurance Program – decided to pick up and move its entire Main Street business district away from the Kickapoo River that ran through the middle of town. After years of community-level work, they secured a nearly $1m grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The village was able to buy out businesses and residences in its floodplain and fund the relocation of its downtown to a higher-elevation ridgetop nearby.
Thirty years later, after back-to-back historic floods in 2007 and 2008, a neighboring village on the Kickapoo River decided to follow suit. Eventually, the municipality of Gays Mills built a new development just outside town on a hillside plot to which residents could voluntarily relocate.
I had reported in this region of south-west Wisconsin a number of times. But when I returned after another round of record flooding in 2018, I was surprised to find that four other villages in the region had plans to at least partly relocate infrastructure and buildings, and develop new residential space outside their floodplains – including Rock Springs. While making plans to demolish its old community hall, Rock Springs moved forward with a plan that moved the village hall, library and an event space to a new building up a hill and out of the floodplain. New apartment buildings and duplexes went up in the village’s higher-elevation areas too, after older damaged homes near the river came down.
The Wisconsin villages bear out a broader phenomenon. Communities and neighborhoods from the Carolinas to Texas and Alaska have relocated or initiated relocation plans due to climate-related disasters in much the same way Soldiers Grove did decades ago. Meanwhile, since that time, individual government buyouts for homes and businesses damaged in environmental disasters have proliferated to nearly every US state. Most often, federal funds via the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fema or the Small Business Administration are funneled to a state or local agency that designs its own program to purchase properties damaged in disasters such as hurricanes, so that residents can move out of the risky area. A 2023 analysis of thousands of buyouts from 1990 to 2017 published in Environmental Research Letters shows that nearly 75% of those who received a buyout relocated within 20 miles of their former residence – and most still reduced their exposure to climate risk.
Climate migration will largely look like people moving from one neighborhood to another, across town, to the next county over, to a nearby city. Preparing for these shifts in a way that serves existing communities is the only responsible way forward.
But the idea of a handful of “climate havens” in a country as large as the United States is incorrect and elitist at its base. Only select, privileged populations – white-collar retirees, recent college graduates with numerous job options, child-free healthy young people or the just plain wealthy – can typically pick their destination like a baby name from a curated list. Most people have more obligations and needs attached to where they already live: kids in school, ageing parents, extended family, careers, college courses, medical care, disability services, custody requirements, personal and cultural memories. Most people forced to move in such situations, as data suggests, prefer to stay as close to home as possible.
A decade in, we see how easy it is for decision-makers to slip into the “climate haven” mindset. Now, as we witness the Trump administration slash and gut the very workers and agencies that direct and fund disaster recovery, we must think differently. Living justly means living alongside uncertainty, adapting to it, and resisting attempts to “future-proof”. While relocation and migration will be necessary, it is good news that there are no climate havens to which we might flee. Indigenous cultures show us that connection to community and local ecosystems will be among our most vital tools in facing climate crises. Every place, if we make it, can become a haven from the way it used to be.