[URBAN NOTE] "Climate Change Means Moving. Just Don't Say 'Retreat.'"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Christopher Flavelle interviews American sociologist Karen O'Neill to talk about some strategies that might get people to abandon coastal areas endangered by flooding.

Most Americans, to the degree that they think about climate-change adaptation, probably think of bigger sea walls, or maybe changing the kinds of houses we live in. You're looking at something different.

There's been an ongoing war that dates back at least 200 years between people who favor building engineered structures versus critics who say you're overpromising. That's the "protect" strategy -- it can be a wall, which is what most people are familiar with. Almost always, that’s the top preference; it sounds good.

The second strategy is to accommodate -- raising houses on stilts. Both the protect strategy and the accommodation strategy keep people in place.

The third one is, move. You just cannot protect your way out of the whole thing. Humans have always moved and retreated from shorelines. Archaeologists now are able to do underwater excavations; what they're telling us about long-term adaptation to the climate really has some lessons for us.

In a new paper, you write about one New Jersey town, Toms River, which includes both barrier islands and part of the mainland. You argue that creating new tourism attractions on the mainland, such as artificial lakes, might pull people in from the barrier islands.

The word "retreat" seems to indicate defeat. What we wanted to do is to think about the tourism economy. There are, it turns out, lots of sand mines that are near shore areas in the U.S. It's already a pit. So let's make it into an artificial lake.

You could develop resorts around this. You can create things that are like boardwalk attractions. You can have amusement parks. You could have condominiums along the water. And it's close enough to the estuaries that you could actually have access to saltwater as well.