Nature Quest: Rebuild Or Relocate Post-Disaster?

In the face of floods, wildfires and other natural disasters, when should a community relocate to avoid potential harm? Listener Molly Magid asks that very question. Molly wanted to know how other communities have chosen the path of “managed retreat.” That’s the purposeful and coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm’s way. In today’s episode, Short Wave's Emily Kwong https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong and Hannah Chinn https://www.npr.org/people/1255819925/hannah-chinn explore cases from New York to Illinois and Alaska to see how successful relocation happens — and what stops it. Have an environment-based question you want us to investigate on the next Nature Quest? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  With producer Hannah Chin.

• 0:26Emily Kwong?

  And for this month's Nature Quest, we are digging into a question from Molly McGidd, an Ul Tautaii, or Christ Church, New Zealand. This community has a pretty unique history.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  So the Otauro Avon River Corridor is what I think the official name is. It is also called the Red Zone, or at least that was the name that a lot of people adopted after the earthquakes.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  So Molly's talking about the series of earthquakes that hit Christ Church over a decade ago. They left a lot of the land near where she lives unstable. And to prevent death and destruction from any future earthquakes in that area, the New Zealand government offered to buy people out of their homes and designated certain areas as residential red zones.

• 1:12Emily Kwong?

  Interesting. And did people take the government up on this, on moving out?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so about 16,000 people in Christ Church, over 95%, accepted the government's offer. And Molly told us now, those red zones are home to things like community gardens and walking paths.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  There should be plots of land where houses are, but there's nothing there.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  She wanted to know more about this process, managed retreat, and whether it's a reasonable strategy for dealing with climate change disaster in other parts of the world.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  What is managed retreat? And how are communities experiencing it?

• 1:46Emily Kwong?

  Great question, Molly. OK, so managed retreat is the purposeful and coordinated movement of people and assets out of harm's way. And it's a part of the larger disaster risk reduction toolbox. There's lots of things we can do to protect communities, but if we do nothing, a flood or an earthquake or a fire can devastate or displace an entire group of people. And that is exactly what is happening in the state where I used to live and report, Alaska. Earlier this month, the remnants of Typhoon Halong slammed into the coast, flooding villages and ripping houses off their foundations. Evacuee Luke Amick Jr. mourned the loss of his village as he spoke to Alaska Public Media reporter Eric Stone.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  Kipnek is our hometown and we've been living there all our life. Everything is lost now. All our, all the memories and all the houses are gone.

• 2:42Emily Kwong?

  Kipnek and Queen Gillingock were the hardest hit villages, but there's destruction across the Yukon-Cascq-Quim Delta, the YK Delta. This is a coastal region that has sustained indigenous people for millennia. And now, as many as 2,000 Alaskans from that area are displaced.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so many. I mean, I know that Alaska's governor called for a federal disaster declaration to unlock federal aid to rebuild these communities. And President Trump announced on Truth Social that he approved $25 million for the state.

• 3:11Emily Kwong?

  Yes, this aid did come through. It will be critical for Alaska's recovery. The thing is, is Alaska knew something like this could happen in the YK Delta. That region is especially vulnerable to climate change. In fact, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium has estimated that over 140 communities, many in the YK Delta, are facing some form of erosion, permafrost, or flooding. And the question for many of them, long before this typhoon has been, is it better to just move out of harm's way?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  So today on the show, manage retreat in a warming world. We're looking at case studies from New Zealand, New York, Illinois, and Alaska, of people on the move as the ground shifts beneath their feet.

• 3:55Emily Kwong?

  I'm Emily Kwong.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  And I'm Hannah Chin. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 5:29Speaker 02

  All right, Em, we're back with Nature Quest, which is our monthly series inspired by listener questions about their changing environment. And this month's question is about manage retreat, the process of leaving. I guess I'm wondering, where in the world are people generally retreating from? And then, how do they make that decision?

• 5:49Emily Kwong?

  Yes, so, one, this has been happening for decades. This is nothing new. It's just getting more common under climate change. Two, it seems to be happening most within communities near water, so places that are flood prone. And three, the question of how retreat happens tends to fall somewhere along two ends of a spectrum.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Okay, tell me more about that spectrum. What are those two ends?

• 6:11Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and this is not scientific. This is, this is just how I'm organizing these case studies.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 6:15Emily Kwong?

  On the one end, you have kind of top down. So these are places where the government initiated and oversaw the retreat. And it's saying, this needs to happen. This has to happen. Check these boxes. You'll get the money and then go figure it out. This is Elena Sutley, a professor in structural engineering at the University of Kansas. And Based on what she told me, I realized the other end to the spectrum is a community-led approach, or at least community-initiated approach, where a town or a neighborhood calls for its own relocation and seeks out financial aid and political support to make it happen.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Huh, OK. So which approach is more effective?

• 6:54Emily Kwong?

  It really depends on where you live. But overall, I would say it is really important to have community buy-in. Even better, community participation, as Elena put it. People in the local community, they are the experts of the lived experiences. They're the ones dealing firsthand with these climate stressors. Elena is a lead co-investigator on a four-year study looking at managed retreat all over the world. And she told me again and again, the best outcomes tend to happen when there is a process that involves the people.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  All right, has that happened before? Do we have any examples?

• 7:31Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, it's happened in the US. Let's talk about what some people cite as the first real case of managed retreat in the US. And that is in 1993. I know we were like children.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Well, I wasn't even born.

• 7:43Emily Kwong?

  Fair. I'll tell you that back then, the Mississippi River topped its levee system. This is known as the Great Midwest Flood of 1993. And it engulfed the village of Valmire, Illinois. The floodwater lingered for months. It damaged like 90% of the buildings.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 8:01Emily Kwong?

  And in response to this disaster, the town went through a process that they led themselves to relocate together.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  OK, so they had general consensus. They decided to move.

• 8:12Emily Kwong?

  Yes.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  How did it go?

• 8:13Emily Kwong?

  They took a vote. There were many meetings, and they brought in the federal government to help. So FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the state of Illinois, actually, bought over 300 flood-damaged homes and 25 businesses. And after a lot of work, the town was rebuilt two miles away on higher ground. And that is where it stands now. They did this all in less than four years.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Wild. Okay, so it seems like this was pretty successful.

• 8:40Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  How common is this kind of thing?

• 8:43Emily Kwong?

  You know, I will say this, Valmar did set a precedent for buyout programs. I mean, these programs are now the most common form of managed retreat in the US. Miyuki Hino has crunched the numbers on this. She's an environmental social scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  Over 40,000 households around the US have made this choice to sell their house to the government. Generally speaking, they get paid the pre-flood value of their home. And then the government tears it down, restores it to open space, and it's deed restricted, meaning you can't ever build on that again.

• 9:17Emily Kwong?

  It's happened in almost every state in the US, even in states where at first, the government resisted buying the land after a disaster. That happened in New York after Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012. The city remains paralyzed. Many businesses are closed, power is still out for tens of thousands, and the city's subway system is shut down. The floodwater caused extensive damage. People were worried about their safety. So on Staten Island, on Long Island, residents in several neighborhoods wanted a buyout. And they were told, no, the government is not going to buy your land. So the community escalated the issue. They reached out to their state senators. They put pressure on the state government to offer a buyout, and it worked. And New York started a buyback program for survivors of Hurricane Sandy.

• 10:01Emily Kwong?

  So Elena considers this a grassroots success. But there are some downsides. Miyuki, the researcher at UNC, told me about this conversation she had with a Hurricane Sandy survivor who did sell his home to the government, and he said-

• 10:15Speaker 06

  This is not managed retreat. This is chaotic because he had sold his home. It was getting torn down and restored to open space. His neighbor had just rebuilt normally. And then, you know, two doors down, they had sold to a real estate developer who was flipping it and building a much larger house than had been there before.

• 10:40Speaker 06

  And so he's looking around and going, well, we have some percentage of this neighborhood that's never going to be built on again. But in other places, we're adding people, we're adding assets, we're adding risk.

• 10:52Emily Kwong?

  And this is one of the big problems with managed retreat in general. Unless there's some kind of red zoning, like happened in New Zealand, or a kind of widespread community cooperation, like happened in Valmar, Illinois, managed retreat can take on this kind of hodgepodge pattern where some homeowners sell and others stay and some build back even more.

• 11:12Speaker 06

  So can you maintain a road if now there's actually only one household that lives on it and there used to be 20, right? Or how do you maintain water and wastewater and trash pickup when now your community is split across multiple different geographies than it wasn't before?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Right. Wow, I didn't even think about that. I mean, I'm going to be honest, Emily, I kind of feel like these examples are leaving me with way more questions than answers.

• 11:40Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I mean, the one thing I kept coming back to doing this reporting is the notion of partnership, of government-community partnership. When there is open conversation between the people in harm's way and the people who can pay to get them out, managed retreat can work. And that brings me back to where the story started, Alaska.

• 11:58Speaker 07

  I have lived all my 57 years here in the community of Nunapichuk.

• 12:08Emily Kwong?

  Morris Alexey has spent his entire life watching the land give way. The permafrost, so the frozen bedrock is thawing, it's softening. In his community, there's boardwalks that cover the village so people can move around without sinking into the land. And watching all of this over the years as neighbors lost their homes, Morris has started to say the word relocate more loudly. He is a community engagement specialist with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and is part of a village-wide effort to move Nunapichuk to higher ground, 50 feet above sea level.

• 12:43Speaker 07

  The possible new site we have chosen is only three, four miles straight south of where we at now. We would not be moving somewhere far from what we've grown up.

• 12:59Speaker 07

  Eating and living off of.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Right, so far away enough that they'd be safe, but close enough that they could still practice subsistence, basically maintain their way of life.

• 13:08Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and even better, this land is land the village already owns. Kwegilingak, that's one of the villages that was heavily damaged by the typhoon last month. They were also trying to relocate, but they didn't have an obvious place to move, and the storm got there first.

• 13:23Speaker 07

  They themselves did not have any land that was high enough for them in their area. So we are very fortunate to have no red tape towards the site we had wanted to relocate to.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  OK, so Nunapachak seems like kind of the perfect example. They have it all. They have the new site, they have community buy-in. How come they haven't moved already?

• 13:46Emily Kwong?

  They don't have the money. An estimate from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium says it will take $277 million to relocate Nunapachak, but not a single federal nor state agency has truly stepped forward to help pay.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Oh, OK. So as much as the community wants this, they're missing that financial support from the federal government, which all of those other places that we talked about earlier, New York, Illinois, et cetera, all of them had.

• 14:14Emily Kwong?

  In one way or another, eventually, yes. The economics have to work. But President Trump's vision is to transfer disaster recovery entirely to the states. And all of this, it just poses a huge challenge to state and local governments.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Right. Plus, like, can states honestly pay for all that disaster recovery themselves?

• 14:34Emily Kwong?

  It really is going to depend on the state. Miuki Hino hopes that states will take up leadership, strengthen infrastructure, deploy early warning systems, build community networks so people can check in on one another and share resources. But again, it depends really on where you live. And Miuki told me this has given her a new definition about what it means to live in a climate haven.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  I feel even more strongly now that the way that we should be thinking about resilience is not so much in the hazards that you're going to face, but much more in the... Social system and the community and the government effectiveness of what happens to people on the ground.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  OK, so I guess this brings us back to the question that Molly asked, right? Is manage or treat a reasonable strategy?

• 15:23Emily Kwong?

  It totally can be, but it's not because of where you live. It's because of who you live among and what systems are in place to protect you in the event of a disaster.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Emily Kwong, thanks so much for bringing us this reporting.

• 15:36Emily Kwong?

  Thank you, Hannah. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior vice president of podcasting. I'm Hannah Chin.

• 15:53Emily Kwong?

  And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.