- Thank you for joining us
for the 2023 Climate Change Symposium:
Will Wisconsin Become a Climate Haven?
My name is Michael Notaro.
I'm the director of the Nelson Institute
Center for Climatic Research
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Center for Climatic Research, or CCR,
is hosting the symposium,
and this year's symposium focuses on the possibility
of climate-induced human migration to Wisconsin.
For those who are unfamiliar with CCR,
our center strives to advance understanding
of the climate system
through interdisciplinary investigation
of past, present, and future climates,
and to use this knowledge for societally-relevant purposes.
The format of the symposium will consist
of brief presentations from three expert panelists
for a total of 45 minutes,
followed by 30-minute question and answer session.
Our first panelist will be Steve Vavrus.
Steve is the director
of the Wisconsin State Climatology Office
and a senior scientist in CCR,
where he is also the assistant director.
He is an expert on Wisconsin climate, extreme weather,
global climate change, and Arctic climate.
Most of his research involves computer climate models
to estimate changes in Earth's climate
in the past and future.
Steve is the co-director of the statewide
Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, or WICCI,
and is a member of WICCI's Climate Working Group.
He's also a member of the Wisconsin Heat Health Network,
the Wisconsin Climate and Health Program's
Science Advisory Team,
and the American Association of State Climatologist.
He earned a master's and PhD in atmospheric science
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
and a bachelor's degree from Purdue University.
Our second panelist will be Alexandra Tempus.
As a journalist, Alexandra has written
on climate-driven migration for, among others,
The New York Times, Rolling Stone,
Orion, Vice, and The Nation.
She is a three-time climate reporting fellow
and has appeared on CNN, Wisconsin Public Radio,
and elsewhere.
She was previously an editor at The Progressive,
where she regularly covered climate migration in the Midwest
and curated an issue on grassroots climate adaptation.
She was also a lead researcher
on Naomi Klein's 2014 bestseller,
This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate.
Her book on climate migration inside the United States
is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.
Our third panelist will be Anna Haines.
Anna is a land use and community development professor
in the College of Natural Resources
at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
and the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Division of Extension.
She is a director of the Center for Land Use Education.
Anna is engaged with WICCI in many ways,
including co-chairing the Science Advisory Board,
the Community Sustainability working group,
and the Climate Migration subgroup.
She uses a sustainability lens to analyze natural, human,
and built environments from small sites
within the city to regional landscapes.
Her research has examined social, institutional,
and ecological systems at multiple scales
and their implication for a policy
in land management in rural areas,
especially the upper Midwest.
Most recently, Anna has started to delve into what
climate migration might mean for Wisconsin communities.
It's an honor to have Steve, Alexandra, and Anna here today,
sharing their vast expertise
to tackle the overarching question,
"Will Wisconsin become a climate haven?"
I'm asserting this will be an informative
and thought-provoking discussion,
and I now hand it over to our first panelist, Steve Vavrus.
[audience applauds]
- So to get things going today, I wanna set the stage
by just reminding us why we have a full room here today,
as well as a big virtual audience,
and that is that this topic of climate migration
has become really, really popular.
It's got its own legs
and sort of cottage industry, it seems like.
And just as an example of that,
I'm showing here just a few snippets
of public lectures just like we have today on this topic
that have been presented around the country,
and even in other countries.
A lot of these have an international bend,
but many of them are focused right here in the U.S.
And it's not only a popular topic,
but it's a topic that has a surprisingly long history.
If we go back nearly a hundred years ago,
all the way to John Steinbeck in the Dust Bowl,
we see people talking and writing
about climate migration even then.
And in many cases,
people fled from the hardest-hit areas
of the Dust Bowl, out West, as shown in this figure.
This is a recent academic article
showing where people from the heart of the Dust Bowl
migrated at that time,
and you see a big cluster here in the West,
like Grapes of Wrath,
but you also see a big cluster around Colorado,
showing that many people didn't move
very far away from the Great Plains.
And then you see more of a general dispersion
around the country.
So nowadays, we're not concerned about the Dust Bowl
in the here and now; we're much more concerned
about human-induced climate change
and the global warming patterns we see.
And the societal impacts that come with that
are very relevant and have become increasingly noticeable.
An example of that is the number of damaging, extreme,
fatal weather events that have become more common.
2023, we're not even finished with the year,
and yet we've set a new national record
for the most billion-dollar weather and climate disasters.
And this graphic from NOAA shows where they've happened,
when they've happened, and what type of event.
And some of these, I'm sure you remember
the horrible firestorm in Hawaii this summer.
Over the winter, the big flooding snows in California,
Hurricane Idalia in Florida, but notice too,
I think what your eye can really catch
is this big cluster of events
in the middle part of the country,
and those are largely severe storms.
Things like hail, straight-line winds, and tornadoes
actually comprise the bulk of the record-setting 2023.
Now, just to show that I haven't cherry-picked one outlier year,
I'm showing here the long-term trend,
going back to 1980 when this dataset began.
Each bar represents the number
of billion-dollar weather disasters in that year,
and it has been adjusted for inflation.
So it's not an artifact.
But you definitely can see this upward trend over time,
and especially in the most recent decade.
It's not only 2023; we had a new record in 2020,
and really ever since about 2010 or so,
we see this uptick in prevalence
in these billion-dollar weather disasters,
some of which could be the weather,
some of it is because we've made ourselves more vulnerable.
But whatever the underlying cause or the biggest factor,
it's understandable that people look at this and say,
"Wow, this could be a real motivating force
to encourage people to find other locations to live."
Some of that could be a push from the hardest-hit areas,
and some could be a pull from the lesser-hit areas.
And many people have speculated
that it's the Great Lakes region, including Wisconsin,
that could be a particularly attractive location,
but nowhere that I know of has gone more in than Buffalo
in advertising itself as a potential climate change refuge.
They made their own YouTube video
to promote this possibility.
They've made it look like the Venice of the North
in that photo. [chuckles]
And I don't know, I've never been to Buffalo,
but they certainly are going all-in on this idea.
I know Duluth has done something similar.
And so clearly,
Buffalo has some climatic things going for it,
but let's not forget that it was not even a year ago
when we had the horrible Christmas blizzard,
dumping more than four feet of snow, 80-mile-an-hour winds,
more than a hundred people were killed,
$8.5 billion in damage, and 7.5 million power outages.
So Buffalo is subject to these events,
and they will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Turning back to this graphic again,
I wanna emphasize now the green bars,
'cause these are all color-coded
as the type of billion-dollar weather disasters.
The green represents severe storms.
So again, these are hail,
straight-line winds, and tornadoes.
And I hadn't realized until I looked at this more carefully,
but it really is the green bars that are accounting
for the bulk of the total, bulk of the increase.
And in fact, over the long 40-year period of the record,
they account for half
of all of these billion-dollar weather disasters,
and those are the ones that the Midwest
and Great Lake states are most subjected to.
In fact, if we repeat this graph
and I just show now the Great Lakes states themselves,
we see a similar upward trend,
including our new record in 2023.
So both in the Great Lakes and the nation as a whole,
we're seeing more expensive,
billion-dollar weather disasters.
But nevertheless, our area, Wisconsin, the Great Lakes,
does have a lot of things going for it
in making it a potential climate haven refuge,
or at least somewhat more attractive place to live.
One of the things we have is water, and lots of it.
In Wisconsin in particular, we have 15,000 inland lakes,
lots of streams, lots of rivers.
We're bordered by two Great Lakes,
as well as a world-famous river.
So we're gonna continue to have water,
and so we will have that going for us,
and that will be a selling point in the future climate,
maybe quite a bit more water, depending.
Another thing we have going for us
is we have a relatively cool climate,
sometimes too cool, [chuckles] obviously,
but if you look at this map of average annual temperatures,
it's a reminder that it's the Deep South
and the Southwest that is subjected
to the warmest temperatures.
And in the upper Midwest, it's largely Minnesota
and Wisconsin that are very favorable.
And in a warming climate, having a cool climate
would be something attractive to potential migrants.
Just as important as what we have may be what we don't have.
One of the things we don't have, fortunately, is hurricanes.
We do get remnant hurricanes when they weaken,
but we don't get direct hits,
and we will never get direct hits from major hurricanes.
And so that is something in our favor.
We also don't have major wildfires.
And we have had smaller wildfires this year,
with the drought, but we're not like California,
or now Hawaii, the Southwest, Alaska
that's subject to these repeatedly.
Partly due to better management, fire management strategies here,
but that's something else we have going for us
is the absence of major wildfires.
And something we'll never have is sea level rise.
And so we do have fluctuations in the Great Lakes,
but we don't have to deal with this chronic problem
of the sea water encroaching on us
the way the Southeast does, the Gulf Coast, and Florida.
Partly land subsidence and partly rising seas.
And so that too is a item in our favor
in becoming a climate refuge.
But, and here is the big but,
we know that despite those checks in our favor,
we also have some strong negatives
or climate challenges to deal with.
Wisconsin has floods, for example,
and lately, we've had more and more.
The 20-teens were Wisconsin's wettest decade on record,
and with that, came a lot of really heavy rainfalls.
This map shows the number of 100-year daily rainfalls.
These are rainfalls you would expect
to happen, on average, once per century,
and yet, we had 21 such events all across the state.
And those of us in the Madison area,
the biggest number of all, of a foot,
happened right here in August of 2018,
and if you were living through it,
you probably won't forget it.
So this is something that we have to live with,
and we've had to live with it more often lately.
In fact, if we look at what's typical
about extreme precipitation in Wisconsin,
showing here the frequency of days with two inches or more
of rainfall in the state,
we see that the pattern is the most in the south
and the most in the west,
with lesser frequency in the northeast.
So that's the present-day climate,
the last roughly 30 years or so.
If we fast forward to late century
using climate model output,
what we see is a strong suggestion
that we'll be seeing more and more
of these heavy rainfall events and probably flooding with it.
Interestingly, the pattern doesn't really change.
You see here that the west and the south is still the region
most subject to these heavy rainfalls, northeast less so,
but everywhere in the state gets bluer
and indicative here on the scale,
showing an increase in frequency,
and typically about a one-third increase statewide.
Something else that we discovered this summer,
Wisconsin can have smoke, right?
And so even though the wildfires from Canada
weren't right on our doorstep,
they were close enough with the prevailing winds
that they got here in a big way.
This is the map of late June at the peak,
and the Great Lakes in particular
were shrouded with high amounts of smoke.
We had some of the worst air quality in the world,
definitely the worst in all of North America.
So this is a reminder of a occasional characteristic
of our climate.
And despite our relatively cool climate, we do have heat.
Extreme heats of 90-degree days are not uncommon here.
If we look at the recent past, we see that the south,
and to some degree the west,
are most subject to 90-degree or higher days.
And if we fast forward now to just mid-century,
our climate model suggests that the pattern
will remain the same, but the magnitude will go way up,
statewide, a tripling of the number of 90-degree days
expected in Wisconsin.
However, there is some potential for refuge regionally
because if you look carefully, the Northwoods is one area
that should be doing relatively better in extreme heat,
but also look at the buffering effect
of the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan, Door County,
fewer of these extremely hot days than elsewhere,
and similarly, on the shore of Lake Superior.
So there may be potential there for a refuge.
There's a memorable quote by Mark Twain,
at least attributed to Mark Twain.
He said, "Go to Heaven for the climate
and Hell for the company."
Now, given some of the discussions
and popularity of this topic
that our area could become a climate change refuge,
you might think that it was actually,
"Go to Wisconsin for the climate."
And so the purpose of this talk today,
kicking off the panel,
is to just put a question mark by that,
and really get into this question
for our discussion here.
Wisconsin and the Great Lake states do have
a lot of selling points to argue in favor
as potential climate refuge,
but we also have plenty of climate challenges
at the same time.
And so the interesting couple of questions,
one is what will be the interplay
among these various climate drivers
as they compete with each other
in terms of their influence on migration patterns?
And then finally, the most important one
is how will human decision-making
intersect with these physical changes?
And for that, I will turn to our other panelists,
who can answer that question a lot better than I can.
[audience applauds]
- All right, here we go.
All right, well, hello everyone, and thank you Steve,
and thank you Michael for the introductions.
All right, so I'm gonna talk about migration
and what is actually happening in Wisconsin.
There's a big problem, trying to count,
and then make some projections or forecasts.
So I have lots of data,
and then I'll talk a little bit about communities.
So I wanna first start with demographers.
So when demographers are looking at population,
they think about natural increase and decrease,
and we're pretty good at measuring births and deaths.
And then there's this huge portion
that has to do with migration.
So we have domestic, so internal to the U.S.,
and then international.
And so I'm gonna focus on the migration piece,
the domestic migration piece.
And so this is where it starts to get tough
for communities to start thinking into the future.
What do we need to plan for?
Do we need a new school?
Do we need more wastewater?
Do we need more housing, right?
There's all sorts of things and reasons why you would need
to think about your population.
All right, so we'll start at the federal level,
and we can see from 2018 to 2022, number of movers.
So this is in the millions.
So people move around a lot in the U.S., all right?
That's the big story from this particular figure. [laughs]
And then we can look at it spatially.
So this is net migration counts over a 10-year period.
So people moving in and out and all over the place.
But I want to focus you on Wisconsin.
Over a 10-year period, we lost population due to migration.
Our population actually increased,
but that was the natural increase, okay?
It had nothing to do with migration.
People left Wisconsin.
And you can see the bright blue, Texas and Florida,
they are the ones that are getting the net migrants in.
All right, we're gonna move past 2019,
and this is fiscal year basis.
A lot of this data comes from the census, by the way.
And so this is looking at July 2019 to June 2020.
So you can see the blues are people moving in,
net, so positive net.
And then the tan and the orange are net people moving away.
So again, you can see in Wisconsin,
there's a little bit of people moving both in and out,
depending on what county you're in.
And again, you can see where Texas and Florida,
people move there.
All right, here's 2020 to 2021.
So we are in the depths of the pandemic,
and not surprisingly, people want to be more remote.
So you can see the West, people are moving out there.
You can see Wisconsin; also, it's mostly blue.
So we do have net migration in.
The census changed from 2021 to 2022 on how we look at this.
So this is the blue dots are showing,
again, positive increase.
And so it's really hard to see Wisconsin here,
but there are a lot of blue dots.
The big thing that we can see here is the lot of orange,
and those are central cities.
So central cities have been,
were losing a lot of people during this period.
All right, we're gonna get really close in here
to Dane County.
This also comes from the census.
So this is showing people moving into Dane County.
So what you should notice is that
the people who are moving into Dane County
are mostly coming from Wisconsin,
and then the very nearby counties and states.
There are people who have moved from elsewhere,
but it's pretty spotty.
There's not really much of a pattern there.
All right, leaving Dane County, so again, right,
when people leave Dane County,
they are sticking within the state into the nearby counties,
and then right around Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota.
They still go elsewhere, right?
We know snowbirds and et cetera leave,
but right, they're not necessarily going to the South.
There's Northeast as well, and Northwest in there,
and Colorado.
All right, and then here's the net.
So the net positive is in orange this time,
and net negative for Dane County is in the blue.
So, right?
Lots of people are sticking within the state itself.
All right, we're gonna go back to the federal level,
and we can see that this is across the country,
the same pattern.
So when people move,
they are sticking often within the same county even.
All right?
So almost 60% in 2021, and it's decreased a bit in '22.
When they move to a different county, it's about 40%,
but it's about 20% who go to a different state.
So, right?
People do move out, but it's a much smaller group of people,
and it's pretty consistent.
So one of the big questions, when we get to climate change,
Steve mentioned sea level rise,
and here are the counties around the U.S.
that will be subject to sea level rise.
And it amounts to a little over 13 million people.
So the question is, where are they gonna go, right?
Their houses are gonna be inundated.
When we look back at this, they're gonna try to stay with,
probably in the same county, right?
Can you move just a little bit inland?
There's gonna be a portion who will move same state,
but to a different county.
It's a little bit more inland,
but again, we're gonna have a whole bunch of people
that will move out completely.
So how many of those could move to Wisconsin, right?
We don't know,
and we really don't have any good way of figuring that out.
All right, we also have why do people move?
And so here's two different years, very recent,
and we can see it doesn't shift a lot
between these two years.
I don't think it's too surprising that people move
because they want a different kind of house,
family reasons, employment, right?
You get a new job and you move elsewhere.
And then the other, so here's a more detailed table.
And this is showing, right,
all the details about housing, family, employment,
but the other is really what I wanted to focus on here,
and change of climate is one reason
that people put for moving.
So I think, we don't know what they mean by this, right?
Are they people who decide, "I hate the Buffalo winter,
[laughs] I hate Wisconsin winters, I'm getting out."
Or is it people from Texas and Florida who are saying,
"I am sick of it being so hot and humid
and the hurricanes, I wanna leave," right?
So we don't know.
The other one there is natural disasters,
that people are moving because there's a natural disaster.
And so, right?
People move after a hurricane or after a wildfire.
In many instances, they're forced to move elsewhere
because their house has been destroyed,
but they might just be sick of it, right?
Time to leave.
All right, so what are local government impacts?
And this came from a paper by Mirandi and Main,
and I just think it's an interesting way
to think about it.
So I'll go over these three different kinds of communities,
and our communities need to start
thinking about these things.
So one are vulnerable communities.
And I think Steve, you know, pointed out
that Wisconsin is vulnerable to climate change,
whether it's flooding, there can be some heat,
there are sensitive groups that are sensitive to heat,
and we have to think who is vulnerable,
aside from where is vulnerable.
We also know that there's two kinds of disasters
that we need to be thinking about
in terms of vulnerability and that sudden onset disasters.
So we can see, again,
we mentioned hurricanes or wildfires,
but it's also that slow onset, the sea level rise.
And so, we do need to be thinking about
what will happen to those communities
that are impacted by these things.
They definitely have a temporary
and/or permanent loss in population.
A lot of the community has been destroyed.
So those local governments don't have the sales tax
or property tax revenue that they once had.
So how do they get going again, right?
How do they rebuild?
There's also recipient communities.
So these are communities that,
because of a sudden onset disaster,
all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people
just come to their community.
It's nearby, it's safe, and they're gonna stay a while
until they can rebuild or figure out their life.
So a lot of these communities are unsuspecting, right?
They are gobsmacked, basically, right?
What just happened?
And so that happened to Chico, California.
The Paradise fire happened, and overnight, practically,
20,000 people moved into Chico.
It was a 15% to 20% shift in their population.
I mean, imagine Madison, all of a sudden,
having, I don't know, 80,000 people dropped on it,
right, overnight.
It's kind of an overwhelming kind of situation.
So these are some of the pallet shelters that they set up
within a month or so of that event happening,
just so people had someplace to live.
Orlando, Florida, post Hurricane Maria,
had an influx of 25,000 people.
So they also had dealt with this issue.
The final one is the destination communities.
And so these are communities
that are purposely branding themselves as climate havens.
Okay?
And so they're saying, "We're welcoming climate migrants
from wherever they are from."
They're trying to think through affordable housing,
what's needed, all of those sorts of things.
And we have two, Buffalo, that Steve had noted, and Duluth.
So Duluth has called itself 99% climate proof.
[audience laughs]
Kind of interesting 'cause we know it's not.
It had terrible flooding around 10 years ago or so,
but that is what they're aiming at, right?
It's kind of an economic development strategy,
if you will.
Buffalo too, it's calling itself a climate refuge city.
They're already seeing results, I guess,
of their marketing efforts.
So after a hurricane in Puerto Rico,
10,000 people from there moved.
They have a lot of underutilized space
and a lot of inexpensive real estate.
So in one sense,
they're ready and open for new people to move in.
And then finally, Cincinnati, Ohio,
it's also claims it's well situated.
It's exactly the reasons that Steve gave.
They don't have hurricanes and they don't have wildfires.
They have fresh water and they're committed to resilience.
So, right, I actually don't know.
I think Madison, to some degree, has said,
"We might be ready for climate migrants,"
but I'm not sure they're marketing
or branding themselves as such.
All right, and that is it.
I could go on and on about this, [laughs]
but thank you for listening, and Allie,
I will pass it on over to you.
[audience applauds]
- All right.
Well, thank you Steve and Anna
for your excellent presentations that laid out
a lot of the foundational information around this issue.
And thank you to the Nelson Institute
for hosting this event.
The environmental studies courses I took as a UW undergrad
at the Institute really helped form the foundation
of this work I'll present today.
So I'm truly honored to be joining this panel
and speaking with this community.
So I'm Alexandra Tempus; I'm a journalist, not an academic.
So this is a little bit
of a different kind of a presentation.
I am from the ancestral land
of the Menominee Nation up in Shawano, Wisconsin,
in the middle of that map up there.
This is an 1877 climatological map of Wisconsin,
showing different temperature ranges.
So, you know, I'm from Shawano, but for the last two years,
I've been crisscrossing the country,
visiting more than 22 states, doing dozens of interviews.
I've been to North Carolina,
South Carolina,
the panhandle of Florida,
Holyoke, Massachusetts,
Staten Island,
up in the Central Sierra Nevada Range,
Utah,
and even back here in the Midwest,
in Nebraska and in Wisconsin.
And actually this trip, this cross-country journey
that started two years ago, started in Wisconsin.
But I'll get back to that in a little bit.
So first, my sort of introduction to these issues
was through Hurricane Sandy.
I was living in Brooklyn.
I recently had this,
I'm sorry for the blurriness of the photo resolution,
but I recently had a Facebook photo memory pop up,
saying, "11 years ago today was Hurricane Sandy."
This was my backyard in Brooklyn on that day,
just the fence popped over, in North Brooklyn,
but we know that it was a game-changing disaster
for many communities up and down the East coast.
You know, up to 280 deaths.
We had up to $70 billion in U.S. damages alone.
It was the third costliest storm in the nation's history.
So, you know,
this was the kind of damage that was happening.
So I, as a journalist, you know,
I was working as a researcher and I started to, you know,
I was walking around, I lived in New York City,
I walked around the streets of Staten Island,
the ruined bungalows, and the, you know,
between the public housing towers of Red Hook,
and you know, I was curious about why we were funneling
millions of dollars into rebuilding homes
where the city's own scientists said, you know,
these areas would be underwater within a matter of decades.
So this was part of the, you know,
path I went on to sort of get me down this, you know,
sort of climate migration track.
And it became clear that even though
we were putting more money into rebuilding,
experts at the government level, experts in academia
were saying people will need to move,
will need to make some sort of move to, you know,
protect themselves from climate risks.
So around this time, and in fact, I had talked
to an Obama administration official who said,
you know, it's not a stretch to call these people refugees.
There was a lot of conversation at that time around,
you know, big numbers.
Can we put a number on this, you know,
a lot like trying to find climate havens today.
Can we put a number on this?
You know, environmentalist Norman Meyers
had this very sort of, you know, well-cited number,
200 million climate migrants by 2050.
This was cited by the IPCC and the Stern Review.
So it was held up for a long time as a legitimate number.
And then there was, you know,
the UN International Organization for Migration said,
well, "It's anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion."
[laughs] Cornell University even came out
with a two billion by 2100 in 2017.
So I had been doing some reporting on this.
I called up one of the experts on the European migrant crisis,
and he's a climate migration specialist, Fran?ois Gemenne,
at the Hugo Observatory
at the University of Li?ge in Belgium.
And I called him up and said, you know,
"What do you think of all these estimates running around?
"We have people uprooted here in the U.S.,
"here's all these numbers floating around,
what do they mean?"
And he's, you know, Franco-Belgian,
and he said in his very thick Franco-Belgian accent,
"They are basically full of crap."
[audience laughs]
So then I went to Belgium, I decided to visit Fran?ois,
or decided to visit his colleagues; he wasn't there.
And I wrote an article for Rolling Stone called,
"Are We Thinking About Climate Migration All Wrong?"
So I learned two really important things
on this assignment.
Most climate migration, as Anna and Steve point out,
or as Anna pointed out, is internal,
within national borders, not across them.
There's this Landmark 2018 World Bank report.
One of the co-authors said that it was the first-ever effort
to apply, at large scales, a plausible approach,
and they only counted internal migrants in South Asia,
Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.
And now they updated that study in 2021.
I don't wanna give you the wrong number,
but it is in the 100 million range.
And it is the first defensible number that we've seen,
according to Professor de Sherbinin at Columbia.
So this was sort of a breakthrough
in this realm of research.
So another key insight that I got on this assignment
was I talked to, you know, Hugo Observatory's, you know,
climatologist/geographer Pierre Ozer.
And he showed me his, you know,
research that he had done in Benin, Africa, in Cotonou.
Here's a slide; you can see on the left side
is from February 21, 2013,
and the slide on the right is from November 26, 2013.
So just a few months' difference there.
But he had observed that there was an average
of 10 meters per year of erosion on this coast
between 1965 and now.
So when that erosion happened,
you can see, this green circle here
was when the erosion happened.
A new house popped up in that same location
where the green circle appeared.
So all this erosion happened,
the sea is really much closer to this green circle,
but now there's a house there.
And then they went to the man who rebuilt
and to lots of people in this community
who rebuilt their homes
right up against the encroaching water,
right up against this water that had just, you know,
taken away 10 meters of their land, and they said, you know,
they didn't consider themselves displaced, you know.
They still lived in their own community,
they still lived there.
So anyway,
this was another sort of light bulb moment for me.
Climate migrants are more often internal,
most often internal,
and they're also most often don't move very far.
So in the U.S., we don't have a lot of ways of quantifying
who counts as a climate migrant or not,
but one way that we can look at this is through buyouts.
The U.S. government, FEMA, and a few others
give buyouts to folks whose homes are, you know,
wrecked in disasters like hurricanes or floods.
You know, they buy them out,
not always at a price that the homeowner's happy with,
and usually not at a price that they can afford
to buy a comparable home with.
But they do get a buyout from, typically, FEMA,
and then they relocate.
Using that money, they find a new home.
So that's sort of buyouts.
So, you know, one study recently from June 2023,
this was in Environmental Research Letters,
analyzed thousands of buyouts from 1990 to 2017.
And they said, "While long-distance moves do occur,
they are rare."
Their average driving distance to a new home,
7.4 driving miles.
And more than 7,000 out of the 9,551 homeowners
moved within 20 miles' driving distance.
So we're now seeing sort of this, like,
the academic literature on migration
come to bear in the U.S.
We're seeing that people are moving within the country.
People are staying relatively close to home,
just as Anna pointed out with her data in Dane County.
And you might have noticed that more folks,
and she pointed this out as well,
more folks moved from within the state
than from outside of the state.
So again, it confirms that we're seeing more local moves.
So is Wisconsin a climate haven?
I don't know; I don't think so.
I don't think that we can make a strong case
that there are such a thing as climate havens.
That's one thing that has become pretty clear to me
as I've crisscrossed this country.
This is Rock Springs, Wisconsin.
This was in 2018.
Steve mentioned August 2018 floods.
The Driftless region of Wisconsin
has been hit hard by floods for generations,
but 2018 was a record breaker.
And this was their downtown; this is their Main Street.
And this is, you know,
I think it represents an example of hope to me
because Wisconsin, funnily enough, you know,
when I was doing my research
on post-Hurricane Sandy displacement,
experts told me one of the first-ever communities
to relocate due to an environmental disaster,
flooding, was Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin
in the Driftless region, just a few miles from Rock Springs.
So Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin relocated in the '70s,
and it provided sort of a template,
an imperfect one, for community-led relocation.
And these are folks who have decided,
"We wanna save our town.
"We wanna keep ourselves together as a community,
"we wanna retain our tax base,
but we wanna move out of the floodplain."
So they, you know, would take buyouts
and then collectively move to a different location
out of the floodplain, higher elevation.
That's what the folks of Rock Springs did as well.
In fact, that's what many communities
across the Driftless region have decided to do.
You can see, there's a half dozen of them here.
Rock Springs is there off by itself,
but the rest of them are all on that same river there.
Soldiers Grove is down there,
but a lot of these communities are already
moving infrastructure out of the way,
including back to Rock Springs,
this photo from the beginning here.
This is that Main Street that was underwater.
You can see all the buildings are gone.
And you can see that, you know,
it's changed the shape of their community.
They have built new housing, new apartment buildings,
and they have built a new community center
because their community center and library
and a lot of other community resources
were housed in this beautiful, old building
with these beautiful arches,
built by the grandfathers of the people who live there now.
They treasured this place,
and it was wrecked by the 2018 floods.
And as part of their relocation project,
their community-led relocation project,
they took those arches
and they moved them onto that empty land
where their Main Street used to be.
And it is now a community gathering space
that is climate safer than it was before.
So it's an example of hope to me,
and I think Wisconsin is full of those.
So I guess I'll leave off there.
There's lots more that we can talk about
in the Q&A, I hope, but just thank you all so much.
[audience applauds]