Climate Disruption and Planning: Resistance or Retreat?

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Accepting Climate Denial and Loss: Florida’s Lessons for Pragmatic Adaptation

Kathryn Frank

Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Introduction

For planning theory and practice, resilience offers nothing less than a paradigm shift: a fundamental questioning of the central tenets of contemporary approaches to planning. (Shaw, 2012, p. 311)

In the United States, Florida is literally ground zero for climate change. The state’s two thousand kilometers of coastline, much of them highly developed, are vulnerable to rising seas and intensifying tropical storms (Wright, Nichols, & Zarillo, 2019). To give perspective, Florida’s coasts account for hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate with nearly half of the nation’s population residing less than four feet above high tide, an area which could be inundated within the century (Strauss, Tebaldi, & Ziemlinski, 2012). Yet, after eight years under a politically conservative governor who denied climate change, the state has offered relatively little support to its coastal local governments, and thus adaptation planning across them varies widely (see for example, Ruppert & Deady, 2017). Before the state was left reeling from hurricanes Irma and Michael in 2017–18, few instances of managed retreat or relocation had occurred, despite historically high flood-related property damage (Mach et al., 2019). The variety of the Florida experiences informs this commentary for a more realistic, pragmatic approach to all forms of coastal adaptation planning.¹

Florida is indeed a study in contrasts and ironies. The Gulf of Mexico to the west is usually gentle, which has permitted the Nature Coast, an expanse of salt marshes spanning eight rural counties. But the Gulf’s hurricanes are intense, as seen when Michael leveled the town of Mexico Beach in the Florida Panhandle. Against the Atlantic Ocean is the state’s largest metropolitan area known as the Gold Coast, or simply South Florida, which has six million people spread across the major cities of West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. Directly to the west is the Everglades, a vast wetland so low that the cities must account for the sea rising from both directions. The state’s karst limestone substrate further complicates matters by bringing the water table to the surface during heavy rains, despite levees, and allowing saltwater to intrude into the aquifers tapped as the primary source of potable and irrigation water. Drainage canals, stormwater systems, and rivers provide additional conduits for high tides to reach inland. Yet, Miami’s towering skyline, which seems to rise up from the ocean, is dotted with cranes building more high-rise condominiums (Bergman, 2019; Sealey, Burch, & Binder, 2018).

More people are now talking about managed retreat (Siders et al., 2019), but at the same time not doing much about it. What are the implications for planning practice striving for resilience? Evident in Florida is that planners confront concomitant environmental, political, institutional, social, and economic constraints on what they can and should do about climate change (Foss, 2018). Here I draw lessons from Florida to make a case for accepting the denial and loss inherent in the clash between human development and climate change, and to establish a way forward via principles of pragmatic adaptation.

Denial: Protection and Accommodation

Understandably, those invested in the coasts are inclined to deny or minimize the threats of climate change, and planning often follows suit (Baptiste, 2016). When the threats are acknowledged, urban planners present the adaptation options of protection, accommodation, managed retreat (or relocation), and proactive avoidance (Butler, Deyle, & Mutnansky, 2016). Florida officials and planners have most often taken the short-term view of ‘engineering’ resilience (Davoudi, 2012) to protect existing development through infrastructure upgrades such as sea walls, beach renourishment, and drainage pumps; or sometimes to accommodate development to the hazard, such as by raising buildings and roads (Torres & Alsharif, 2017). For example, Fort Lauderdale is considered a leader in adaptation planning because it was the first to use the state’s new land use policy tool, adaptation action areas (AAA), to designate vulnerable areas for adaptation (Markell, 2016). For its AAAs, Fort Lauderdale selected flood mitigation projects, rather than retreat or avoidance. The long-term problems with protection and accommodation are that they are expensive and allow continued investment in vulnerable areas. This worsens the inevitable day of reckoning, which is likely to come on suddenly or sooner, since publicized climate and cost projections are underestimates (DeFries et al., 2019; Oppenheimer et al., 2019; Ruppert & Grimm, 2013).

Protection and accommodation can also affect a community’s social fabric, as happened in Cedar Key, a small island town along the Nature Coast.² Longtime Cedar Key residents still mourn the replacement of the low wooden dock, which was a community gathering spot, by a concrete behemoth. They also note how the modern requirement for elevating homes one or more stories off the ground has changed neighborhood character and stranded retiree residents who can no longer climb the stairs. Likewise, Miami Beach’s plans to raise flood-prone roads have residents debating a host of interrelated concerns, including impacts on traffic and drainage (Harris & Gurney, 2018).

Loss: Retreat and Avoidance

Although managed retreat and avoidance seem better aligned with long-term, ‘evolutionary’ resilience (Davoudi, 2012), they are not panaceas, and unmanaged retreat will be unavoidable. The planning field has developed proactive adaptation mechanisms, such as sea level rise vulnerability assessments and post disaster redevelopment plans, but, despite taking these steps, communities usually fall short on actions and enforcement (Berke, Cooper, Aminto, Grabich, & Horney, 2014; Fu, Sun, Frank, & Peng, 2019; Ruppert & Deady, 2017). Even if better supported, the pace of implementing policies and updating assessments/plans would be outmatched by accelerating climate change and capricious natural disasters.

Following Hurricane Irma, Florida reconsidered retreat, and initiated a $75 million grant program for local governments to purchase damaged homes at fair-market value from willing sellers. However, buyouts are cumbersome multi-year processes which leave homeowners in limbo (Weber & Moore, 2019), and voluntary programs can hollow out neighborhoods that then isolate the remaining residents who may have rational reasons for staying (Mast, 2019).

An earlier case of a local government attempting to retreat from a vulnerable area shows the social, financial, and legal challenges. Summer Haven is a historic beachside community in St. Johns County in northeast Florida.³ In 2004 a hurricane damaged the road between the houses and beach, Old A1A. The road had a history of washouts, so the county decided not to maintain the road and issued a temporary building moratorium, since the cost would be more than the county’s budget for its entire road system, and even more money would be needed for property buyouts (Guinta, 2013). The residents sued, and after one resident had a health emergency and could not be reached by an ambulance, the county negotiated an agreement to maintain the road. Furthermore, the case established the legal precedent that government inaction when there is a ‘duty to act’ could support a claim for inverse condemnation (a constitutional takings clause). In 2016, soon after the county repaired the road, a hurricane wiped it out again; and before a new federal project for the road could be approved, a 2019 hurricane began carving a new inlet between the houses and buried the road in sand.

Florida has also had limited success with avoidance. A nationwide study by Climate Central (2019) found Florida to have the highest number of houses being built in vulnerable areas, despite several statewide policies aimed at coastal flood zones, including the 2015 ‘Peril of Flood’ law requiring that mandatory local comprehensive plans explicitly address sea level rise (Ruppert & Deady, 2017). The national Biggert Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 had the potential to curb coastal development by reducing insurance subsidies so rates would reflect the full actuarial risk, but it was repealed within two years due to public backlash. At the local level, the small municipality of Yankeetown (to the south of Cedar Key) made state news when it codified a Natural Resource AAA to protect its saltmarshes from development, but it has not implemented a consensus based recommendation to direct new growth away from low-lying developed areas and towards the higher elevation receiving area designated in the town’s transferable development rights program (Volk, Frank, & Nettles, 2015).

Pragmatic Adaptation

The discussion above has situated retreat and avoidance within the broader context. The reality is that in the coming years planners will face significant inertia, spend much of their efforts shepherding protection and accommodation projects to preserve the local tax base, and perhaps their own jobs, without the benefit of much avoidance. Increasingly, as the threats amplify and funds draw down, planners will be involved with the consequences of unplanned property owner retreat, government abandonment of services, and drawn-out planned relocation programs, all of which will have profound social equity repercussions (Siders et al., 2019). Acceptance of this reality means turning towards strategies for managing urban and economic decline, coping with community trauma and loss, and humanitarianism (Erfan, 2017; Hollander & Németh, 2011; Tulumello, 2019).

One Cedar Key leader sees her town’s best approach as akin to a hospice, keeping life comfortable and meaningful by maintaining their connection with nature, celebrating community, and documenting what they will likely lose, but not by going to the extremes of life support, i.e., hard engineering (Swirko, 2017). Fitting this soft, delayed retreat philosophy, the city is restoring coastal wetlands and oyster reefs, and choosing to remain in place, such as when officials consciously decided to restore, not to raise or move, their City Hall following a hurricane in 2016. Accepting both climate change and societal constraints will allow community leaders and planners to reframe adaptation in terms of human meaning rather than prescriptions.

Pragmatic adaptation not only accepts denial and loss, it can open up previously unknown options for evolutionary resilience through communicative learning and planning (Campos et al., 2016; Innes & Booher, 2010; Trell & van Geet, 2019). The interconnectedness of social-built-environmental systems demands interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder collaborations, and advanced engagement techniques. One such technique was a sea level rise planning role-play game developed for public workshops held during adaptation planning for the Matanzas Basin of northeast Florida.⁴ The game educated participants about the nuances of adaptation strategies and enabled them to take the perspectives of different stakeholders in the region; and the participants and project leaders saw how agreements might be achieved in real life. Overall the highly collaborative Matanzas project built consensus for managed retreat and avoidance (Linhoss, Kiker, Shirley, & Frank, 2014), which participants then incorporated, i.e., mainstreamed, into local government policies, private sector decisions, and land acquisition for wildlife to migrate inland. In areas with less planning capacity, collaboration can hasten progress when those assisting give local governments directly actionable products and tools, such as occurred when a university produced the policy language for Yankeetown’s Natural Resource AAA (Adaptation Action Areas).

Conclusion

Florida’s high-stakes struggles to come to terms with climate change have provided valuable insights into the complex reality of adaptation planning, which explained the prevalence of engineering resilience, but also redefined evolutionary resilience and the roles of protection, accommodation, retreat, and avoidance. Although key lessons were that denial and loss are inevitable, and that planners do not have as much control over outcomes as they might like, pragmatic adaptation has the positive potential to expand planning into new realms of service, human connections, and meaning.

Notes on Contributor

Dr. Kathryn Frank is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida, USA. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary and collaborative planning practices to improve regional resilience and sustainability. She has been the principal investigator for $1 million in action research projects concerning coastal adaptation to sea level rise, which have combined the physical, social, and policy sciences. Her interests have also led to studies of rural planning, environmental management, and neighborhood planning. Email: [email protected]

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As Safe as Houses: Do People Consider Climate Change Impacts in ‘Choosing’ Where to Live?

Karyn Bosomworth^a and Raphaele Blanchi^b

^aCentre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; ^bCSIRO, Land & Water, Melbourne, Australia

Safe and affordable housing is a central tenet of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 (United Nations (UN), 2015). Concurrently, climate change is increasing the occurrence of natural hazards across the planet; particularly for those places already renowned for their natural hazard risks. As we write (late 2019), California is facing another round of wildfires in the Autumn, and the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland are experiencing ‘catastrophic’¹ fire conditions in Spring. There will undoubtedly be studies and reviews following these events (again).

As two people with a deep love of ‘Country’ – the Australian landscape – we have and do consider the implications of climate change for natural hazards, particularly wildfire, in our choices about where we and our families might live. We have friends and family that have already moved from places that might be considered to have a high bushfire risk to highly urban contexts, because they were concerned that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of bushfires. This has led us to consider to what extent other people – where they have a choice – are making decisions about where to live, informed by an understanding of the implications of climate change for natural hazards? And, if these choices become a particularly important influence on housing and population patterns, what are the equity and justice implications?

Within the fields of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation (separately and together), there is a growing cohort of studies examining how authorities and communities are managing their natural hazard risks. This burgeoning academic literature is exploring a number of the implications of the intersections between housing and climate change implications for natural hazards. Reflective of the way in which housing in Australia is predominantly viewed through an economic resource lens, rather than a right, many of these studies are exploring the influence of natural hazard risks on property prices. Most studies (but not many) have examined the influence of housing prices, mostly in relation to flood events, and most are in the US. For example, in a study in New York, Boston, and Chicago before and after Hurricane Sandy, Eichholtz, Steiner, & Yönder, 2019, p. 1) found that “properties exposed to flood risk experience slower price appreciation after the storm than equivalent unexposed properties”. Their work suggests that “the price effect is not driven by physical damage incurred, nor by concurrent unrelated pricing trends for waterfront property; it persists through time, suggesting it does not reflect a temporary overreaction that is subsequently reversed; it is driven by higher risk premiums for exposed properties” (p. 1); and it is influenced by views of locals. Drawing on ‘prospect theory’, which suggests that people are likely to overestimate risks with which they have some familiarity and ignore risks that are unfamiliar, Husby (2016, p. 41) suggests that “households will ignore flood risk until a flood actually happens, after which they will attach a disproportional weight to the likelihood of a new flood”. So perhaps people do not consider the possibility of risks they have not yet experienced?

A smaller but growing literature, primarily from within geography, has started examining the issue of ‘climigration’ – where people are moving in response to experienced or potential impacts. For example, Hamilton, Saito, Loring, Lammers, and Huntington (2016) argues that behavioral responses to environmental pressures tend to be socially mediated and complex, with environmental ‘push’ forces clearest in the wake of disasters – ‘climigration’. There is also the case of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) directly allocating $48 million of federal funding to the residents of the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana to relocate the entire community. In a case study of New York City following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Buchanan, Oppenheimer, and Parris (2019) used a discrete choice experiment that suggested that the odds of homeowners who have already taken a low-hanging fruit adaptation measure (such as stocking up on resources for an emergency) are 80% less likely to take out insurance or 66% less likely to relocate in the future: “[t]he odds of homeowners to relocate are also ~1.9, ~2.2, and ~3.1 times as great if their peers relocate, nuisance flooding becomes a frequent occurrence, and property values fall substantially, respectively” (p. 809). In other words, if people have already undertaken some kind of action, they are less likely to relocate. Their study was also one of the few studies that considered the implications for renters. They found “that renters’ motivation to relocate is largely driven more by external issues such as crime, gentrification, and economic security than by flood hazard” (p. 809). Matthews and Potts (2018) describe climigration as the adaptation option of last resort in response to chronic and severe impacts that may render settlements unviable. They advocate for anticipatory land-use planning systems to strategically guide climigration responses if vulnerable communities are identified. What land use planning (and development) systems will we need to deal with the potential of people actively avoiding living in areas they consider too risky, or leaving where they are currently living in anticipation of more natural hazards ahead of any experience of these hazards? It seems that the foci of most studies is to explore responses to impacts i.e. after natural hazards have impacted communities. There appears to have been much less exploration of the extent to which people are considering the growing threats to our urban environments from climate change in their choices about where to live – where they have such choice.

There is a wealth of publicly available information and data available for any potential householder about current bushfire risks, albeit with little guidance on how to interpret this data. However, even if our awareness and concern grows, are people considering the implications of climate change in their choices around housing locations? What guidance is there if people were wanting to do so? In disaster risk reduction lexicon, the primary action to mitigate any natural hazard risk (likelihood and consequence) is to avoid creating them in the first place. Therefore, in an ideal world, we would avoid having our homes in places facing significant natural hazard risks, such as fire or flood. However, we already have significant development in some of the most well-renowned, high risk locations in the world, including in our own home State, Victoria. Concurrently, several studies have indicated that the occurrence and intensity of fire weather for these places is only going to increase and indeed, other places less well-associated with bushfire risk may increasingly face such risks (Hennessy et al., 2005). Yet, there appears to be little guidance for people in how to take this into account in their individual decisions, and also for the planning fraternity.

Studies exploring the needs, possibilities and implications of ‘managed retreat’ are perhaps those closest to the questions we have reflected on here. As Siders and colleagues have suggested:

[F]aced with global warming, rising sea levels, and the climate-related extremes they intensify, the question is no longer whether some communities will retreat – moving people and assets out of harm’s way – but why, where, when, and how they will retreat. To the extent that retreat is already happening, it is typically ad hoc and focused on risk reduction in isolation from broader societal goals. It is also frequently inequitable and often ignores the communities left behind or those receiving people who retreat. (p. 761)

A similar argument perhaps to that of Matthews and Potts regarding a strategic land use planning system response, Siders et al. (2019) argue for a reconceptualizing of retreat “as a set of tools used to achieve societal goals, communities and nations gain additional adaptation options and a better chance of choosing the actions most likely to help their communities thrive” (p. 761). For example, the inequities of cheaper housing in higher risk areas are being explored. For example, cases such as that of Fox Beach on Staten Island, which, “after the completion of the Verrazano Bridge in 1964, the population of the island more than doubled to 500,000. The rising cost of housing throughout the rest of the city further pushed residents from the city’s core into lower cost housing on the island, much of it located on floodprone areas along beaches or wetlands” (Consensus Building Institute [CBI], 2015, p. 1). These residents then lobbied for and received a buy-out program. However, “of the several hundred original homeowners in Fox Beach, less than a dozen remain, mostly those too behind on their mortgages to afford buyout offers without a debt forgiveness component” (ibid.). What are the implications for planning and public policy for those remaining residents with limited capacity to choose where they live, where the state has clearly agreed the location is at high risk? This literature has only begun to consider the questions this raises about increased pressure on those locations considered or perceived to face lower or fewer natural hazard risks (although not necessarily other risks), and the communities living there.

Their work highlights important ethical questions for understanding the implications of people avoiding particular locations if they perceive a growing natural hazard risk. Here, insights from pertinent fields, such as environmental justice and ‘managed retreat’ studies, are needed to engage with the ethical and justice implications. As disaster and climate change researchers concerned with social-ecological justice, this suggests there remain significant questions for us all, including state versus individual responsibilities, particularly in the context of property rights and the persistent short-term profit-making drivers of housing development despite long-term projections for increasing natural hazard risks. If a pattern begins to emerge where people with choice are avoiding particular locations because of their increasing risk of natural hazards under a changing climate, what are the implications for people who do not have the privilege of such choice? Here, insights from studies of disaster and housing politics, as well as social and environmental justice, would likely be informative.

This returns us to many of the as-yet-unresolved existing challenges of intersections between disaster risk reduction and land use planning: what is the onus on land use planning authorities and policymakers to prevent development in locations facing natural hazard risks? At what point will a location be deemed uninhabitable because of potential future risks? How do planners and planning authorities ensure safe housing for all, not just for those who can afford to move to locations facing fewer or lower natural hazard risks? And when will we start to talk seriously about all this?

Notes on Contributors

Dr Karyn Bosomworth is a Senior Research Fellow and Co-Convenor of RMIT University’s Climate Change Transformations research group, in Melbourne Australia. Her research seeks to bring a social-ecological systems perspective on questions of sustainability and justice under climate change. Her current research projects include cross-sectoral adaptation risks, community-based heatwave planning, climate change implications for emergency services, and adaptive planning in the water sector. Email: [email protected]

Dr Raphaele Blanchi is a researcher at the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia) Land & Water in the bushfire adaptation team. She has a background in geography, risk assessment and land-use planning. Her research is concerned with understanding and preventing risk posed by bushfire to communities and infrastructure. Email: [email protected]

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The Implications of Climate Related Resettlement Policies in Cities of the Global South

Cassidy Johnson

Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, UK

In cities, climate related resettlement may refer to resettlement of people living in locations considered ‘at risk’ due to climate-related disaster events. To understand the implications of climate-related resettlement policies in cities of the Global South, we need to ask a few simple questions: In cities of the global south, why do people live in areas that would require resettlement? What does ‘climate-related resettlement’ mean in policy and in practice? What does planning need to do to combat the growing trend of widespread evictions related to climate change and disaster risk?

Urban Risks are a Culmination of Climate Change Risks Plus Development Deficits

Residents of cities in the global south face compounding urban risks, not only related to climate change, but also to development issues. Climate change risks are increasing, bringing variable changes to normal climatic patterns, for example sea level rise for those in coastal areas, extreme precipitation, longer rainy seasons, more tropical storms, heavier winds leading to coastal and inland flooding and landslides. Other regions, in contrast, are seeing hotter or dryer weather, more droughts and less rain, water scarcity, heat stress and air pollution (Revi et al., 2014).

These changes in weather patterns are compounded with increasing urban densities and the development challenges this brings. Worldwide it is estimated that 30 per cent of people live in informal settlements, comprising the major proportion of residents in cities of the global south. For example in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 60–70 per cent of urban dwellers live in informal settlements, which lack basic infrastructure such as paved roads and pavements, piped water, sewerage and waste collection, electricity, fire safe structures, security, and access to affordable health care (The United Republic of Tanzania, 2016). The increasing density of cities is leading to environmental degradation such as forests or green land cover removal for new buildings and fuel. Due to the lack of piped water infrastructure, it is common for people to drill wells and draw on ground water, which in many Asian cities, such as Jakarta, Shanghai and Bangkok, is leading to ground subsidence (Jha et al., 2012).

Why People are Living in Exposed Areas

The areas within cities that are worst exposed to urban risks are usually those inhabited by the poorest residents. This includes houses built into steep slopes at risk of landslides, informal settlements in low-lying areas or riverbeds at risk of flooding, high density informal neighbourhoods with narrow streets at risk of fire, and communities located next to dump sites at risk of disease (Hardoy, Mitlin, & Satterthwaite, 2013).

Families may decide to locate to higher risk areas because these areas bring certain opportunities. The opportunity of housing that is affordable and with flexible costs, a location that is close to jobs and services that reduces the need for unaffordable transport, proximity to existing social networks, such as family or people migrating from the same regions or villages.

Living in these exposed areas carry serious risks, though, which are weighed, in people’s minds, against the opportunities (Marx, Lwasa, Johnson, Kisembo, & Barrow, 2016). These risks include exposure to possible illnesses and injuries, even potential loss of life as well as monetary costs in terms of damaged property, lost wages, as well as time spent to clean up, repair, care for sick relatives, etc., when disaster happens. Within these groups, some people are particularly vulnerable, including women, the elderly, disabled people and those belonging to particular castes. While we all live with a certain level of risk in our daily lives, a significant and growing number of people live in very high-risk areas. Exposure to climate risk is increasing people’s vulnerability to everyday events as well as to large intensive disasters. While living in areas exposed to urban risks may be portrayed as a choice, as such, there is actually little choice that people have due to economic constraints. For example in Kampala, Uganda, informal settlements such as Bwaise III, are located in the lowest elevations, where all the rain water drains down from the hills. This leads to almost daily flooding during the rainy seasons, inundating people’s houses and the areas around their houses. While some of the worst flooded areas in the community have been abandoned, a thriving community of people continue to live in Bwaise III and deal with the flooding problems and the health and economic difficulties these bring. For many people this is because they have lived there for many years, and have some kind of tenure status, for others the area offers cheap rental housing and access to inexpensive food and informal markets to sell goods (Lwasa, Johnson, Marx, Barrow, & Kisembo, 2016). Sometimes families find the risks too much to bear, for example one family who had lived there for many years left the area after a family member was almost swept away in a flash flood, but they decided to come back a couple of years later due to the economic difficulties of renting elsewhere.

Why are People Being Evicted? What is Resettlement?

According to Ferris (2012), resettlement is a major integrated, comprehensive movement of people and families, which normally involves significant distance between the original and new location. Resettlement involves not only new housing and services but also new social and economic relations, and new challenges such as access to work and social cohesion.

In an effort to try to address risks to people living in highly vulnerable areas, many governments and planners conclude that the answer lies in relocating people out of the highly exposed areas and resettling them to other locations in the city. Time after time, in urban plans or municipal operations the solution of resettlement of people from informal areas of the city is put forth, for example, in metro Manila following the 2009 Ondoy floods (Alvarez & Cardenas, 2019), or in Jakarta where the flood risk management plan proposed the relocation of thousands of people from flood prone areas (Octavianti & Charles, 2018). In Karonga, a small town of 50,000 in Northern Malawi, relocation from high risk areas is one of the town’s key planning strategies (Malawi Government, 2013)

However, resettlement as a strategy for addressing climate-related risk in urban areas is proven to be flawed. From the government’s perspective, resettlement is a very costly endeavour, especially in countries that cannot afford social housing programmes. Furthermore, resettlement is rarely successful from residents’ perspectives – the new locations fall short of meeting people’s needs; for example, they are located far away, or require expensive payments for housing or services. Furthermore, and most importantly, resettlement programmes are, by and large, top-down in decision-making and therefore the affected communities, usually the poorest and most vulnerable in society, are forced to leave against their will. Thus, in most situations, resettlement amounts to a forced eviction. Evictions refer to the act of expulsion of someone from possession of land or house usually by a process of law. In evictions, households are moved forcibly without an alternative location being planned for the move. In other situations, while climate or other environmental risks may be used as a reasoning for the resettlement or eviction, there are many examples where relocation is officially proposed by governments on the basis of ‘moving people out of harm’s way’, when the real intention is to clear valuable areas of the city for higher value uses, often as part of a ‘global city’ agenda.

Top-Down Decision-Making

One of the major problems with climate-related resettlement is insufficient understanding of decision-making processes, implementation challenges and the associated outcomes of such interventions on people and the cities in the short and long-term. Resettlement needs to be understood within the framework of long-term sustainable development, and not just a means for risk reduction. The design and implementation of resettlement schemes and relocations often exclude key stakeholders and lose sight of the development context, creating other socio-economic and environmental risks for the people moving, and for the city.

Part of the chasm in decision-making around resettlement is that risk is subjective; people make habitation decisions based on their current availability of choices, opportunities, values and priorities. Thus, there are certain risks that are acceptable to people, based on the socio-economic and/or political opportunities offered by the location, and the value people place on these opportunities. Decision-making authorities understand risk differently, and often equate risk with exposure to extreme events and simplistically assume resettlement as a stand-alone tool for disaster risk management, a vision which is aided by legal and policy frameworks. For example, the policy concept of ‘un-mitigable risk areas’ in Colombia and Peru and ‘untenable’ in India, present visions of risk based on specific methodologies that are acted on by local level institutional actors. The data used for such decisions offers a limited view of risk and risk mitigation options available. It underestimates adaptation strategies adopted by people living in hazard-prone areas. These laws are rigid, and often place too much power in the hands of the few.

The Need for Planning and Development Solutions, Not Evictions

The risk brought on by climate change cannot be separated from everyday life; it must be seen within the broader patterns of society. If one looks solely at risk mitigation, then resettlement may seem a good option. But given the choice, people will rarely choose this option. Risk is a subjective concept and will be defined differently across sectors of society and science. Deciding on how to mitigate the risks from disaster and climate change requires a collective understanding of the values that different people have and the current and future hazards in that place. Better information on the risks people face, and how the people affected see these risks is needed, through bottom-up ways of communicating risk. This can be coupled with scientific knowledge about the most severe threats, now and in the future.

The risks that are created by climate change need to be viewed as a development problem, and the ensuing disasters serve as an indicator of skewed development. To reduce urban risk the systemic factors and drivers of multi-dimensional poverty and inequality need urgent attention, rather than reactive approaches to remove people from high-risk areas.

Notes on Contributor

Dr Cassidy Johnson is Associate Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Her research contributes to the area of disaster risk reduction and recovery and to the role of local governments and civil society in this – integrating an understanding of disaster-risk into development and climate change adaptation. This encompasses looking at environmental justice issues related to urban planning, housing quality, building code regulations, informal settlements (and upgrading), evictions and relocation. Email: [email protected]

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Notes

1. Hoch (1984) launched pragmatic planning theory. Picketts, Déry, and Curry (2014) began to explore climate adaptation through a pragmatic lens, but they stopped short of developing theory. The pragmatic adaptation approach developed in this commentary has principles in common with this previous work, as well as some leading literature not explicitly applying pragmatism, such as Moser and Boykoff (2013).

2. Findings for the towns of Cedar Key and Yankeetown, in Levy County, are based on a series of action research projects begun in 2012 and led by the author and others from the University of Florida with funding from Florida Sea Grant and state agencies. Information about these projects is available at ChangingLevyCoast.org.

3. Findings for Summer Haven and St. John County are based in part on the author’s action research project, Planning for Sea Level Rise in the Matanzas Basin, conducted in 2012–15 with funding from the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative. Information about this project is available at PlanningMatanzas.org.

4. See above note for the Matanzas Basin project. The planning region surrounded the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM NERR) and included the cities of St. Augustine and Palm Coast.

1. The word catastrophic is not used here for hyperbole. It has a formal definition in bushfire warnings across Australia. Catastrophic fire conditions are ‘Code Red’. These are the worst conditions for a bush or grass fire. If a fire starts and takes hold, it will be uncontrollable, unpredictable and fast moving. Spot fires will start, move quickly and come from many directions. Homes are not designed or constructed to withstand fires in these conditions. The safest place to be is away from high risk bushfire areas.