Community-led relocations and the use of buyouts as an adaptation to climate change-induced flooding and erosion

THE ISSUE

Climatic changes, sea level rise, and repetitive flooding (Figure 1) act in concert with social and political drivers such as colonial histories, inequitable distribution of shoreline armament and other hazard mitigation technology, and lack of political and economic capital, which together may lead to the displacement of communities along the coastal U.S. How this process of relocation happens can determine if people will be subject to increased or decreased risk, either of which may occur in place or through inequitable relocation processes.

Figure 1. The Calm Before the Storm. © Dennis Davis, all rights reserved. “This is a winter snow storm. All the water that’s there on the ocean, it is supposed to be frozen, but it’s not and you have a big storm coming. This is beautiful, but it is also dangerous. This was in October – right at the beginning of the storm season; if the ocean is frozen, then the waves can’t cut into the permafrost and cause erosion and flooding. If the water is not frozen, then it is dangerous.”

WHY IT MATTERS

While relocation away from the coastline may be necessary, there is less understanding of the social impacts of these relocations. Studies of development-induced displacement show long-term negative social consequences as an outcome of forced relocation and displacement. It is therefore highly likely that climate and disaster policy that does not explicitly mitigate for negative social outcomes of displacement will create new risks for displaced peoples. Among communities with high levels of social capital and histories of forced displacement via government intrusion, such as among Indigenous peoples, there is an even greater risk that policy mechanisms that disrupt ties to land and community will violate human rights and may undermine tribes’ rights to self-determination and tribal sovereignty.

STATE OF KNOWLEDGE

Voluntary buyouts are the most common policy solution to repetitive flooding in the U.S., and are administered on an individual scale. Federal buyouts, supported through FEMA, allow municipal or state governments to purchase property (mostly following a disaster) at pre-storm market value. In these federal buyouts, properties are cleared, then zoned as green space without the prospect of redevelopment. While some acquisitions of at-risk properties allow for redevelopment, voluntary buyouts administered through FEMA do not.

Despite their regular use, there is a lack of empirical research on buyout program experiences and their efficacy and impact on people who accept buyouts or their communities¹. There also continue to be concerns regarding policy equity. First, in some cases, there is evidence that protection in place is a mitigation strategy disproportionately offered to wealthier and whiter communities, while relocation is administered in response to risk in lower income and more diverse communities². Second, the outcomes of buyouts for renters and non-property owning occupants are unknown in most cases, but ethnographic data suggest that, despite rental assistance, some struggle to find a place to live following a buyout^3,4. Third, in places like Indigenous communities in Alaska, the value of a home purchased via a buyout does not meet the cost of rebuilding a new home in subsistence territory. In the absence of other funding, this discrepancy may increase the debt load on tribes and individuals, limiting the efficacy of this program for tribal communities or any group that wants to rebuild together⁵. So far, buyouts have also restricted access to previously inhabited land, making it difficult to maintain relationships with traditional territory for communities who want to have some right of return. Fifth, because buyouts explicitly target individual property owners, planning and funding for a community-wide relocation is logistically challenging⁵. A recently administered relocation from Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana has been critiqued for not meeting its obligations to tribal leaders⁶.

The policy landscape, however, is rapidly changing. In 2022, the White House launched the Voluntary Community-Driven Relocation Program. The program is being led by the Department of the Interior and, so far, has dedicated $115 million dollars to 11 tribal communities. Three of these tribes are using the money to fund relocation. The rest are using the funds to plan relocations. Six communities total are in Alaska. Whether these relocations will be timely, ongoing, and prevent social-disarticulation is an evolving question.

WHERE THE RESEARCH IS HEADED

There is currently an explosion of climate-induced relocation and displacement research and funding, as mentioned above. First, researchers continue to develop a nuanced and locally specific understanding of how disasters unfold based on how social inequalities and structural factors interact with local hazards. Second, despite methodological challenges linked to privacy issues, some researchers are trying to follow people during and after relocation, individually and en masse, to empirically measure outcomes and ongoing exposure to risk following a buyout³. Third, researchers are trying to understand the gap between who is offered a buyout and who accepts it. Fourth, researchers and government agencies have recently begun exploring how cost/benefit assessments for hazard mitigation funding may hide histories of disinvestment and create disaster inequities. These efforts to understand the impacts of cost/benefit analysis may offer insight into how disproportionate climate impacts occur in the U.S., and may affect funding streams to communities where buyouts are available. Fifth, some researchers are trying to create concept maps and patterns of migration as an impact of climate change. Because climate-induced migration contributes to other human migration decisions, researchers are trying to measure the overall climate signal in human mobility. Finally, economic researchers are looking for signs in the real estate market to determine how and when climate impacts will affect the desirability of living on the coast, how this impacts political will for making funds available for buyouts, and how these processes affect other migration decisions.

Among this group of authors, we are interested in whether and how law and policy can be used to administer restorative justice and to support local visions of the future. We recognize the inherent strength and resilience in tribal communities in Louisiana and Alaska developed over thousands of years (Figure 2) and query the legal landscape to understand how local desires, including both relocation and protection in place, can be supported or thwarted by federal and state laws and policies.

Figure 2. Learning from the Pro: Learning the Subsistence Lifestyle. © Dennis Davis, all rights reserved. “This is my daughter and her aunt working on the spine of the ugruk. You boil the cut pieces and you eat them – the leftover meat that’s on them. You can see the bigger portions are in the background.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15230430.2023.2291846.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation.