Climate Corner: A Challenge and an Opportunity

Dec 28, 2024

Rebecca Phillips

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

2024 has been a year of climate-related disasters. On Dec. 19, Reuters published one photo from each of the countries mentioned in its coverage this year: of the 125 countries, 22, or more than 15%, of the images featured the aftermath of floods, wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, or heat waves, and this in a year that saw political upheavals and wars across the globe. In the United States alone, wildfires burned 8.4 million acres, a million and a half more than the average of the last ten years, which have seen historically high fire numbers. The eighteen named storms of the Atlantic hurricane season devastated places as far from the coast as Asheville, N.C. and, combined, caused $190 billion in damages. Twenty-four of this year’s climate-related events caused more than $1 billion each in damage and resulted in 418 human deaths in just the U.S.

The areas most at risk for property damage and loss of life are those to which Americans have been moving in recent decades, specifically, the South and Southwest. Arizona’s large cities are possible only because of water diversion from the Colorado River, and that river is drying up. Some Phoenix-area developers have been unable to get building permits because there is not enough water available to service the homes they want to build. Many home insurers have stopped writing policies for hurricane-prone areas of Florida, leaving the state the only insurer available, with half a trillion dollars in liabilities. The National Flood Insurance Program was $21 billion dollars in debt, debt for which taxpayers are ultimately responsible, before the damage caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton.

As Scripps Prize-winning journalist Abrahm Lustgarten puts it in his book “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” “Drought, coastal flooding, crop failures, intensifying hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires will begin to overlap and close in on the country from its edges, slowly making entire regions less attractive and even, in some extreme cases, unlivable. … Decades from now, the United States will be wildly different, even unrecognizable.”

These changes may make some currently growing areas less desirable. While the last few decades have seen more people leaving areas like the MOV than moving here, researchers have noticed what may be the beginning of a new pattern of climate migration, people leaving fire-and hurricane-prone areas for safer parts of the country. Many of these migrants have chosen to settle in the so-called Rust Belt, our country’s former industrial heartland. There have recently been numerous conferences and a fair amount of press on the Great Lakes region as a “climate haven,” an area likely to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Universities and think tanks have been exploring how Rust Belt cities can prepare for population gain. Already, Duluth, Minn., markets itself as “climate-proof Duluth” and in the last few years has seen nearly 2,500 new residents from other states, many of them escaping wildfires and high temperatures. This number represents an over 3% increase in its population after decades of decline. Invest Appalachia has issued a report on the central Appalachians, an area that includes the Mid-Ohio Valley, as a region that can absorb climate migrants and revitalize our communities in the process.

Yes, despite the destruction that climate change is wreaking, we can use this challenge to strengthen the communities in our less-climatically-threatened region. Go to nearly any town or city in Ohio or West Virginia and count the empty homes, retail buildings, and former schools.

Many of these are sturdy buildings in established areas, well worth saving if there were people to do so. In addition to physical infrastructure, our region contains close-knit, welcoming communities. Imagine Wood and Washington counties with 7,000 or so additional residents bringing their skills and ideas, easing labor shortages, creating new businesses raising families. This is a possible dream if we prepare for it, as Marietta is doing with the Reimagine Marietta process.

Creating the physical and social infrastructure for a growing rather than a declining region is not an easy task, but a crisis can provide an opportunity. Climate change is almost certain to bring a stormier, hotter, more dangerous world with less land hospitable to human civilization; however, in our region we have the opportunity to grow and strengthen communities that can thrive more than they ever have.

My wish for the New Year.

***

Rebecca Phillips taught research writing at WVU Parkersburg and is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.