America’s “climate abandonment areas” can be seen by looking closely

The First Street Foundation: Identifying the Relationship Between Flood Risks and Population Change in the United States and Implications for Neighborhood Decisions

First Street Foundation is a nonprofit research group that has developed tools to help residents assess risks from flood, fire, and extreme weather that individual properties face. The journal Nature Communications published its research today. Some researchers at universities and the Environmental Defense Fund contributed to the study.

They used First Street’s flood risk data to build a mathematical model that can detect the relationship between flooding and population change, and control for other factors like job availability that might affect someone’s decision to move.

But if people are trying to avoid moving to flood zones, why are so many people ending up in the most flood-prone parts of the country? The authors of the new study offer some new insight.

“People understand which parts of their community to avoid and which parts of their community are more safe, and they’re acting on that,” says Jeremy Porter, demographer and head of climate implications research at the First Street Foundation that led the study. People are more thoughtful when it comes to where to live.

The phenomenon is more pronounced when you zoom in to see how people are moving from neighborhood to neighborhood. People might picture someone moving far away from home because of the effects of climate change. But that’s just a small slice of overall migration trends. Most people move within the same city, county or metro area.

It is not limited by these regions, which can get hit multiple times by storms during the Atlantic Hurricane season. There are climate abandonment areas throughout the US in places where it is becoming more important to deal with flooding.

Previous research has found that most people stay local when they move to a new home, including in situations where a flood disaster forced them to relocate. That means decisions about where to live and how to stay out of harm’s way often come down to block-by-block or even house-by-house comparisons.

Moves to the Sun Belt “are a macro migration trend,” explains Porter. “But they’re dwarfed by the amount of people that move within their same city. Keep the job, keep the friends, stay close to your family.

They believe that the neighborhoods lost 9 million residents between 2000 and 2020. South Florida and Southeast Texas are places where many of the neighborhoods are located.

Real Estate Buyers Need to Know Before, or Supposed to Know When Your Home Will Be Flooded: A Study by Redfin

At the same time, people buying homes are increasingly aware, and wary, of flood risk. More and more states are requiring that homebuyers receive information about whether a house has flooded before, and whether it is likely to flood in the future. Information about flood risk can be found on some real estate listing sites. And people are less likely to search for flood-prone properties when they are given information as part of the listing about whether a home flooded in the past or is likely to flood in the future, according to a study by the real estate website Redfin.

The US has experienced a rise in flood damage in the last few years. Huge financial losses from flood damage are not sustainable, warns the Federal Emergency Management Agency.