Asheville Was Never A ‘Climate Haven.’ Nowhere Is.

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. For years, Asheville, North Carolina, was called a climate haven, a place safe from the touch of climate change exacerbated disasters. But late last month, Hurricane Helene put that label into question. Some of the worst damage of the storm occurred inland, in Western North Carolina. As North Carolina continues to recover from Helene and Florida assesses the scale of damage from Hurricane Milton, how can these communities build back more resilient and better prepared for climate disasters of the future?

Joining me to ponder through these big questions are my guests, Dr. Jesse Keenan, Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning at Tulane University in New Orleans And Dr. Jola Ajibade, Associate Professor of Environmental and Climate Justice at Emory University in Atlanta. Welcome to Science Friday.

JESSE KEENAN: Thanks so much for having me.

JOLA AJIBADE: Thank you so much for having me, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Nice to have you back, Jola. Let’s start off by tackling this idea of a climate haven. Jesse, is a climate haven a myth at this point?

JESSE KEENAN: Yeah, climate havens are a fiction of the media.

IRA FLATOW: Really?

JESSE KEENAN: There’s no scholarship associated with climate havens. What we see in the scholarship, in the literature and the empirical research, is that we have sending zones and receiving zones. There are places where people are leaving, and they’re leaving for a variety of different reasons, sometimes the risk of loss or actual loss, and sometimes it’s the chronic economic stress, for instance, insurance costs. For a variety of different reasons, there are places where people are leaving, and they’re getting pushed out, forced out, or under their own election, they want to live somewhere else, particularly in advance of what they see as increasing climate impacts, in that there is no place that’s fully immune from climate impacts.

Certainly, Asheville has been a place where people have been moving, particularly from coastal Carolinas as well as the Southwest. It’s been viewed as a place that has moderate climate, which indeed it does, but it doesn’t escape the fact that in all these places and all of these observed receiving zones across the United States, there’s still a tremendous capacity, particularly for extreme precipitation. And the risks are there. And they’re quite real, as we’ve recently seen.

IRA FLATOW: If these devastating floods, the rainfall and everything that comes along with it, if this is the new normal, is it possible to rebuild emergency infrastructure? Can we set that up? What kinds do we need?

JESSE KEENAN: So when we’re talking about engineering resilience within infrastructure systems and critical infrastructure systems, there are some things that we can engineer and finance and develop, and there’s certainly investments that we can make that can manage extreme events on some level. And in fact, some of that engineering resilience did exist, for instance, within the potable water system and design in Asheville. There was redundancy there, and based on experience, where they had had lost some pipes from prior floods.

But I think it’s worth recognizing that those investments have costs. And Asheville is a city of not even 100,000 people. It’s a quarter million in the urban area, and the entire metro area is not even half a million. It does not have a tremendous economic capacity to make unlimited investments in what is very expensive infrastructure that can very often pass on a cost burden, whether it’s a tax base or a utility rate base for people who really, in many cases, can’t afford it. So, yes, we can design and we can engineer critical infrastructure to withstand a certain broader parameters of environmental performance in the context of climate impacts. But it comes with a cost. And many places simply can’t afford it.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah. Jola, the scope of devastation with these hurricanes reminds me a bit of when COVID first struck and we had all these first responders being overwhelmed that were almost frozen in place.

JOLA AJIBADE: Yeah, the way I see it, both for Asheville, but also recently for Hurricane Milton and Florida, is I think about this as a cascading disaster and a consecutive disaster. So if we think about Asheville, we can think about the variety of devastation, the transportation system, the roads, the bridges that have been damaged due to the heavy winds and to the floods and the sewage systems and also the power grids. And people lost communication systems.

And I remember watching just on TV when a woman had said, it took about five days before emergency was kicked in. And that’s too long for someone to declare an emergency, a state of emergency, in Asheville. And this goes back to the idea of people in different parts of the world feeling that they are relatively safe, when indeed, we’re not in a changing climate.

And so when we’re thinking about the impact of the Hurricane Helene in Asheville, we have to think about the multiple levels of disasters that have happened to different people at the level of individual, the community, but also at the level of the city. And when we’re thinking, how do we really plan and build resilience, you have to think, resilience to what? Resilience– is it economic resilience? As Jesse was saying, there’s not enough resources to go around.

But the question is, what’s the tradeoff? So are we willing to invest in other sectors, rather than putting a lot of investment in building resilience against disasters? And I know when these types of disasters happen, that’s when there’s a lot of attention and a lot of interest in putting money, but we need to do this proactively before the disasters happen, not just right after. We have to start thinking long term on how to deal with the impact of climate change, how to deal with the impact of category 3, category 4, category 5 hurricanes like we’ve seen.

And specifically, how do we manage disasters that happen right after one another, as we’ve seen with Hurricane Milton? For families that were devastated in Sarasota, in Tampa, all of these other places as well, in Naples, how do we really help communities and cities better prepare is the big question. And there are a variety of approaches to think about it.

IRA FLATOW: Well, when you say, how do we do that, is that a political question? Because these budgets and decisions are made by public policy people.

JOLA AJIBADE: It is an economic question. It is a social. But it’s also a political question. You’re right. It comes down to what do we prioritize when you’re thinking about the changing climate? Do we prioritize human life? Do we prioritize investment in infrastructure in the long term? Do we prioritize the needs of people for emergency in situations like this and long term investment in infrastructure? So for me, it comes down to who are the decision makers, and what is the priority for this decision makers, and how do they think about long term investment in reducing impact of disasters for communities?

JESSE KEENAN: So I think there’s a really important point here that Jola brings up, which is that we tend to think that through democratic processes we can determine who gets protected and who gets left behind. That’s how we distribute resources and investments and adaptation more broadly.

But I think it’s worth recognizing that right now, the private sector is firmly in control. It’s not the local government that’s sending you a notice that you’re in a high risk area. It’s your rent bill. It’s your insurance bill. It’s forces of the private sector that are beginning to rapidly internalize the risk and price it accordingly. And those are the signals that are telling people that, hey, you live in a pretty high risk area, and you’re going to begin to pay for that accordingly.

IRA FLATOW: And, Jola, how do we make that decision? How much of a focus needs to be on what we call the gray infrastructure, like bridges and roads versus other types of infrastructure, perhaps food or survival?

JOLA AJIBADE: Before I move to answer that question, one thing I do want to just add to what you and Jesse were saying earlier is the fact that it’s not everywhere that things are getting cheaper, in Florida, certainly not. There are some small towns like in areas like a small town of Cortez in Florida, there is this development called Hunters Point development homes, where they are building hurricane-proof houses. And in those locations, they found that the kind of houses– because they built them to be resilient to about category 5 hurricanes. And they found that those houses, about 31 of them, have actually proven to be hurricane-proof.

So they went through Hurricane Ian. They weren’t affected. And they were significantly affected during Hurricane Idalia. And now, during Hurricane Helene, those homes did survive as well. And the homes also had solar panels, which allowed for continuous electrification and power supply even during the emergency.

However, those types of houses, they go for as high as $1.2 million for a unit. And so that’s pretty expensive. Most people cannot afford it. But I would say we need those types of hurricane-proof or hurricane-resilient homes if one is going to be living in specific areas that are likely to be affected or that will continually be affected by major hurricanes in the future.

And when it comes to our infrastructure, I think we cannot leave those behind either. And this might be a combination of government and private sector working together to build stronger and better infrastructure. Whether it’s storm infrastructure, the sewer infrastructure, particularly, there should be investments in order to prevent contamination of clean water with sewage water. We need better grid systems. And so I think these are common knowledge. The fact that we need resilient infrastructure, I would say that argument has been made for so long. The question is, are we really investing in those direction, or what else are we doing with our resources?

And if you look at Florida, there’s a lot of wealthy people in Florida and a lot of people still building homes along the coast. But should we be building there? Should we be relocating and then reinvesting that money in resilient infrastructures, in power and stronger power grid system? This is up to people to decide, especially people in Florida.

And how do we make adaptation more equitable? How do we make sure that even if we were to relocate people, or if we build better infrastructure for the critical systems that are there, are we doing it in a way that we’re paying attention to different races, different income classes, and different groups that have been affected by past disasters, but that could be affected by recent or future disasters if they don’t move? How do we do all of that is a question of bringing different stakeholders together to make this decision. And I think this is the right time that we need to do this and not wait for the next hurricane to happen before those types of changes begin to– those types of conversations begin to take place.

JESSE KEENAN: So I think Jola sets up something that’s very important for listeners to understand, that there is a limitation to resilience and specifically the type of resilience we call engineering resilience. One, it has costs. And it has a kind of amenitization to real estate that many people can’t afford. Two, you can build all that resilience or resilient infrastructure that you want, but if it’s in a high risk area that isn’t considering land use, it’s not just how you build, for instance, it’s where you build because you can have a structure that can withstand a hurricane and the wind loads, but you still have dependent infrastructure that the public is responsible for largely providing.

So adaptation to one person may be maladaptation, more broadly, to society. And these are tradeoffs that we have to make. And in a place like Florida, that shapes the tax base. They have to shift and move a tax base from these very wealthy areas. But in the long term, in many places, they’re going to save on the infrastructure costs when they adjust their land uses and really force development away from the most high risk areas.

IRA FLATOW: I want to play a clip from David McConville, who is a data scientist who helped the city of Nashville with a flood plan. I’m talking 15 years ago. He said, with an event this extreme, no amount of green infrastructure was going to absorb all that water from Helene. But he thinks what they did has made a bit of a difference.

DAVID MCCONVILLE: You don’t necessarily see how the improvements help people because the thing that you see is the catastrophe. But there are serious lessons to be learned around how taking seriously floodplains, and development, and mudslides, and all of these things that are not going away anytime soon, and if anything, they’re just going to be getting worse.

IRA FLATOW: Jesse, how do you react to that?

JESSE KEENAN: Well, I think that it’s very difficult sometimes for the public to see the investments that we make in the institutional investments, but also the individual investments that are made in both engineering resilience and in adaptation more broadly. And I think it’s a challenge in many ways because we only see viscerally the disaster and the destruction, but we don’t necessarily always see the successes, the avoided losses.

And so it’s difficult– it’s very easy to see the loss. It’s very difficult to see the losses that never happened. And I think there’s an entire area of the academy, and in scholarship, and in science, and social science that tells us that at multiple scales from the households to the institutional level, we are adapting. That’s the nature and the course of human civilization is to adapt. You either adapt or you fail. And so I think the challenge we have as scholars, but also in public policy, is to make it more clear what the benefits are of adaptation and how we all play a role in adapting to climate change.

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you’re just joining us, we’re talking to Jesse Keenan and Jola Ajibade about hurricane resilience and infrastructure. Jola, does one adaptation we make and should be considering relocation, just get out of those places that are going to be hit over and over again? It could be on the shore. It could be on the flood plain.

JOLA AJIBADE: When we’re thinking about relocation, I like to think about it in terms of evidence. So what’s the evidence that relocation does make a difference for communities. So I’m going to refer to a paper that was published by my colleague, Liz Koslov. She’s in UCLA. She and others wrote a paper about the effect of relocation on communities that relocated after Hurricane Sandy in New York.

And what they found was that communities that were eligible for buyouts and did take their buyout and moved to another location, those communities, after a few years, felt less stressed, they felt happier, and they felt that they were recovering, compared to those who stayed behind and rebuilt in the same location.

And so the question for people who have gone through Helene, and who perhaps have gone through Milton as well, and for those who have gone through both, especially in the case of Sarasota community in Florida, the question is, what is the best approach moving forward? I would say, yes, it’s important for communities to consider all of the different strategies for adapting. Certainly, considering relocation will be helpful as well. And look at the evidence. Does it help when people move?

And obviously, if some people decide that they’re going to move, the question comes down to, are they going to get funded by the government? Are they going to get funded through insurance? Do they have their own money to be able to fund the relocation? To tell people to relocate without providing the resources that they need, the information that they need to make an informed decision would not be helpful in making those decisions if people don’t have the variety of data that they need to be able to make that decision. And that’s why for me, I would say put all of the different adaptation strategies on the table, give them the evidence of the data, and let people make their decision on their own.

IRA FLATOW: Well, we have run out of time, such an interesting conversation. Dr. Jola Ajibade, Associate Professor of Environmental and Climate Justice at Emory University in Atlanta, and Dr. Jesse Kenan, Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning at Tulane University in New Orleans.

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