What Happens When Your “Climate Haven” Is No Longer Safe?

Editors’ note: This article has been updated to clarify scholar Jesse Keenan’s role in discussions of climate resilience.

It was supposed to be a safe place. At least, that’s what Kelsey Lahr believed of Asheville, NC. After researching the most climate-resilient places to live in the United States based on data from researchers and experts, Lahr relocated to Asheville in 2020 following years of wildfires and mudslides impacting her home in Santa Barbara, CA.

The Appalachian city of Asheville, with its mild temperatures and inland location, was believed by many, including Lahr, to be safe from severe climate events. But only three years after Lahr’s move, Hurricane Helene surged through the Appalachian region, killing more than 160 people. Over 100 died in North Carolina alone.

As the AP reported, the hurricane “dumped trillions of gallons of water hundreds of miles inland, devastating communities nestled in mountains far from the threat of storm surge or sea level rise.”

One of those communities was Asheville, where floodwaters rose so fast that many residents had no warning or evacuation assistance. NPQ wrote that “less than half of the three-day rainfall in Asheville, NC, was considered by researchers to be a once-in-1,000-year occurrence.” Lahr’s home lost electricity for several weeks and was without potable water for over a month.

The trauma of living through a climate disaster can influence survivors’ decisions on where to go next.

“Clearly southern Appalachia is not the ‘climate haven’ that it was built up to be,” Lahr told the BBC.

But in the age of climate change, events are increasing in severity and frequency. Is any place truly safe? And what does “climate haven” mean now that the places people have fled to are also in danger?

What’s Behind Climate Moves?

Research has found that when people do move due to climate events or worsening climate conditions, they tend to stay close to their original home for various reasons. One reason is convenience. It’s expensive to move. Housing remains limited. Homeownership, or even a deposit for a rental place, is financially out of reach for much of the country. Home insurance is starting to become prohibitive. Moving far away can also mean leaving behind one’s community, schools, established medical care, and the financial and emotional support of family, friends, and neighbors.

NPQ reported on a survey from 2022, which found that 58 percent of people moving for climate reasons stayed within a 10-mile drive of their home, while 74 percent stayed within a 20-mile drive. But finances and community are not the only considerations regarding climate relocations. As NPQ wrote, “Climate change-prompted moves are not usually made willingly and are often accompanied by feelings of loss or regret.”

The trauma of living through a climate disaster can influence survivors’ decisions on where to go next. Some choose to go far, the difficult memories of the disaster driving them away. For Christina Welch, another disaster survivor interviewed by the BBC, living through two California wildfires in as many years was enough. She remembered ash falling from the morning sky. A neighbor shouted at her to wake up and warned her to leave. Welch decided not to return to California, moving across the country to Minnesota.

“There’s only so many times that I was going to go through every fall of worrying about what is going to [be] set on fire, if I was going to lose a house,” she told the BBC.

So-Called Climate Havens

Welch left after the Kincade Fire of 2019. The place where she settled, Duluth, MN, is considered attractive when it comes to climate due to its mild temperatures, an abundance of water—thanks to its proximity to the Great Lakes, the world’s largest body of fresh water—and its location above sea level in the upper Midwest. In 2019 climate change scholar Jesse Keenan made the tongue-in-cheek reference to the city as “climate-proof Duluth.”

That’s a nickname some new residents took to heart—many, like Welch, fleeing to the city from California. In 2023, The New York Times reported that Duluth, once a post-industrial city whose zenith appeared to have passed, saw 2,494 new residents from out of state over a period of five years.

“Climate haven” is a phrase that has grown in popularity in the last few years; those commonly identified in the United States include the Midwest, inland Northeast, and northern Great Plains. Internationally, parts of Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia are thought of as havens due to the less severe weather they’re expected to experience.

Some cities, such as Buffalo, NY, are advertising themselves as such. In 2019, the mayor of Buffalo, during his state-of-the-city address, declared the city in western New York state a “climate refuge city.” The mayor later said this was an out-of-context joke, but local economic development seized on the phrase, boosting on a still-active website: “Buffalo’s weather is going from punchline to lifeline. You read that right. In the not-so-distant future, Buffalo may have the most desirable climate in the United States.”

Regardless of their climate-safe claims, are places prepared for an influx of new residents? Aging infrastructure may prove to be an issue. The Great Lakes region’s power grid is already overburdened, with advanced planning and more transmission lines needed to prevent future blackouts.

“The media, city mayors, and the real estate industry filled us with false hope.”

“Places like Duluth definitely could be a good place to live, but we’re going to have to plan now,” Derek Van Berkel, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School for Environmental Sustainability, told Detroit PBS’s Great Lakes Now. Van Berkel is part of a research team tracing the Great Lakes states’ environmental risk compared to other, more vulnerable locations.

A shortage of affordable housing is also a problem in places like Duluth, though a focus on community-based housing rather than single-family residences has been proposed as a solution. Housing is an issue facing Denver, CO, another city many Californians have moved to in recent years. The influx hasn’t helped the metro area’s overcrowding and traffic.

A Shady Myth

Despite having moderate temperatures, the Denver area is also not immune to the risk of wildfires, smoke, and drought, all worsened by the climate crisis. This leads to the question: As climate change accelerates around the globe, as hurricanes cause flooding hundreds of miles inland and expensive houses topple off cliffs, is anywhere safe?

“The notion of a climate haven is a little bit aspirational,” Van Berkel said.

Climate relocation is an issue of justice. Not everyone can afford to start over.

In 2024, Vox writer Adam Clark Estes described the idea of climate havens as a myth with “shady origins,” writing that “the media, city mayors, and the real estate industry filled us with false hope.”

Climate havens, at a time when all parts of the world will be impacted by the changing climate in some way, are perhaps wishful thinking. “People are desperate for optimism,” Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, told Vox.

Climate relocation is an issue of justice. Not everyone can afford to start over. In that sense, a climate haven is less of a place and more about financial security and social or community status.

“To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon,” Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told Vox. “It’s social and economic.”

Can you rebuild again, if you must? Do you have the resources or community support?

Californian Lahr doesn’t regret coming to Asheville. She believes that a future living under climate change will require sacrifices from us all. “I sort of increasingly think that climate havens are a myth,” she said. “Everybody has to assess the risk where they live and go from there.”

For More on This Topic:

When Fleeing Climate Change, Most People Stay Close to Home

The Global North Needs to Stop Distancing Itself from Climate Migration