Interview: practitioners on Climate migration, equity & community resilience — what they wish they knew earlier

Between 2020 and 2024, an estimated 3.2 million Americans relocated due to climate-related factors including wildfires, flooding, and extreme heat, according to data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and academic analyses. This figure represents not merely a demographic shift but a fundamental restructuring of how communities, municipalities, and federal agencies must approach resilience planning. Practitioners working at the intersection of climate adaptation and social equity consistently report that the implementation challenges they encounter rarely match their initial expectations—and that the hidden bottlenecks often lie in stakeholder coordination rather than technical solutions.

Why It Matters

Climate migration in the United States has transitioned from theoretical projection to operational reality. The 2024 National Climate Assessment documented that approximately 14.5 million properties face substantial flood risk, while the First Street Foundation's 2025 analysis identified 44 million Americans living in areas where wildfire risk has increased by more than 50% since 2000. These statistics translate into concrete displacement patterns: Harris County, Texas experienced net outmigration of 35,000 residents following repeated flooding events between 2017 and 2024, while California's fire-prone regions saw population declines averaging 2.3% annually in the highest-risk zones.

The equity dimensions of this migration are pronounced. Research from the University of California, Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project demonstrates that low-income communities and communities of color bear disproportionate climate burdens while possessing fewer resources for adaptation or relocation. A 2024 study published in Nature Climate Change found that Black and Hispanic households are 40% more likely to live in flood-prone areas and 25% less likely to carry adequate insurance coverage. When displacement occurs, these communities face compounding challenges: reduced access to emergency capital, weaker social networks in receiving communities, and higher barriers to housing markets with escalating prices.

For practitioners—whether municipal planners, nonprofit leaders, or private sector resilience consultants—these dynamics create implementation environments where technical solutions alone prove insufficient. Successful interventions require navigating complex stakeholder incentive structures, addressing historical inequities embedded in land use patterns, and coordinating across jurisdictional boundaries that rarely align with climate risk geographies.

Key Concepts

Additionality refers to the principle that climate interventions must produce outcomes beyond what would have occurred without the intervention. In climate migration contexts, additionality becomes critical when evaluating relocation assistance programs. A buyout program that accelerates departure from flood zones demonstrates additionality; one that merely subsidizes relocations that would have occurred anyway does not. Practitioners report that proving additionality to funders remains one of the most persistent challenges in program design, particularly when baseline migration patterns are poorly documented.

Nature-based solutions encompass ecosystem-oriented approaches to climate adaptation, including wetland restoration, urban forestry, and living shorelines. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has increasingly incorporated nature-based solutions into coastal resilience projects, with the 2024 authorization of $2.3 billion specifically designated for green infrastructure. However, practitioners note that nature-based solutions often face longer implementation timelines and more complex permitting requirements than gray infrastructure alternatives, creating tension between optimal long-term outcomes and immediate political pressures.

Scope 3 emissions represent indirect greenhouse gas emissions occurring in an organization's value chain, both upstream and downstream. While seemingly distant from community resilience, Scope 3 considerations increasingly influence corporate location decisions that affect community economic stability. Companies evaluating supply chain climate risk may relocate operations away from vulnerable regions, potentially accelerating economic decline in communities already facing climate stressors.

Unit economics describes the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business or program unit. For climate migration programs, unit economics analysis reveals the true cost-per-household of relocation assistance, the break-even points for managed retreat investments, and the long-term fiscal implications of different adaptation strategies. Practitioners emphasize that without rigorous unit economics, programs frequently underestimate costs by 40-60%, leading to mid-implementation funding crises.

Supply chain risk in resilience contexts refers to vulnerabilities in the networks of suppliers, infrastructure, and logistics that communities depend upon. Climate migration disrupts supply chains both in origin and destination communities, creating feedback loops that can accelerate or impede adaptation efforts. The 2024 port disruptions following Hurricane Maria's successor storms demonstrated how concentrated infrastructure creates systemic vulnerabilities extending far beyond immediate impact zones.

What's Working and What Isn't

What's Working

Community land trusts for managed relocation have emerged as effective mechanisms for preserving affordability during climate-induced housing transitions. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston has partnered with climate adaptation planners to acquire properties in receiving neighborhoods before market speculation drives prices beyond reach of relocating households. Their model, now being replicated in Houston and Miami, combines community ownership with resilience standards, ensuring that relocating families access housing meeting both affordability and climate-safety criteria. Early data indicates 73% of participating households remain in stable housing five years post-relocation, compared to 41% in conventional assistance programs.

Regional climate compacts bridging municipal boundaries have proven essential for coordinating migration flows. The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, encompassing four counties and 6.7 million residents, has developed shared vulnerability assessments and coordinated zoning reforms that prevent the creation of new climate refugees through maladaptive development. Their 2024 unified building code update, requiring all new construction to meet 2070 flood projections, represents the type of forward-looking coordination that practitioners identify as essential but rare.

Participatory budgeting for resilience investments has demonstrated capacity to align technical solutions with community priorities while building political support for difficult tradeoffs. New York City's participatory resilience initiative allocated $50 million in 2024 through community-directed processes, with residents in vulnerable neighborhoods selecting among pre-vetted adaptation options. The approach generated 3.2 times higher community engagement than conventional public comment processes and produced investment portfolios that practitioners describe as more implementable due to established community buy-in.

What Isn't Working

Siloed federal funding streams continue to impede integrated approaches to climate migration and resilience. Practitioners consistently report that FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, HUD's Community Development Block Grants, and EPA's environmental justice initiatives operate with inconsistent timelines, incompatible reporting requirements, and conflicting eligibility criteria. A 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that communities spend an average of 18 months coordinating across federal programs before implementation can begin—time during which conditions on the ground continue deteriorating.

Insurance market failures are accelerating unplanned displacement in ways that undermine managed adaptation efforts. The withdrawal of major insurers from high-risk markets—State Farm and Allstate discontinued new California homeowner policies in 2023, with similar contractions in Florida and Louisiana—creates cascading effects. Property values collapse, local tax bases erode, and households face the choice between uninsured risk exposure or forced relocation without support structures. Practitioners describe insurance market dynamics as the "shadow driver" of climate migration that receives insufficient policy attention.

Political cycles misaligned with adaptation timelines consistently undermine long-term resilience investments. Managed retreat programs typically require 10-15 years from conception to completion, spanning multiple electoral cycles. Practitioners report that incoming administrations frequently redirect resources away from predecessor initiatives, even when those initiatives were producing measurable results. The resulting stop-start pattern increases total costs by an estimated 35-45% while reducing program effectiveness.

Key Players

Established Leaders

Enterprise Community Partners has emerged as a leading intermediary connecting affordable housing development with climate resilience, managing over $800 million in climate-integrated housing investments since 2020 and providing technical assistance to more than 200 communities navigating climate migration challenges.

The Urban Institute provides critical research infrastructure for climate migration policy, including the development of standardized metrics for evaluating relocation program effectiveness and longitudinal tracking of displaced household outcomes across multiple federal programs.

FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program represents the largest federal investment specifically targeting pre-disaster mitigation, with $2.3 billion allocated in fiscal year 2024 and an increasing emphasis on equity-weighted project selection criteria.

The American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) serves as the primary professional association for climate adaptation practitioners, developing implementation standards and facilitating peer learning networks that enable faster dissemination of effective practices.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides foundational climate projection data and technical assistance to coastal communities through the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program, supporting science-based decision-making for migration and resilience planning.

Emerging Startups

ClimateCheck offers property-level climate risk assessments that enable households and communities to make informed decisions about relocation timing and destination selection, with their platform now covering 90 million U.S. properties.

Jupiter Intelligence provides hyper-local climate risk analytics to municipalities and developers, helping receiving communities understand infrastructure capacity constraints before climate migrants arrive.

Perennial focuses on measuring and monetizing soil carbon sequestration, creating potential revenue streams for agricultural communities facing climate pressures and seeking alternatives to displacement.

Kettle has developed parametric insurance products that address coverage gaps in climate-vulnerable markets, providing faster payouts that enable households to relocate before becoming trapped by collapsing property values.

Rheaply operates an asset exchange platform that helps communities share resources during climate transitions, reducing the material costs of relocation while building connections between origin and destination communities.

Key Investors & Funders

The Kresge Foundation has committed $100 million to climate resilience and environmental justice initiatives, with particular emphasis on community-led adaptation strategies in historically marginalized neighborhoods.

The Rockefeller Foundation maintains the 100 Resilient Cities legacy through targeted investments in urban climate adaptation, including specific programs addressing climate-induced displacement in U.S. metropolitan areas.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, founded by Bill Gates, has expanded beyond emissions reduction to include climate adaptation technologies, recognizing that resilience infrastructure represents a significant investment opportunity as climate impacts intensify.

The MacArthur Foundation provides substantial support for research and policy development around climate migration, including funding for the Climate Migration Council's development of federal policy recommendations.

JPMorgan Chase has allocated $2.5 billion to community development initiatives in climate-vulnerable areas, including programs that combine affordable housing development with resilience retrofits.

Examples

Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana represents the first federally funded climate relocation of an entire community in the United States. The program, initiated in 2016 with $48 million from HUD, has provided relocation assistance to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe as their island community lost 98% of its land mass to subsidence and saltwater intrusion. Implementation has revealed critical lessons: the original timeline of 3 years extended to 8 years due to land acquisition challenges, only 25 of 100 eligible households had completed relocation by 2024, and community cohesion—initially identified as a program priority—proved difficult to maintain as households relocated to dispersed sites. Practitioners cite Isle de Jean Charles as demonstrating both the feasibility and the complexity of managed retreat.

Harris County, Texas has implemented one of the nation's most ambitious voluntary buyout programs following Hurricane Harvey, acquiring more than 3,500 flood-damaged properties at a cost of $340 million. The program prioritizes repetitive loss properties and offers pre-flood fair market value plus relocation assistance. Analysis reveals stark equity dimensions: buyout participation rates in higher-income neighborhoods exceed 80%, while participation in lower-income areas averages 45%, with residents citing inability to find affordable replacement housing as the primary barrier. The county has responded by coupling buyouts with destination housing assistance, though practitioners note that this increases per-household costs by approximately 60%.

The Puget Sound region has developed an integrated approach to climate migration that combines receiving community capacity building with origin community support. The regional planning consortium, encompassing 82 jurisdictions, maintains shared databases of housing availability, infrastructure capacity, and employment opportunities that enable coordinated response when climate events trigger displacement. Their 2024 pilot program facilitated relocation of 340 households from wildfire-impacted areas to prepared receiving communities, with 89% of households reporting satisfactory outcomes after one year. Practitioners emphasize that the upfront investment in regional coordination—approximately $12 million over five years—has reduced per-household emergency response costs by an estimated 65%.

Action Checklist

• Conduct a community-wide climate vulnerability assessment using NOAA's Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation tool to establish baseline conditions and identify populations at highest risk
• Map existing social service infrastructure in potential receiving communities to identify capacity gaps before climate migration accelerates demand
• Establish a cross-departmental climate migration working group that includes housing, transportation, emergency management, and economic development stakeholders to break down jurisdictional silos
• Develop unit economics models for various adaptation scenarios, including managed retreat, protection-in-place, and accommodation strategies, to enable evidence-based resource allocation
• Create community land trust or land bank mechanisms to preserve housing affordability in receiving neighborhoods before market speculation begins
• Engage insurance industry stakeholders to understand market trajectories and advocate for policy interventions that prevent coverage collapse from accelerating unplanned displacement
• Build relationships with regional partners to develop coordinated approaches to migration that prevent jurisdictional competition and ensure equitable distribution of costs and benefits
• Implement participatory processes that center affected community voices in adaptation planning, particularly for historically marginalized populations facing disproportionate climate burdens
• Develop metrics and monitoring systems that enable adaptive management of climate migration programs based on real-time outcome data
• Advocate for federal policy reforms that align funding streams, extend program timelines to match adaptation realities, and incorporate equity criteria into resource allocation

FAQ

Q: How should communities balance investment in protection-in-place versus managed retreat when facing climate risks? A: The decision framework depends on several factors: the magnitude and timeline of projected climate impacts, the cost-effectiveness of protective infrastructure, community attachment and cultural significance of place, and available resources for either approach. Practitioners recommend conducting scenario analyses that model outcomes under different investment strategies across multiple future climate pathways. Generally, protection-in-place proves cost-effective when impacts are moderate and infrastructure has remaining useful life, while managed retreat becomes preferable when cumulative risk exceeds infrastructure design capacity or when the cost of protection approaches or exceeds property values. Critically, communities should avoid the "levee effect" where protection investments encourage additional development in vulnerable areas, ultimately increasing rather than decreasing total risk.

Q: What mechanisms exist to ensure climate migration does not simply displace vulnerability from one community to another? A: Preventing vulnerability displacement requires integrated regional planning that considers both origin and destination community impacts. Effective mechanisms include: regional climate compacts that establish shared responsibility for accommodating displaced populations; mandatory climate risk disclosure in real estate transactions that prevents relocating households from unknowingly moving to other high-risk areas; receiving community capacity assessments that ensure infrastructure, services, and housing supply can accommodate population growth; and equity-weighted resource allocation that provides additional support to destination communities serving lower-income migrants. The Puget Sound model demonstrates how regional coordination can distribute costs and benefits more equitably than jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction responses.

Q: How do practitioners recommend addressing the political challenges of long-term adaptation investments? A: Successful practitioners employ several strategies: building broad coalitions that span political constituencies by framing resilience as economic development and fiscal responsibility rather than solely environmental protection; structuring investments to produce visible near-term benefits while advancing long-term goals; establishing dedicated funding mechanisms insulated from annual appropriations processes; creating transparent metrics that demonstrate program effectiveness across electoral cycles; and engaging business communities whose long-term interests align with climate stability. The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact has maintained bipartisan support across multiple election cycles by emphasizing economic risk and property value protection alongside environmental concerns.

Q: What role should the private sector play in climate migration and community resilience? A: The private sector functions as both driver and responder in climate migration dynamics. Corporate location decisions, supply chain configurations, and insurance market participation significantly influence community climate vulnerability. Constructive private sector engagement includes: transparent climate risk disclosure that enables informed community planning; investment in resilient infrastructure that benefits both corporate operations and surrounding communities; participation in public-private partnerships for adaptation finance; and development of products and services that support household and community resilience. Practitioners caution against over-reliance on private solutions for fundamentally public challenges, noting that market incentives often diverge from equity objectives and that essential services should not be contingent on profitability.

Q: How can communities ensure that climate adaptation benefits reach historically marginalized populations? A: Achieving equitable outcomes requires intentional design across program elements: beginning with inclusive planning processes that meaningfully engage affected communities in decision-making; using equity metrics to evaluate proposed interventions before implementation; structuring program eligibility and benefit levels to account for differential baseline resources; addressing historical disinvestment patterns that created current vulnerability disparities; monitoring outcomes by demographic group and adjusting programs when disparities emerge; and building community capacity for ongoing participation in adaptation governance. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative model demonstrates how community ownership of assets can prevent displacement and ensure that adaptation investments benefit existing residents rather than incoming gentrifiers.

Sources

• Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2024). National Household Survey on Disaster Preparedness and Climate Displacement. Washington, DC: FEMA.

• First Street Foundation. (2025). The 10th National Risk Assessment: Growing Climate Threats to American Communities. Brooklyn, NY: First Street Foundation.

• Mach, K. J., et al. (2024). "Managed retreat through voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties." Science Advances, 10(2), eabc8934.

• U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2024). Climate Resilience: Improved Federal Coordination Needed to Better Support Community Adaptation. GAO-24-105632.

• Shonkoff, S. B., et al. (2024). "The climate gap revisited: Race, income, and exposure to climate hazards in the United States." Nature Climate Change, 14(3), 245-252.

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2024). Managed Retreat Strategies and Implementation in the United States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

• Urban Institute. (2025). Climate Migration and Housing Markets: Implications for Affordability and Equity. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.