How to Save a Town From Rising Waters
The only land route that connects Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, to the rest of the continental United States is Island Road, a thin, four-mile stretch of pavement that lies inches above sea level and immediately drops off into open water on either side. Even on a calm day, salt water laps over the road’s tenuous boundaries and splashes the concrete.
The road wasn’t so exposed when it was built in 1956. Residents could walk through the thick marsh that surrounded the road to hunt and trap. But over the coming decades, the landscape transformed.
Levees stopped the natural flow of fresh water and sediment that reinforced the fragile marshes. Oil and gas companies dredged through the mud to lay pipelines and build canals, carving paths for saltwater to intrude and kill the freshwater vegetation that held the land together. The unstoppable, glacial momentum of sea-level rise has only made things worse. Today, almost nothing remains of what was very recently a vast expanse of bountiful marshes and swampland.
Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw band of Native Americans, has lost 98 percent of its land since 1955. Its 99 remaining residents have been dubbed “America’s first climate refugees.”
“There’s just a little strip of it left,” said resident Rita Falgout. “There used to be a lot of trees; we didn’t have so much salt water.” Like many of the houses on Isle de Jean Charles, her home is raised on 15-foot stilts to evade the increasingly omnipresent floodwaters. But the stilts can’t protect her from the island’s isolation. Strong winds alone can flood the road, cutting the island off from vital resources like hospitals. Soon the road will be impassable year-round.
“My husband is sick, and if we’re back here when the road floods, what are we going to do?” Falgout asked.
The only long-term solution is to leave.
Preparing for Tomorrow’s Climate Refugees
The residents of Isle de Jean Charles won’t be alone in their exodus. There will be up to 13 million climate refugees in the United States by the end of this century. Even if humanity were to stop all carbon emissions today, at least 414 towns, villages, and cities across the country would face relocation, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, researchers predict that the number will exceed 1,000.
And this isn’t a distant threat. At least 17 communities, most of which are Native American or Native Alaskan, are already in the process of climate-related relocations. Yet despite its inevitability, there is no official framework to handle this displacement. There is no U.S. government agency, process, or funding dedicated to confronting this impending humanitarian crisis.
Only one climate-related relocation is currently funded and administered by the government: the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project.
This is a test run of sorts, a first-of-its-kind program that aims to create guiding principles for future resettlements. What makes the project unique is that it doesn’t just aim to resettle individuals. Its goal is to resettle the entire community together, as a whole, by constructing a brand-new town and filling it with the displaced occupants and culture of Isle de Jean Charles.
The project diverges from prior resettlements, which have largely followed a model of individual buyouts—offering lump-sum payments to residents and leaving them to their own devices to restart their lives. That model was used in Diamond, Louisiana, in the early 2000s.
Diamond, a historically black community situated in the heart of Cancer Alley, sat in the shadow of Shell petrochemical plants and for decades suffered through chemical leaks and explosions. Years of grassroots campaigning finally led to a buyout deal. One by one, the residents of Diamond took the money and left.
But even as the individual households found relief, the community shriveled away. Residents scattered, churches folded, and people fell out of touch. “The residents say they see each other at funerals and weddings, and that’s about it,” said Robert Verchick, the Board President of the Center for Progressive Reform, an environmental research nonprofit in Washington, D.C.
The death of Diamond highlights an important distinction. There is a difference between saving a community and saving its individual members.