A map of Great Lakes cities that are being studied as potential areas where climate migrants may relocate to in the future. Illustration by Dave Brenner
Planning for Climate Migration in the Great Lakes Region
As climate change accelerates, people across the U.S. who live in hurricane-, wildfire- or drought-prone areas may be considering relocating to other places that are perceived as being safer from extreme heat, sea-level rise and other severe impacts of climate change.
This idea, known as climate migration, is prompting renewed attention on areas like the Great Lakes region, which has an abundance of fresh water, a relatively temperate climate and fewer natural disasters. Some media headlines have even leaned into the idea of the Great Lakes region being a “climate haven” that is free of most climate-related problems.
University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) Associate Professor Derek Van Berkel says the term climate haven is misleading, though, because it sets up false expectations for the people who may want to move there.
Derek Van Berkel
“There are plenty of places that will be less prone to climate change, but they will still face climate-related challenges—just different ones,” says Van Berkel, a geographer and data scientist who studies climate migration. “For instance, here in the Great Lakes we are prone to ice storms, which can cause severe power outages.”
It is unclear how many people may migrate because of climate problems and where they will go, Van Berkel says. He notes that scholarly research often focuses on the reasons why people become climate migrants and less on the cities that are identified as climate havens or potential “receiving communities”—and whether their infrastructure, economies and resources are sustainable enough to support an influx of new residents.
Through his work as the principal investigator of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategies (CLARS) Project, which is funded in part by a three-year, $614,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Van Berkel and his research partners are hoping to bridge that knowledge gap by studying climate migration as a complex process that affects not only migrants but also the communities they join. Van Berkel hopes their findings will aid cities to better understand, prepare for and manage the impacts of climate migration, so that existing problems and inequalities aren’t exacerbated.
“We hope to tap into some of those conversations around climate migration and start a planning process for making cities more livable, adaptable and just,” says Van Berkel. “We need to have more thoughtful conversations on how to sustainably move forward in our cities and include a broader array of people in that discussion, particularly those who have been excluded from planning processes in the past, such as minorities and poorer communities.”
The project is focusing on the Great Lakes cities of Duluth, Minnesota; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Toledo, Ohio; and Detroit—which are also considered legacy cities because of their aging infrastructure and declining population—and comparing their climate adaptability efforts to cities in the Lake Victoria region of Africa, a densely populated area bordered by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. Lake Victoria is the largest of Africa’s Great Lakes, and a major source of the Nile River.
The Lake Victoria Basin and the Great Lakes region are similar because they are resource-rich areas that could attract climate migrants in the future. The Lake Victoria Basin is already experiencing climate migration, Van Berkel noted, while the Great Lakes region is expected to experience it. Each area could learn valuable lessons from the other while providing critical planning knowledge that could be scaled to and adapted by cities around the globe.
We hope to tap into some of those conversations around climate migration and start a planning process for making cities more livable, adaptable and just.”
Van Berkel and his colleagues are using the Participatory GIS Urban Development Tool (PIVOT) that Van Berkel developed as part of GLISA, a NOAA CAP/RISA team, to display mapped information such as demographics, economic trends and tree cover. Eventually, it will include urban development projections, climate-related stressors like precipitation and temperature changes, and the risk of flood and heat events, so that users can interactively explore different vulnerabilities within their communities. The aim is to help them learn how population increases may result in complex social and climate trade-offs over time, and to consider those trade-offs in the face of changing demographics, growth patterns and flood risk.
By planning for climate migration now, before it actually happens, cities can find ways to be more adaptable in the face of future climate uncertainty. “We’re helping cities start the conversation of what this actually means for them to be a place for climate migrants and how they should start planning for it,” Van Berkel adds. “It seems like such a nebulous thing for people to think about what their city is going to be like in 30 years, but we’re hoping to get them thinking about longer-term visioning and what sorts of climate-driven challenges they may need to address in the future.”
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