Sinking Islands, Pursued People -- Climate Refugees in the U.S. (2020)

Sinking Islands, Pursued People -- Climate Refugees in the U.S. (2020)

The problem of climate refugees in the United States was already quietly underway in 2020. Approximately 1.7 million people have lost their homes to extreme weather events, and the number continues to grow each year. Not only sudden hurricanes and wildfires, but also slowly rising sea levels and chronic flooding were eroding the footprint of their lives.

One of the most symbolic examples is Jean Charles Island in Louisiana. After years of coastal erosion and subsidence, the land itself was disappearing; by the 1950s, the island was home to more than 300 people, but by the 2010s, the population had dwindled to about 40. The federal government initiated a plan to relocate the entire population off the island and funded it with $48 million. This attempt was recorded as the first "official mass relocation" in the United States directly attributed to climate change.

Also that year, it was estimated that as many as 500,000 homes per year would be at risk of permanent flooding, causing a quiet panic among residents in coastal cities. The limitations of the insurance system for natural disasters were exposed, and it became clear that the poor and minorities were most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, at the national level, the country was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and rolling back global warming measures, leaving the response to the climate crisis to individual municipalities and citizens. The relocation of Jean Charles Island is a rare example of an unusual intervention by the federal government in response to climate change.

This event was not simply the disappearance of a single region. It is a symbol of the fear that every city and every home "could be the next to go under" in the years to come, and it illustrates how the United States as a nation faces the difficult challenge of coexistence between nature and humanity.