Sian Roper for Noema Magazine
Moving people away from places at risk of flooding, heat, fires and other climate impacts is the only way to protect vulnerable populations from future destructive events.
Brian Stone Jr. is a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and director of the Urban Climate Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This essay is adapted from his recent book, “Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World” (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans proposed a flood control program unlike any other in U.S. history. Developed by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, a diverse group of stakeholders appointed by the mayor, the resulting plan called for large parts of the city to be converted from longstanding residential zones to floodable parks. Released to the public in the form of a map, large green circles were positioned over neighborhoods where owners would be forced into buyouts. These were some of the most historic districts in a very historic city — the Lower Ninth Ward, St. Claude, Gentilly — and almost exclusively in majority Black and marginalized neighborhoods.
Christened in the press as the “Green Dot” map, the proposal ranks among the most profoundly unsuccessful plans ever issued by a municipal body and would never be put to a vote in the city council. But it would give life to an idea that has only grown more compelling in the subsequent decades: We cannot engineer our way out of climate change; retreat is inevitable — and not just in coastal cities.
The Green Dot map’s remarkably brief tenure can be attributed in part to its proponents’ failure to adhere to the most basic rule of community planning: Never designate the where before building support for the what. It is possible that a proposal pairing the creation of floodable space somewhere in New Orleans, alongside the offer of generous and non-compulsory property buyouts, could have engendered community support — indeed, more than a decade after the city’s almost complete inundation, space for a large floodable park was assembled from publicly acquired land in Gentilly.
But because the commission launched into climate adaptation with a list of neighborhoods to be condemned, an opposing army immediately assembled. Today, the Green Dot map endures only as a precisely-how-not-to-do-it example in urban planning textbooks and, until recently, as a small but popular French brasserie situated in one of the neighborhoods targeted for abandonment: the Green Dot Cafe (4.6 stars).
“Retreat is inevitable — and not just in coastal cities.”
Almost 20 years after the devastation of Katrina, neither New Orleans nor the United States national government has developed a policy framework for planned retreat. Much of New Orleans recovered and even thrived in that time, but some neighborhoods today are characterized more by land vacancy than occupation and often lack the most basic of community amenities: schools for neighborhood children, markets and restaurants within walking distance, churches and other community institutions.
Most importantly, enshrining a “right to return” everywhere in post-Katrina New Orleans resulted in a greater resilience to flood risk almost nowhere. The most serious risk confronting residents today is not a levee-topping storm surge but a bowl-filling deluge. New Orleans now floods annually from heavy storm events that overwhelm the drainage network of a city that sits at a lower elevation than the water that surrounds it. A more extensive network of floodable parks is arguably the most effective strategy to prevent regular flooding of streets, homes and businesses, but there is no plan yet in place to bring this outcome about, even in low-lying areas that remain largely depopulated.
New Orleans is not unique in the extreme risk of climate change it confronts. All major cities are now at an elevated risk of three climate impacts for which they are largely unprepared: extreme flooding, extreme drought and extreme heat. This is not a future risk but one that is daily unfolding across the U.S.
In the Southwest, rising temperatures are fueling elevated rates of evaporation and years of drought, forcing a growing number of communities to rely on the regular delivery of drinking water; in the Midwest, the intensity of heat and humidity may soon render basic municipal services, such as garbage collection, too hazardous to operate during heat waves; along the east coast, high tides pull oceanside homes into the sea in calm weather. To watch a video of barrier island homes breaking up and falling into the Atlantic is — for me, at least — to experience initially a sense of awe at the destructive potential of a gradual but incessantly rising ocean. The emotion that lingers, however, is not one of wonder but of shame.
Only the most scientifically and institutionally incapable of societies would experience such impacts from annual weather events that can be forecast years in advance. Perhaps more than the most violent of storms, it is the slowest-moving climate impacts that are most clarifying: The era of retreat is underway. It is an era for which we find ourselves remarkably unprepared…
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https://www.noemamag.com/climate-resilience-means-retreat/
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