These findings are concerning because people are moving into harm's way—into regions with wildfires and rising temperatures, which are expected to become more extreme due to climate change, Mahalia Clark, University of Vermont and study author.
A new ten-year-long study released by the University of Vermont and published in Frontiers in Human Dynamics reveals how heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfire disasters influence the decisions made on migration within the United States. The research found that people's decisions to move are like jumping out of the pan and into the fire. The decade studied, 2010-2020, is considered one of the most extensive studies on migration patterns in the age of climate change.
The study reveals that many Americans migrate to areas prone to fire storms and killing heat. As many green diarists at Dail Kos emphasize, significant dangers of regional climate impacts already threaten human life and property and will only intensify as the months, years, and decades pass.
The top U.S. migration destinations over the last decade were cities and suburbs in the Pacific Northwest, parts of the Southwest (in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah), Texas, Florida, and a large swath of the Southeast (from Nashville to Atlanta to Washington, D.C.)—locations that already face significant wildfire risks and relatively warm annual temperatures, the study shows. In contrast, people tended to move away from places in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and along the Mississippi River, including many counties hit hardest by hurricanes or frequent heatwaves, the researchers say. (See maps for migration hotspots.)
“These findings suggest that, for many Americans, the risks and dangers of living in hurricane zones may be starting to outweigh the benefits of life in those areas,” said UVM co-author Gillian Galford. “That same type of tipping point has yet to happen for wildfires and rising summer heat, our results suggest, probably because they’ve only become problems at the national level more recently.”
Despite climate change’s underlying role in extreme weather events, the team was surprised by how little the obvious climate impacts of wildfire and heat seemed to impact migration. “If you look where people are going, these are some of the country’s warmest places—which are only expected to get hotter.”
“Most people still think of wildfires as just a problem in the West, but wildfire now impacts large swaths of the country—the Northwest down to the Southwest, but also parts of the Midwest and the Southeast like Appalachia and Florida,” said Clark, a researcher at UVM’s Gund Institute for Environment and Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.
Beyond the aversion to hurricanes and heatwaves, the study identified several other clear preferences—a mix of environmental, social, and economic factors—that also contributed to U.S. migration decisions over the last decade.
The team’s analysis revealed a set of common qualities shared among the top migration destinations: warmer winters, proximity to water, moderate tree cover, moderate population density, better human development index (HDI) scores—plus wildfire risks. In contrast, for the counties people left, common traits included low employment, higher income inequality, and more summer humidity, heatwaves, and hurricanes.
For those wondering, Florida is still a significant migration destination despite extreme summer humidity and windstorms. The migration from the northern states is appealing. "While nationally, people were less attracted to counties hit by hurricanes, many people—particularly retirees—still moved to Florida, attracted by the warm climate, beaches, and other qualities shared by top migration destinations." The study did not mention whether these retirees were snowbirds or permanent residents.
As a former Florida resident that left the state for climate crisis reasons, I moved to the southern Appalachians, which is still a goldilocks zone. According to the study map, the Appalachians are a fire hazard. However, no place will be safe from the changes to the climate.
The housing shortage may not be an issue yet, but when more and more people migrate to less dangerous zones, where will we get the products to rebuild? Overshoot is already taking a heavy toll on nature. Europe is cutting its ancient forests down, and we should concentrate on protecting biological diversity as much as possible in the states.