 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Yulia Pamphill. I'm the director of the Future of Land and Housing program at New America. This event is being co-hosted and supported by the Pulitzer Center's Connected Coastlines Initiative. To date, this nationwide climate reporting initiative has launched 29 reporting projects and published 136 stories with 39 unique news outlets on every U.S. coastline, including Alaska and Hawaii. Journalists seeking support to report on climate related issues in the U.S. coastal states can apply for grants at Pulitzer Center. Today, we will be discussing a major frontier in our battle against climate change. And that is the decisions facing coastal cities and communities who are on the front lines of sea level rise, devastating storms, and other climate change impacts that may get increasingly difficult to live in these places. In these places, climate change isn't a far off theoretical concept. It's happening before their very eyes, and they have no choice but to make some really hard choices. Two weeks ago, New America fellow Dr. Donna Stewart released a report examining the increased threat of climate change to coastal communities, the weaknesses of current and local and federal policies to manage this heightened risk, and the concept of managed retreat, which basically means planned relocation of communities that no longer want to or can keep rebuilding after storms. Based in Florida, Donna has a deep interest in the impact of climate change and sea level rise on housing insecurity. Donna is a senior product manager at academic labs and formerly a volunteer with Datakine, a long-term partner of New Americas. A former geography professor, Donna's past research interests include housing and security and the relationship between economic factors and the urban landscape. Donna will present a short synopsis of her report, and then we'll transition directly to a panel with Jeff Goodell and Hallie Parker. Jeff Goodell is a 2016 New America fellow, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine, and the author of The Water Will Come, Rise Exceeds, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World. This book was a New York Times critic's top book of 2017. Hallie Parker is an environment reporter at the advocate and the Times-DKU in New Orleans, and is a Pulitzer Center grantee as part of the Connected Coastlines initiative. Her project as part of that grant, a long-form article for Southerly magazine, examines how Louisiana's barrier island communities are grappling with sea level rise. And with that, I will turn it over to Donna. Thank you, everybody, for making time today to attend this event. I'd like to thank New America and especially the Future of Land and Housing program for the opportunity to conduct this research. And I'd also like to thank Pulitzer for giving it greater reach, as well as my colleagues, Hallie and Jeff for being willing to participate today. I'm only going to make a few comments because we'd really like to spend most of the time today in discussion and answering any questions. But as some of you may know, because it's been covered quite extensively, the National Flood Insurance program recently raised its insurance rates. This was the issue that really kind of prompted us to start. But also to draw attention to the much more complex issues surrounding the issue of coastal change and also the increasing storm intensity. What we're seeing now with coastal vulnerability is something that I think we thought was a little further off, but is actually beginning to manifest. When we talk about coastal vulnerability, we have about 95,000 miles of coastline in the United States. About 94 million people or more live along the U.S. coast. About 29% of our population. Over the last 20 years, our coastal populations have increased by 15% or more. So this level of population increase is also affecting our level of vulnerability. Because at the same time, the frequency and intensity of storms appears to be increasing. If we just look at the last couple of years, 2020-21, and their associated hurricane seasons, we can see 18 storms have impacted the United States. This is a record number. Some of states such as Louisiana, where Hallie reports from, have had multiple storms. In the last two years alone, Louisiana has had four hurricanes and two tropical storms. Some communities have been hit more than once, such as Grand Isle. The larger hurricanes, such as Hurricane Ida, are category four and have exceeded 150 miles per hour winds. Something that is regularly, has not been regularly happening, seems to be happening more often now. In addition to the loss of life associated with these storms, the economic cost of storms also appears to be increasing. Of the storms in the last two years, NOAA has declared seven of them, billion-dollar disasters. Seven storms alone have accounted for $42 billion in damages. I would like to acknowledge that this is a record number. One of the things that is important despite the name of this report on coastal vulnerability, is that this dynamic is not just affecting the coast. These tropical storms and hurricanes are now causing much more widespread inland flooding, as they make their way up through particularly the Appalachian mountains and hit the northeast. They cause massive damage in the loss of lives hundreds of miles from the coast. We are now in an era of hard choices. While the increase of the flood insurance has brought this to the attention of many, communities have been dealing with this for years. Communities are already making decisions every day to stay, to go, or to try to increase their resiliency. The problem is, right now our policies and our policy toolkits, especially at the federal level, are not prepared to deal with the current situation that individuals, communities, and the nation faces. Thank you so much, Donna, for setting this conversation up and sharing some of the findings of your report. So I will actually, excuse me, pick up where you left off, which is this question of, do we stay or do we go? And this question that communities are grappling with, Jeff, Holly, and Donna, you've each grappled with it a bit in your work in different ways. Can you tell us a bit from your perspective, how are communities making these types of decisions? What goes into a decision like that? I'll take that, I'll start with that. I think that there is no, you know, uniform way people are making these decisions. As Donna pointed out, it's all very left up to individuals, to individual cities, into individual towns. There's no, for all intents and purposes, there is no managed retreat in America. There is no such thing as Donna pointed out. We have, in fact, the opposite. We have, you know, a met, you know, a full-scale attack on the coast. People are moving very quickly towards the coast. And part of the reason is because there's no incentive not to, right? I mean, there's the insurance, the price of insurance has not reflected the risks. People have a sense that the government is somehow going to bail them out. And there's really no kind of big picture appreciation for really what's happening, but I think it's important to mention things like climate denial and all that. So the individual communities in my experience that I've encountered in reporting my book were dealing with this themselves, you know, there is the buyouts in the aftermath of storms, but that's as Donna's report points out, a kind of reactive policy that allows people whose storms have been, houses have been damaged during storms to relocate somewhere else. And I think it's important for communities that are doing things like trying to raise money for beach replenishment to make the beaches to fortify beaches, but that is, you know, requiring taxing increases in these local communities. But nobody knows really what to do. There really are no plans and there is no strategy and there is no kind of big picture thinking about this. And the last thing that I'll just say to set this up is that you know, there are a lot of issues that I've had with the government in other countries. You go to Europe to the Netherlands and places like that. It's a whole different kind of conversation. But here in America, it runs into very fundamental rights issues, especially private property. And this question is about eminent domain and you're not going to tell me where I'm going to live or how I'm going to live or what I'm going to do with my property. And it becomes deeply entangled very quickly in these sort of discussions about who we are as Americans. It makes this particularly difficult to resolve. Yeah. And just to build off what Jeff was saying about there not being a mechanism for this kind of, you know, movement. There's also, when you look at the people, when you talk to the people living in these coastal communities, they have a strong sense of place. And so they don't necessarily, a lot of them have the desire to want to leave and want to be proactive on their own. And so there's a lot of times if people leave, it happens after a disaster. After Hurricane Ida, I went down to this little community, largely black called Ironton and Plaquemines parish. And they, their town, one councilman described it as going through an egg scrambler after Hurricane Ida because of the storm surge. And one person living there decided that he had evacuated to San Antonio with his girlfriend and figured that he's going to live there now. He's just not going to rebuild in that area. And that's like a decision that's happening on an individual basis because others in that, that community will stay there. And they plan to rebuild as they're able to. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's at the moment, very ad hoc. And I think one of the biggest challenges is it appears that more resources are available post disaster than really pre disaster. So it's only post disaster that some of these conversations start to take place. I will say though it also varies greatly from community to community. Generally communities take action when things become a problem. And if you look at Florida, for example, look at Miami, Miami has been, you know, doing lots of work on resiliency and these issues of how are we going to deal with sea level rise for, for quite some years. I remember going to a conference a number of years ago where actually they have brought in European experts because Europe has been doing a lot more research and policy development at the national level on, on these issues. So really it's, it's kind of all over the board right now. And it's complicated in, in part like this, as Jeff mentioned about individual property rights, it's complicated because this issue is one that's a multi scalar issue. You have the individual, the choices in individual can be, the resources available to an individual. You have the community and then you have the national level. And so for us to come up with a, a more holistic approach to this is really going to have to involve linking all those levels together into something that is more comprehensive and much less ad hoc than right now. Thank you to all of you for your perspectives on that. I, I want to move to Halle. In your story for Southern Green magazine, you have this quote about Louisiana's barrier islands. And the quote is, these islands are expensive, but they're cheaper than the alternative. So this idea that continuing to fortify and, you know, save these islands while it's expensive, it's cheaper than the alternative. And Jeff, in your book, you also deal with this issue. You talk about these kind of extravagantly costly projects to elevate and reinforce coast, the coastline in Miami. So I was hoping to talk about cost. How do each of you, Jeff and Callie, see local governments weighing the cost of what some might say is delaying the inevitable. And how much is too much? Yeah, I mean, when it comes to Louisiana's barrier islands, they're definitely unique in the sense that they provide a critical speed bump and like a first line of defense from hurricanes, plus really important habitat that they create behind them. So if the state were to let those slip away, the storm surge would be felt even more intensely by those further inland, especially since we're losing marshes every day. But at the same time, having people living on those barrier islands is another factor that makes it, you know, even more difficult to decide like if there's, if how to like create policies around whether people should even be allowed to live down there because Grand Isle is the only very inhabited barrier island that Louisiana has left. And the mayor is talking about wanting to rebuild despite all of the damage down there. And so right now, they're not necessarily being asked the question of should they rebuild or not because they aren't, they aren't forced to ask that question. And that's also not a very politically popular thing to do, right? When you go down to other coastal parishes like Lafouche and Terrebonne, they haven't had a lot of support from the state or federal government in terms of funding for levies. And so they actually on their own started their own tax in order to fund the levy protection that they felt like they needed in order to stay in that area. So I think that's a good question. Really, it just, it just depends. You know, you brought up the question of, of how much is too much and how much is this going to cost? And, you know, first thing I think just to say about this is that we haven't even begun to grapple with this. I mean, the, the scale of costs that we're talking about here are just enormous. And it's, you know, the obvious truth that Donna talks about in her report also is it, you know, what's going to be saved and what can't be saved? Not everything is going to be saved. And so, you know, where do you put the walls? Where do you put the storm drainage? Which neighborhoods get it? Which ones don't? Who pays? Who doesn't? These are the really hard questions. And, you know, yes, Miami has done, you know, a lot of good stuff, but it's just the beginning. And it is not even, no one is even beginning to grapple with the really hard stuff like moving airports and things like that, but it's going to have to happen in the very near future. And it doesn't happen like on Tuesday, you decide to move Miami International Airport on Thursday, it's on a higher ground. You know, these kinds of projects take years and decades of thinking and nobody is, you know, beginning to think that way. And the other thing that this, you know, this who's going to pay for thing really underscores that, that Donna's report touches on also is, you know, equity and, you know, who, which neighborhoods get saved, you know, in New York, yeah, we'll put a big wall around lower Manhattan, but, you know, show me the wall. We're going to put around Red Hook, you know, it's not going to happen. And the same kind of thing in Miami, you know, Brickle will be saved Miami shores. I don't think so. And that's going to exacerbate, you know, a lot of political tension and a lot of political problems in, as this conversation moves forward. Now I'm glad Jeff that you mentioned the issue of infrastructure because it wasn't mentioned in the report, but I think it's absolutely critical because a lot of infrastructure is actually is based near the water because of the requirements that infrastructure. So your refineries, your power plants, your sewage treatment plants all are nestled along coastline. And so they're all, all vulnerable. And the question of, you know, which neighborhoods get saved, I think is, I think that's one of the reasons why this is going to always be a very local issue, no matter what's done on the national level is going to be a very local issue. But even if you look at the strategy from Miami, they acknowledge, you know, not everything can be saved. And that's, I think some of the hardest, it's going to be some of the hardest aspect of this. So a follow up question, which I knew said, nobody's sticky about this. And I guess my question is, why not? Because it seems somewhat obvious, right, that this is coming at this point. This is a question to anybody who would like to jump in. You know, is it because it's a political third rail, as Hallie mentioned, is it because, you know, convincing people to move away from their homes is just unpalatable? What's going on? Well, you know, it's all those things, but you know, mostly it's, it's a question of, you know, short term, you know, asking for sort of sacrifices now for long-term gains or to pay now to do something in the future. And nobody wants to do that. I mean, the best example, you know, simplest example of the failure of our political system to deal with this is flood insurance reform. I mean, you know, in 2012, we, you know, there was flood insurance reform that began, that raised prices and began to, you know, build in some financial incentives, not to build in risky areas and everything. And it was a good program. It was just the beginning. It was, it was, it started to raise some of these costs and in high risk areas. So it was just the most modest kind of change. And people went bananas. I mean, they went bananas. You had, you know, it was Democrats and Republicans, you know, you had homeowners. I remember being, I was reporting my book and I was out in Staten Island in Chuck Schumer's. People were freaking out and calling Schumer's office and he went, you know, ballistic and wanted to roll everything back. And they pushed back all those flood reforms because people didn't want to pay more money. And that's just a microcosm of this conversation. So when you think, oh, well, we're going to like relocate, you know, 800 or 1000 people and pay, you know, tens of millions of dollars to change, you know, the location of an airport or these oil refineries along Houston, these sort of large scale rethinking of our landscapes. I mean, nobody's willing to have that conversation. They aren't even willing to bring it up, much less have the hard conversations about it. So it's become, you know, this sort of Mad Max conversation about like, well, everybody's doing what they can and, you know, some people are staying, some people are going and, you know, it's just a free for all. So the past couple of weeks with, especially with the flood insurance reform, you know, making the news, there have been quite a few articles on this issue, which has I think been very, very, very good for trying to elevate this to, especially to the national level. And I'm always interested in reading the comments on articles just to get a sense of, you know, what do people think. And one of the things I noticed in the comments, there seems to be a misperception among people who don't live on the coast, that the coast is largely populated by very wealthy people who live in second homes. And one of the things I think we need to consider when we look at the issues of raising the flood insurance, but also manage a treat is there are a lot of people on the coast who for whom, you know, with less expensive houses, they're only houses. This is the only place they have to live. So if they can't live on the coast, you know, where, where do they go? One sentiment I saw in the comments were as along the lines of, well, they should have known better than to live there. It was like, things have changed so rapidly, really just in the last, you know, I would say even less than a decade, you know, that people who, you know, formerly were living in some place that was considered largely, you know, free from floods now find themselves living in areas that are, you know, in the rural front prone and a lot of people living in these areas are not necessarily wealthy people. So when you start talking about insurance rate hikes of, you know, in the extreme, sometimes, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50% depending on the property, that can get you into some, you know, housing insecurity or even housing equity concerns, you know, one potential would be, you know, for only those people who don't have a mortgage, right, so they're not required to have insurance or have, you know, so much money that they can buy a house without a mortgage. Are there all the ones who can afford the coast, which would be a different, you know, different outcome with this type of conversation? So I want to pause for another moment on this equity question, because this is something that I think more and more, you know, we're seeing it from reporting, like the reporting that how Jeff do, we're also seeing it on the research side from researchers like Katherine Mock who are looking across buyout programs and finding that really whether or not a community pursues a buyout has more than anything to do with how well resourced and wealthy that community is, you know, whether they even have like the people and the money to go through this complicated bureaucratic process to apply for buyout funds, but then once a community applies and receives buyout funds, it seems to be the residents of the less wealthy areas of the community who are actually taking the buyout to moving away. So I was hoping, I know that we've touched on this a little bit already, but if anyone would like to just add anything more, you know, on this question of the difference in people's abilities to react to sea level rise and climate change, depending on their financial security and other factors, you know, what are these equity implications of climate change adaptation? Well, from my perspective, one of the alternatives to buyouts right down in Louisiana is elevations and in other coastal areas is elevating their homes and speaking to officials who are in charge of that program in the coastal parishes, there tended to be a barrier to entry when it came to those who couldn't afford flood insurance in order to qualify for that kind of program. So when you think about that, if they can't afford flood insurance, they also can't afford to elevate their own home, which would, you know, potentially allow them to deal with less damage and be a little bit more prepared for a storm and whatever impacts it would bring. So that's kind of a gap in the system that we have in terms of trying to protect people and offer them other options for adapting. And, you know, elevating your home is nice and obviously helps keep water out of your living room, but it doesn't keep communities alive, right? I mean, if the roads are washed out and schools are flooded and everything, you know, if your house is elevated, that's great, but, you know, it's not how you keep communities on the coast alive. It requires this larger-scale government kind of presence and policy to keep these places alive or not. The one thing that I'll say about this is that, you know, there's also the problem of when it comes to equity of wealthy people having a lot of voice and political clout in the water will come. For example, I wrote about a community on the Florida coast where you had a couple of wealthy homeowners who wanted to keep, who elevated their house and wanted to live on the coast and keep it, but they also wanted to make sure that the county paid for the road to get to their place. And, you know, they wanted, I don't remember how long the road is, but several miles, and this road kept washing out and washing out and washing out. It was costing the county millions and millions of dollars to maintain this one road to these, like, three people's houses. And they, finally the county said, forget it, you know, we're going to bankrupt the county in order to keep your road to your multimillion-dollar mansions alive. I mean, passable, I don't think so. And that the homeowners sued the county saying, you know, you have to keep this road paved and passable for us. So it gets to all these other kinds of equity issues also of like the, because as communities are reduced and bought out as these, as they shrink their tax basis shrink also. And as the tax basis shrink, they have less and less money to spend on the kind of adaptations that they need to do, whether it's for roads or septic systems or something. So it becomes this sort of Detroit-like spiral of declining tax base and declining infrastructure that is really hard to deal with. It's interesting because if you look at, you know, a lot of these communities are also highly dependent upon tourism and access to the coast as their economic generator. So you kind of have this tension there between, you know, if we lose access to the coast, then we lose the income from these areas. We lose, you know, people lose their jobs. So it's just, you know, I think even complicates it more. And this is something that went into the decision making around road repair in one of the islands in the Outer Banks. And so they decided that they actually, that without that road, they lose their economic engine in that area. So Jeff, you mentioned that, you know, it's not like this everywhere, that the mentality is quite different. And you talk about this in your book in certain European countries who are taking a much more proactive approach to the situation. Could you share a bit about how other countries are thinking about this issue and what we can learn from them? Well, I mean, the classic example is the Netherlands, you know, who have been kind of basically living below sea level for, you know, a thousand years and have an incredible system of dykes and barriers in order to manage water. I think 95% of the engineers in the United States working on coastal engineering are from the Netherlands. I mean, they really are. It's like someone, an engineer, I know joked about them being like the new kind of Royal Dutch, India Company kind of thing, this sort of new international kind of expertise that has been, you know, widely in demand all over. But for example, I went to a place called a project that was called Room for the River in the Netherlands where they had to shift the flow of this river because it was flooding this town, medium sized town, maybe 75,000 people or something. And they had to rechannel the river in order to save the town from continual flooding all the time. But in order to do that, they had to buy out or evict hundreds of people from their houses and farms to rechannel this river. And it was not an issue. They just did it. I mean, there was not this sort of property rights, we're going to fight, we're going to march. There was this communal sense that, yeah, this is the right thing to do. I don't even think that there was much of a legal question about it. And it was a relatively straightforward process within the legal and political system in the Netherlands. You could never imagine in a million years that happened in here. You would have lawsuits for the next 300 years about that. It makes these kinds of projects which are necessary and that one in the Netherlands, for example, worked really well and basically, you know, 500 people had to sacrifice their houses and their homes for the greater good of the 75,000 people who live in that town. But it worked and it was a fabulous project, but it would never happen here. So I'm going to ask just a couple more questions and then we'll turn it over to questions from the audience. So please, for audience members, I see a bunch of questions already coming in. Keep them coming. So I want to turn to the question of eminent domain. This was something that I didn't know about that I learned Donna from your report and it sort of blew my mind that there had been a quiet policy change within the Army Corps of Engineers that allowed them to condition federal climate change mitigation funding to communities on those communities willingness to use eminent domain if needed to relocate residents. So eminent domain meaning forcing providing compensation for people to move away. And I'm curious how, you know, where you all land on this idea of using eminent domain in the context of managed retreat. So I have to say I was very surprised to learn about this in the Army Corps of Engineers memo. And I would love, if any of our participants have background information that can pass on, it would be great. I would love to find out how this change took place, how this suddenly appeared in the Army Corps of Engineers documentation because I don't have any background on that. But just based on, you know, the little bit of research I was able to do and looking at some of the communities where this was, you know, where this has been an issue, my concern is that eminent domain if it's required as part of non-voluntary, right, if it's required it would actually have the effect of discouraging communities to grapple with flood risk and discourage them from participating in plans to mitigate against or build up resilience and otherwise prepare for flood risk and coastal vulnerability. Donna meaning that communities will choose to leave money on the table rather than accept federal funds that carry this condition of eminent domain. I think it can put communities in a difficult position because, you know, while it's a federal statement that you have to have this eminent domain it comes down to the local level, right, where down a local level translates into whose houses are going to be lost. And that can become extremely difficult at the local level, local level politics. So I think it could potentially, depending on how it's implemented, be discouraged communities to take action to prepare. I would add, Donna, that I was very surprised to read that too. That this was embedded in the Army Corps proposals. I also would add that there's a, well, I'm not a huge fan of Army Corps projects, period. I mean, the idea that there's a sort of, they have this, you know, domination over how we think about coastal resilience. And a lot of Army Corps projects are, you know, all about walls and concrete in ways that I think stifle a lot of more creative thinking about how we'll deal with living on the coast. So I'm not saying that I think it's a good thing that these, that eminent domain could stop some of these projects, but they're in some sense a kind of silver lining to it. But I will say that, you know, this eminent domain thing is a big issue. I mean, this goes to the heart of these property rights questions. And, you know, if you do want to do a massive project along your coastline and you have three houses that say, forget it, I'm not leaving. Well, then what do you do? Would you build around them? I mean, how do you handle that? So I do think that these questions are going to come more and more to the fore. And there's, in my view, a kind of inevitability that we're going to be using more and more of the eminent domain powers to do these projects. Yeah, I think that I just, it has to be used, you know, compassionately because there's a history around eminent domain, right, in terms of race, in terms of Indigenous communities that makes those populations who are already incredibly vulnerable to climate change, you know, worried and they, for good reason because they have been exploited by the government policy before. So I think that is something that needs to be taken into consideration. I'd like to see us move away from managed retreat to a term, perhaps participatory retreat, you know, where we acknowledge that it's really the communities needing to work this out and everybody worked together, right, to be able to achieve a higher level of a security book, you know, in their community. And my concern about the way in which the eminent domain issue, right, has been brought into managed retreat is, as far as I can tell, there was no context. It just, you know, appeared. No framing, no, what are we, you know, this is why it needs to be done. Here's some right and left limits, you know, compassionate eminent. All of these types of discussions, I think would have been very, very helpful to have had at the time in which the policy was being changed. And maybe there were, I just have not been able to find any, any record of it. I'm going to close one question, quick question to how we can move us over to audience Q&A. How are you in your reporting, you're, you know, you're talking to these residents who are in their 80s and their descendants of people who have been on this land for hundreds of years and, you know, they're really grappling with not just this is where I've saved Doc to move, but like this is my ancestral home. These are, are, you know, lands for generations. Can you talk a little bit about how, you know, this tie of these communities to the land and how these communities are grappling with the possibility of their land potentially physically disappearing. Right. I mean, for some people in the community, they, they recognize that sea level rise is an issue. I mean, they see it happening. They see storms getting more intense. They might not believe in climate change and global warming and fossil fuels fueling in, but they do see and feel the impacts, you know, very personally. And for them, what they're thinking about is where is the help and when is it going to come? And they're just looking for local solutions to, you know, this massive problem. I mean, they talk about wanting rocks to be placed along like the, the gulf side of their island in order to try to break up wave action and keep it in place better, but that kind of solution isn't necessarily going to work. Well, isn't going to work long term. And so I just, I think that some people, they see the issue, but they don't know how to solve it, right? That's just not something that they're equipped to do because they're just living there. They've lived there for a long time and they see things changing around them and they, what, what options do they have? Others of course feel like, you know, they've been there. They've lived there. They're 88 years old. Their families live there. They don't think that the island is going to go away. So I don't want to say that that is ignorance or anything like that, but it's just, they think that things can stay the way that they are. Because that's, that's what's happened in the past. Jeff, finishing up with you. Your book came out in 2017. What's changed since then? And what hasn't. Well, a lot of more people have moved to the coast. The opposite has happened than, than what you would hope would happen, right? So, so that's certainly one thing that's happened. I mean, you know, in a broad sense, obviously. The climate crisis has become much more front and center in our political conversation. You know, it is, you know, I started writing about the climate change 20 years ago and I would talk to people about it. And it would be like I was writing about the sort of sex life of porcupines or something. It was some weird little thing that, you know, what kind of fascinating to talk about, but wasn't really central to anybody's life. And now these questions are central to everyone's life. Everyone knows this is happening. Obviously there's still denial and all that, but, but the, the, the centrality of the conversation is much different than it was. What is not different though is still the, you know, entrenched interests that are keeping, you know, these, these conversations from happening as fast as they need to, you know, I would have hoped that people who lived on the coast would be much more politically active, not only in their own neighborhoods of whether we're going to put beach replenishment here or there, but also in cutting carbon emissions and in fighting harder to build that movement. Although to be clear, I'm missing most people who are on this know that cutting carbon emissions is really important for the long term and for all kinds of reasons, but it's not going to stop sea level rising in the near term because of the thermal inertia and the oceans and things that are already melting of these glaciers. But, but the lack of political action, despite the increase in political talk or climate talk is I think the biggest gap that I feel and that has not kind of been filled in the years since I started reporting on this. Thanks, Jeff. Turning to audience questions. The first one is, where should people go? So, you know, these coastal communities. Where should they be retreating? Where can they relocate? That's to anybody. Well, I'll jump in. I'll just say that, you know, broadly speaking, you know, there is no safe place from the climate crisis, right? I mean, there is no like, you know, look what happened in the Pacific Northwest, you know, for years, everyone talked about, oh, you want to retreat from the climate, climate change is one of the safest places to go is like Portland, you know, temperate place, lots of water, lots of trees, lots of food, massive heat wave that killed, you know, a large number of people in that region. With sea level rise, obviously, this is not complex science. Elevation matters, right? So if you're living on the coast and your house is one foot above high tide, it's very different than living on the coast in your house is 100 feet above high tide, right? So elevation matters a lot in any kind of coastal situation. But, you know, that's so that that's simple, but the idea of kind of safety in the climate crisis is a very relative term. Yeah, and I just, I guess I just point out too, when you look at the attempts to resettle. Yield is John Charles, the island with the coastal tribe on it on Louisiana's coast that has washed its protect, watched its protective marshes kind of just recede in front of it and leave it incredibly vulnerable to hurricanes. They've been moved a few dozens of miles north inland. But part of the issue with that process, it has been community buy-in and also the timing in terms of how long after different hurricanes that forced residents on that island to move away. Like it's been a long period of time and so it's been difficult to actually coordinate that kind of move. So I think that what's important when thinking about that question of where should people go, we need to be thinking about how do we talk to communities and get their input on where they think they should go and where they think they'll be able to retain a sense of place and feel comfortable. And that sort of premise. So nice here, back with us. If you want to just jump in and finish your remarks. Sorry, I have no idea what happened. But on this issue of where do they go, another dynamic that's coming out of this, which we haven't really, wasn't really covered in detail yet. But what's important is the issue of climate change popular or not very wealthy or desirable or suddenly more desirable. And so residents in those areas are getting pushed out into wherever. This has been talked a lot about in Miami, for example. Thanks, Donna. One question I'm seeing in the chat is sort of echoing the frustration that we've heard on this issue, which is, you know, this sense that this existential issue feels like it's just being ignored. And the question is, how do we break through, like how do we break through and illustrate the imminent threat to our coasts and smaller islands that are going to disappear? How do we break through to politicians and policymakers? Well, that's a big question. And that is the sort of question that haunts everything about the climate crisis. And, you know, that's the question that's going to be asked in Glasgow in a couple of weeks. And that's the question that every climate activist who walks down the street in front of the White House asked. And that's the question that Greta Thunberg asked. And that's the question that, you know, all of us as writers and people who are thinking about this ask, you know, you know, I remember being out on a ship in the North Atlantic with some scientists who were doing some sedimentary coring. They send these to kind of essentially these tubes down to take up sediment from the ocean floor. And they look at the sediments and they can reconstruct past histories of the climate. And it's really important to understand what happened in the past and what's going to happen in the future. And we were sitting out on the fantail of the ship on a night, a beautiful clear night in the Atlantic and drinking bourbon. And I talked to this great, you know, something with this great scientist who, and I said, what's going to, what is it going to take, you know, to wake people up and stimulate action? And he said, well, when a big storm comes along and wiped out a major American city, people will wake up and understand, you know, what's at stake here. And this was before Sandy, you know, before Katrina, all of these things. I mean, look at what's happening in our world. California is a flame, has been a flame. There are massive heat waves in the Pacific Northwest. Look what's happening on the Gulf Coast that Hallie writes about. Look, look at what's going on in Miami every day at high tides, which are going on right now. I mean, it's happening in real time now. This is not something, some event that is in reports or books that I'm writing or that Donna is writing. And yet still we're not grappling with it in any kind of significant way. So the answer to your question is, I have no clue. So we'll say that I think the risk rating 2.0 is at least a step in the right direction. Regardless of, I don't want to talk about the cost of policies, but the fact that we are now recognizing flood risk in a different way, right? Recognizing different types of flood risk, storm surge, rainfall, coastal erosion, things that were not taken into consideration in the past at the federal level, as well as taking into account factors specific to a dwelling, their elevation, the cost that we build and these types of things. So we are at least with risk 2.0 beginning to look at different types of environmental variables when it comes to flood them in the past. Right. And I guess I would just add that in addition to a major disaster like Jeff was talking about, it probably will also depend on rising costs to live in hazardous and risky areas. You're already seeing that now in terms of flood insurance and we'll see how the 2.0 protocol will affect that as well. One question from the chat. Are any coastal communities having the hard conversation about, excuse me, creating a buffer zone where no one can build within a certain distance from each? I'll just give you my quick thoughts on that, which is I'm sure that there are and that's a very good and kind of clear idea. I'm not aware of any in particular that I can point to, but I'm sure that that is happening. And I just want to say one other thing around that is that, and this goes to my comments earlier about the Army Corps of Engineers. I mean, I think that what's most exciting to me about what's happening on our coastlines is rethinking how we live with water and thinking about living on the coast in ways that do not require concrete walls and basically imagining that we're going to keep cities like Miami or more anywhere, the same just build walls. I think you look at places like in my book I wrote about Venice and obviously that's an example of a water city that was designed in an entirely different way. And I think the most hopeful and interesting and exciting thing that's happening on the coastlines right now is beginning to reimagine what a coastal city is and beginning to rethink how we live with water, whether it's floating houses and canals or buffer zones, natural habitats, there's some really interesting projects going on around that. And to me, that's really cool and really exciting. It makes me think that we're talking about this in the loss of these places, but I think we're also going to gain a lot in the future in how we think about the coast and how we live on the coast. And I think we'll do it in a kind of better way in many cases. So I think there's a lot of sort of hope in the imagining of the future that we're talking about here. If you look at, for example, some of the buyout programs, especially if you look at some in New York City, New York State rather the properties that were bought out, well that land then is returned to its natural state, typically a marshland, and it becomes in effect then a safety barrier for houses further back. So I think there's just that a growing recognition of the role of the natural habitat and actually being the regular protector of the rest of the area, instead of walls. So there are a few questions in common instead of coming related to Puerto Rico and, you know, what's happening in with beach erosion in Puerto Rico and the beach line moving so far inland that it's hitting building walls. And the question is, you know, there's a comment with the state, meanwhile keeps on giving permits for permanent construction on the beach and basically privatizing the beach and selling it off to developers. And I think there's maybe a broader question there around, you know, zoning and the role that zoning plays in helping, you know, create these buffer zones and otherwise kind of helping communities learn to, you know, live with water. I'm curious if anybody would like to chime in with any thoughts on that. I think you're on mute, Donna. I think it's interesting. And I don't think we've talked about the various types of building along the coast at any sort of, you know, fine-grained manner of just kind of kind of talk about building on the coast. I think it'd be interesting to start distinguishing between commercial and residential and residential. You know, if you have a hotel on the coast, right, and there was a major weather event, you hopefully have enough time, you can tell everybody the hotel, you know, they need to leave. If you have houses on the coast, it's much harder to get people away, you know, in a short time. So I think there's some interesting, I mean, I'll have answers, but I think there's definitely some interesting conversations to be had around what type of development is appropriate in various places along the coast and not just talk about development in general. One final question, and excuse me, this has to do with rivers and freshwater resources. It's going a little bit of a different direction. How do we protect our rivers and save our rivers in an era of overpopulation? What do you mean by protect our rivers? So the question is the full question is how can we manage freshwater resources and permit rivers natural flow? So how do we save our river resources? And if that question is a bit far afield, we can move on to a slightly different question. So I'll give everyone a second to jump in and if nobody does, I'll ask a different question. I'll just say one thing about that. You mentioned this idea of how do we save their natural flows? And I think one of the key things to kind of grasp about this moment that we're in and our climate future is that there is no normal. What is normal? I mean, Donna talked about this with the aftermath of the hurricanes that hit the Gulf, the flooding we saw in Appalachia and in New York City for that matter. I live here in Austin, Texas, where we regularly have enormous flash floods all the time. Climate is changing the way water moves around everywhere, not just in the ocean. It's changing precipitation patterns in a big way. We're getting much more intense rainfalls than we had before. And so this question of how do you maintain natural river flows is in a way it's an important question because maintaining river flows is really important for the larger ecosystem in general. But this question of how do you anticipate what these river flows are going to be like and how do you think about rivers and drainage in a world where rainfall may double or not and then look at the opposite in the Pacific South, in the Southwest, where you have massive drought, you have Lake Mead near a fifth of its normal capacity. You have rivers overheating. You have salmon in the entire salmon run in the Pacific Northwest was basically destroyed by the heat wave there. So it's a very complex question and one that's really important to think about. But I think that the really important thing is to think that is to understand that there is no normal anymore. And on that note, we are at time. So I would like to thank everybody for participating in this panel. I would like to thank all of the panelists, the Pulitzer Center for supporting, and of course the audience for chaining in. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.