Will the LA fires unleash a wave of climate migrants?
35:09 Share

Welcome to Xero. I am Akshat Rati. This week, climate migrants. As the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn, displaced residents are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives.

In an evacuations shelter in Westwood, Bloomberg reporter Michelle Ma spoke with a 72-year-old man named Paul Netter. And can I ask where you live? Well, I used to live in the Palisades. Okay, and do you know what the state of your home is? 99% corrupt. I'm so sorry. I mean, they call it a war zone, a...

Paul had just enough time to grab his two cats, a few sentimental items before he left, but not much else. Where will he go next? He does not know.

Each year, the number of people making decisions like the ones he's facing grows. In the US alone, a Census Bureau survey found that at least a million people were displaced by climate catastrophes in 2022.

And the International Organization for Migration estimates that there might be as many as a billion environmental migrants around the world within the next 30 years. It's something Gaia Vins has written about in two superb books. In her 2014 book, Adventures in the Anthropocene, she traveled the world to document what people in places like Nepal and Bolivia are doing to deal with a warming climate. And then in her 2020 book, Nomad Century, she takes that thesis forward,

by talking about places where people cannot adapt and will need to move. As these fires rage on, I wanted to talk to her about what it will take for us to adjust to this new reality. This is...

just more evidence that we are now living in a different world. We're living in the post-climate change world. Gaia, as you'll hear, thinks about global solutions to these kinds of problems. But local solutions are needed too. The geography and politics of the Los Angeles area poses its own challenges. So I also spoke with climate reporter Jake Bittle about what California's government is doing when it comes to the challenges of rebuilding. He's a staff writer for Grist and the author of The Great Displacement about migration in the U.S.

Jake, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We're speaking as fires continue to burn in Los Angeles. And one of the many questions that is on a lot of people's mind is what happens after the disaster? What gets rebuilt and what is not going to be built? And you had a very interesting thread on X about the economics of which neighborhoods get built after a fire. And I think that's a very interesting thread.

and why they might sometimes be surprising. So given what we know of LA right now, how do you think this plays out? Yeah, it's difficult to tell for sure because, you know, the housing market that

burned in the Palisades fire especially is just one of the most valuable and desirable in the world, arguably. But I think that what we've seen in the past in California is that some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most complex terrain, not only do they tend to be underinsured because they're so high value, also the permitting and construction process

can be really difficult and take a really long time because you're building just on really, really difficult ground, right? Like there's really steep slopes. Developing those canyons is really hard to begin with. So redeveloping them is also going to be hard and expensive. But is there an assumption that given how wealthy the people were who could afford to live in the Palisades versus, say, the people in the Eton Fire in places like Altadena who aren't as wealthy,

that it's the palaces that get rebuilt and alternina, not? Yeah, yeah, you might think right there, oh, well, the rich people have more money, so they're going to be able to rebuild faster. But very few people have enough money on hand to just rebuild a home out of pocket, right? You're talking about almost a million dollars of rebuilding costs in some of these cases, right? So

You know, it really comes down to how much insurance you have and in particular, I think, how much of the proportion of the value of your home is insured, right? So if you're in a home that's maybe $600,000 or $700,000, you can probably cover that with a typical insurance policy. And the insurance situation in Altadena actually turns out to have been better than in a lot of other places in California, in part because the insurers...

Hadn't gotten around to dropping these people yet because they hadn't had a fire in a while and the homes weren't super, super high value. But then in a place like the Palisades, right? Okay, these homes are worth millions and millions of dollars. It's hard to find market insurance coverage that covers that. So if you lose your home and you didn't have insurance, the full value, okay, what are you going to do? Either you dip into your savings to just rebuild it out of pocket, which I'm sure some people will do, right? Like the wealthiest.

But if you are wealthy and you had a big home, but not that wealthy to where you can just build a new one with the money you have in your Merrill Lynch account, then you're really in a pickle. And I saw this happen in Santa Rosa after the 2017 Tubbs fire. There was a hillside neighborhood with relatively wealthy homeowners and on complex terrain. And they really struggled to rebuild.

The other thing that is a wider problem, which is just housing in general and building new housing, is now competing with sort of rebuilding after a disaster. We heard from Governor Gavin Newsom that he wants to see if the legislature will suspend some of the Environmental Assessment Act and the Coastal Planning Act.

What do you think happens in these situations where a government goes beyond, you know, desire to want to rebuild, but in the process, perhaps encourages building in the very same places that are risky and vulnerable to these disasters in the future again?

Yeah, yeah. It's really, really hard. In the past couple of years before this fire, California and Gavin Newsom, they've been trying to suspend CEQA and the Coastal Act just to build regular housing, right, just to build multifamily housing. And they've made some progress in getting some of that permitting streamlined.

I think it's a little rich for the governor to say, oh, I'm going to suspend this stuff. It turns out we can just do this the whole time. You know, rebuilding after disasters is really complicated, and permitting is one part of it. But the truth is it takes a couple years, even in the best case scenario, right? But I think that the conversation about whether to rebuild or where we're going to rebuild depends.

is one that the governor seems intent on sort of trying to move past that as fast as possible, which is pretty typical. But in his defense, I guess, it's a pretty hard conversation to have. The land is still owned by the people who live on it. They technically have a right to come back since they own the property. And saying, let's not do this is really tough. And very few places really try to do it, especially in California where property values are so high.

And we should talk about insurance because there are two layers to this, which is one, you cannot really rebuild without insurance, but also the way insurance is playing out, especially in California, but a few other states in the US, there is perhaps misbuilding happening because the insurance that is being provided is not private. It's not really taking risk into consideration. It's being backed by the state. And so you're building in the very places that will burn again. So talk

goes through what the changes in the California insurance system have been and whether you think they are actually going to work in this hot world that we are creating and continue to heat up.

Yeah, it's a really interesting situation in California and sort of like a far more acute version of what other states have experienced, where I think as the fire damage has gotten worse, they've sort of encountered this tradeoff between, you know, price pressure on consumers and the availability of coverage. And for a long time, California basically chose to limit price pressure on consumers. And now they're paying the price with affordability, where, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of people have lost their coverage.

And the state basically like two weeks before these fires finally finished this regulatory process said, OK, insurers, you can charge more money. You can you can account for the risk of climate change. You can pass on your costs. And in exchange, please stay in these areas. And so I think that, you know, it remains to be seen. And the big question, I think, for the post-election.

LA fires world is whether, you know, if insurers feel like they can set an adequate price, whether that acts as an effective signal to the homeowners that, you know, from the perspective of fire risk, they really shouldn't be living in these homes in these places unless they take substantial mitigation action, right? Because that's what insurance is supposed to do. It's supposed to be a signal about climate risk.

in the rational way of viewing it. And it hasn't been in California effectively. And the question now I think is, if you have people paying, you know, upwards of five, six, seven, $10,000 a year for insurance, and it won't go down unless they mitigate or get out of the way, does that start to change the building patterns? I'm not sure what the answer would be, but that's sort of the big, big question, I think. So now we take a step back and just look at the book that you've written on the great displacement. You make the case that

You're already starting to see in some pockets real climate change driven migration within the US and that'll get supercharged as extreme weather events get worse. Could you talk us through what kind of notable stories you've

Yeah, I think on the fire specifically, there's sort of two big things that stuck with me, right? One is that for people at the lower end of the income scale in really tough rental and housing markets, a lot of times what happened is they either got pushed out of homeownership and into a really chaotic rental market where they're being price gouged.

or they just sort of bounce from apartment to apartment. You know, this happened in Santa Rosa. It was almost impossible to get an affordable apartment even before the fire. But then you lose 5,000 housing units in a night, and it's just really, really hard to find a place to settle. The other thing that's really interesting, I think, and you may see this happen too in L.A., but maybe to a lesser extent, just given the political geography of the place, is a lot of people in Northern California, in places like Paradise,

which are relatively conservative compared to the state as a whole, which is trending left, they took the insurance payout that they got from the fire and they just made an elective move to a different part of the country, right? So I think most notably, like a lot of people from Paradise, I want to say it's in the dozens,

ended up moving to Boise, Idaho, which is obviously a more conservative state. These people were not on the wealthy end of the income scale in California, but in the Boise housing market, they were like titans. They could get huge houses in the suburbs of Boise. And they went through a lot. I'm not trying to say that they made out great, but you can either, for people who maybe have less equity in their home or they were renting to begin with, it just ends up being this sort of scramble. A disaster can honestly be a sort of unsticking point where it

you know, induces a move that they maybe otherwise wouldn't have made. But there's also a sort of stunning admission in the book where if you look at current migration patterns, yes, California and perhaps Louisiana are the two states from where people are leaving.

And some of that might be climate linked, some of that might be just affordability linked. But most of the migration is actually happening towards states that are being affected by climate change. So Florida is seeing a lot of migration, a state that gets hit by hurricanes all the time. Arizona, another state which gets hit by droughts and heat. Is that just us seeing an old pattern of economic migration or...

are we going to start to finally see a reversal because of climate change? Like, how do you square the circle here? Yeah, this was the most bedeviling question that still remains with me from the book. You know, it's climate migration. It's just people not liking the climate in Michigan and deciding to move to Fort Lauderdale, you know, and that's the median form of climate migration, even in just in the 21st century so far.

I don't know at what point the trend reverses itself, but I do think a lot of the places that the post-war housing boom took place in in the United States, where there was a ton of cheap land...

I think we've sort of gotten to a point, and this is true in Colorado too, like at the front range. You've gotten to a point where we're just pushing out from what was the sort of central cities at those times into really, really risky land. And in Arizona, of course, it's just very hot there. I think insurance, you know, probably is the mechanism, at least in the case of Florida, right, that would sort of force like a slowdown or a cessation of this dynamic.

I think like Florida is probably the place to look for this, right? Because you also have to pay for flood insurance and wind insurance there. And I've spoken to people on these rapidly developing metroplexes, right? Like Fort Myers or Tampa, where I'm from. Sometimes they can pay upwards of $20,000 a year in insurance costs combined between the two formats. And that is just not sustainable for almost anybody. And then, you know, the rebuilding rules are really tough too. So I think that...

It's possible that in the next couple of decades, in a geographically specific way, you might sort of start to see the housing market be unable to tolerate further expansion into these areas. And then what comes after that is another big question. So most climate change link migration, as we know, happens within countries. Obviously, you focused on the U.S. with your book, but are there lessons that the rest of the world can take from it? Noting that, of course, the U.S. is

You know, the world's largest economy, one of the richest countries in the world, has a much more developed and widespread insurance market. But still, are there lessons that others can take? Yeah, absolutely. I think that the main lesson is that for a lot of disasters, climate displacement just kind of looks a lot like

than regular housing displacement does, right? And so I think like LA is a good example, right? This is like a giant housing market and it's a giant rental market. It's like one of the biggest in the country. So you're not likely to see people get up out of their house in Altadena and walk up to North Dakota, right? Or to Canada, right? They can go to the next suburb,

or the next suburb over or the next suburb over. And that's the way that housing displacement works in LA generally. Like if you get evicted, you're not going to go to North Dakota, right? So, and I think that's probably true in other countries too, where like people sort of move in ways that are typical of those places. I think that the typical image in the United States and other places of a climate migrant is someone who, you know, flees from one climate to another, right? Like they want to make an elective move away from, you know, one type of weather event. And I think that

It's probably better from a policymaking standpoint if we just think about climate change as being kind of a factor that exacerbates all the other weaknesses in the way that we house people. In the United States, we have specific weaknesses, as you know, and then in other countries, there are other weaknesses. Thank you, Jake. No problem. After the break, Gaya wins on why climate upheaval is a global problem and needs global solutions.

If you've been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show. The average time to hire for most organizations is 30 to 45 days. Are you tired of a costly and lengthy hiring process? Simplify and speed up your recruitment by using the experts at Express Employment Professionals.

Reduce time to hire, cut down on multiple interviews, and lower your recruitment costs. Whether you're looking for contract workers or a new team member, our streamlined recruiting, candidate screening, and hiring process is more efficient than hiring on your own. Visit ExpressPros.com today. Haven't used a staffing company before? We know you enjoy learning new things and keeping up with trends and efficiencies.

Gaia, welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here, Akshat. Now,

Both of us have been watching the news from Los Angeles. The fires are still burning as we record this, and there's a lot that we aren't going to know about how communities in the Pacific Palisades or other areas will recover. In the intro, we heard from Paul, who was living there. He has no idea whether he's going to get a chance to go back and move into the Pacific Palisades.

What has surprised you or perhaps confirmed conclusions from your own reporting as you've watched the story? Well, I mean, obviously, I'm seeing it from London, so I don't have that very first-hand view. But it's so photographed, isn't it? Because it is LA. And I think what we're seeing here is...

Perhaps the first example of wealthy climate migration, right? Because we're seeing some of the richest people in the world having to move. But I think it's a reminder that we are all at the bottom of everything.

a puny mammal that has certain needs, right? We can't live under certain temperatures. We can't live where there's flames around our homes. You know, we can't breathe air that is infused with smoke. We have to move. And so for all our luxury mansions and our dreams of paradise, we are

actually an animal that needs to find a safe home. And we are seeing the very real dangers from these huge, huge earth systems. And we can't just push them back, you know. So in the two books out of the many books you've written, in The Adventure in the Anthropocene, you documented how people in different parts of the world, especially in the global south, are starting to adapt to the warming that exists already.

But then in Nomad Century, you took this one step forward to think about places which are beyond adaptation. When did that hit you that these places are there and they're growing in size? I think I took a two and a half year journey around the world to research adventures in the Anthropocene. And

It slowly sort of crept up on me that what I was seeing was enormous amounts of climate migration, even though people themselves didn't recognise themselves as climate migrants. They thought that they were perhaps, you know, moving for a better job, leaving rural areas because the economy wasn't working there. But actually, when you dug into it, why wasn't it working? It was because of persistent chronic drought that got worse over time.

the last decade or so. It was because of the encroachment of saltwater from rising sea levels into agricultural fields. It was because the coastline had completely eroded through more vicious storms and that constant rising of sea levels. And all of these things made me recognise that we don't have an honest level of debate at all anywhere, certainly not from leadership. We're not talking about the climate change

change that has already occurred. We're not talking about what our cities will look like over the coming decades. You know, what will LA look like in 2040, 2060? What will London look like? What will New York? What will Miami? Because we need to adapt right now to those changes and we need to recognise that some of those places are

are just not going to be livable. So we're not having that conversation and people are going to have to move. What is the scale of migration that we're talking about? It's impossible to put a figure on that because it depends on a lot of things. We've just had the first full year where the average temperature was 1.6 degrees above the pre-industrial average.

temperatures may go down slightly, but they are on an upward trajectory. And if we look ahead, it's quite likely that we will end up by the end of the century somewhere between three and four degrees above the pre-industrial average. We already have people living in unlivable zones, some of them heavily adapted and some of them suffering horribly. Places from Sudan to Mali have

hunger because of drought or floods. We have people in Asia, farm workers who are now working at night with head torches because it's simply too hot during the day. We already have these unlivable areas, but what will happen is they will increase in severity and intensity and last for many months of the year, if not throughout.

Some studies have put the zone of unliveability, this kind of climate niche of humanity, sort of shifting up and that area will encompass some 3 billion people by 2070, according to one study.

That doesn't mean 3 billion people will have to move, but it means that vast areas will have to be adapted and people will have to be accommodated either within their own nation or increasingly across borders. But, you know, if we want fewer people to have to move, to be forced to move, why?

we can do a lot in terms of mitigating the temperature rise to come through decarbonisation, but also through adapting and making some of these desperately difficult places more habitable longer term. But at the moment, we're really not doing any of that. We're not even adapting places in the rich world, let alone the poor world. And these projections become more uncertain the further out in time you go. But

Are there specific countries or regions that you've looked at where we can definitely say that climate change has caused or has been the primary reason for climate change?

people migrating away. Yeah, absolutely. Like the majority of climate migration is occurring within countries. And we see that in a lot of the most hit places. Obviously, Bangladesh has huge amounts of climate migration from the Bay of Bengal to other areas. But you

But, you know, there was a really interesting study out recently that showed that drought in the growing season in Mesoamerica is directly correlated with the number of migrants at the US border. So when it's particularly dry during the growing season, it pushes up food prices across Central America. And then we get this wave of increased migration towards the US border. And that's

perhaps the most kind of beautiful correlation that I've seen. But we also see in parts of Africa, we see a lot of climate migrants. We just had a really horrific flooding in East Africa, a place which is also suffering from chronic drought. What we're seeing is these cascading effects of one impact then leading to another impact.

I mean, if we look back to Pakistan a couple of years ago, they had months of intense heat, which was concurrent with extreme drought, which hit food prices and caused harvest losses. And then they got this terrible precipitation, this flash floods that caused 33 million people to be displaced within a week.

And then that's followed by landslides because the drought dries the soils and pulls it away from infrastructure, from houses and bridges and so on, making it much more susceptible. When those floods come, you get the loss of the topsoil, which can take a decade sometimes to be replenished. So terrible harvest problems. But also you get that loss of huge amounts of erosion, loss of the soil. And we see that everywhere.

These impacts are being felt very widely, are being talked about at a level where there is awareness of the problem. We also know there are potential solutions.

But there aren't that many places that are following through with those solutions. We know the amount of adaptation funding is vastly smaller than the funding that goes to reducing emissions. We need to do both. But definitely there's a huge gap on adaptation. So are there places that are starting to or perhaps are already doing a good job that others can look at and learn from?

I think Bangladesh is a really great example, actually, of how adaptation can work well. So

They have cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and they have become progressively worse, more intense, more frequent, more severe. And yet they've put in place a brilliant adaptation strategy where everybody knows what to do in the case of a cyclone. There are early warning systems. People get alerts. They know where to go. They know where to bring their animals. They know that they will be allowed to return if they want. So there is a lot of

trust there in the institutions and that's one of the most fundamental things to adaptation. Now what's happened is even though the severity and the frequency of these cyclones have become far more intense in recent years, the death toll has absolutely plummeted. Very few people die comparatively to how many used to and we can all learn from that. I mean we're

We should all be preparing ourselves for an extreme event hitting us in our town. You know, is your bag packed? Where would you go? Where's the safe place that you would drive to or walk to? Do you have your friend's numbers written down? Do you have the numbers of relations? Do you have enough food and fresh water to survive for a few days? Do you have a battery pack? All of these things are conversations that we should be having, especially if we live in

places that are a bit further out or a bit more rural. As people in LA are realizing today, you never know when something can hit. There is this quote that crops up on social media every so often, especially when there's a disaster unfolding from a scientist called John Holdren, who eventually became the science advisor to Barack Obama, the former US president. And the quote said,

There are basically three choices: adaptation, mitigation and suffering. We are going to do a mix of all of that, but the more we mitigate, the less we'll have to adapt and the less there will be suffering. Now, what we are seeing in front of us is obviously a mix of all that, but we are seeing not enough mitigation, definitely not enough adaptation and thus more suffering.

And that causes or will cause in much larger numbers migration. That's already become a hot button issue world over, right? We've seen politics turn to the right, turn to be anti-immigrant in most Western economies over the past few years. How are we going to deal with the challenge of migration if the politics is already so toxic?

You know, we are living in this time when the narrative around migration is truly toxic. We have leaders that are far right, that are populist, that are slogan driven, rather than vision led leadership to try and bring us together to solve these planetary scale crises. What we need is honesty. We need honesty over the scale of the climate disaster, but we also need honesty across

migration, right? It's completely normal and natural. People move. We need to counter some of the toxic tropes that come out that

Immigrants increase unemployment. The opposite is true, that they lower wages. Most economists would agree that immigration is absolutely essential in order to keep productivity, especially at a time when our birth rates are absolutely plummeting. You know, in a few decades, if not just one decade, nations will be competing for immigrants.

And, you know, those nations that manage to endear themselves to people who want to move are going to be in the better position.

But ultimately, we have to be pragmatic. You know, migration is inevitable. It's already underway. It is only going to increase. What we need to do is engage with the reality that we have right in front of us and make it work for us because there are so many benefits to it if we get it right. There are ways in which you can get migration right and there are clearly ways in which you can get migration wrong.

Are there any places where there are politicians that have successfully made the economic case for migration, pulled it off and actually won an election? Well, so it's a kind of sort of the dog chasing its tail in a way. So the reason quite often that...

leaders are chasing the anti-migrant vote is because they themselves have made such an anti-migrant case and they're sort of supporting media that is also making the anti-migrant case. So the public therefore think that they want no migrants and nobody really is making a positive migrant case. So they're sort of like locked in this ridiculous, vicious circle, which is completely unproductive for anybody.

But I mean, if you look at Australia, for example, I think it's like almost a third of Australians were born out of the country. And about half of Australians have at least one parent that was born out of the country. Now, Australia is quite a weird example because on one side, it's vehemently anti-migrant and on the other side, it's incredibly pro-migrant.

So they haven't quite got that right. But there are definitely aspects which are very pro-migrant. And again, the same situation with Canada. I mean, you only have to spend two seconds in Toronto to realise that this is an immigrant city, as all cities are. Yeah, I mean, London has the same qualification of having half the population actually not being born in the UK. And yeah, that's true of most global cities around the world.

But it still doesn't quite translate into the politics of actually...

But that's the world we're living in now. And that's the great rift in the United States. It's the great rift that we saw with Brexit and that we're seeing actually across the European Union. And it is very, very worrying. And so these are the challenges that we need desperately, desperately to resolve. And that takes leadership. This is the big problem that we don't have the honesty from leadership. We don't have that courageous leadership.

visionary person in leadership really that I can see

Antonio Guterres, perhaps, you know, but he's not the leader of a country who is speaking honestly about the crises we face in climate, in migration, in poverty. We don't hear it. Well, you've tried to make a case for a global body that oversees immigration worldwide. You brought up Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations. Should the United Nations be doing this and...

How in the hell is it going to get the powers to actually do this across nation states, sovereign states that so fight to keep that status of independence and spend so much money on defense to ensure that stays?

Yeah. Now, the United Nations, these bodies were set up at a time of huge crisis just after the Second World War, when nations had been ripped apart, when millions had been displaced, entire cities had been flattened.

Hatred each other. They'd literally just been at war with each other. And yet they came together to produce these international bodies that would eradicate the curse of smallpox and polio that would set out extremists.

a declaration of human rights, all of these things, they came together to do that. And that was remarkable. And yes, you know, there are flaws with that system. But where we are now, this planetary scale of crises cannot be solved by drawing imaginary lines on maps. It needs...

a response that is also planetary and I think that we need a United Nations that is a stepped up version. We are now a population of more than 8 billion people, resources are now more scarce and we're living in this extreme dangerous world of climate change and I think the only way we can deal with planetary scale human mobility and climate crisis that's helping to cause that

is through a body that can help to manage that. Well, you join the illustrious company of Kim Stanley Robinson, who would also very much like the members of, say, the G20 or the United Nations to actually act like members of a body that has teeth to make global policy work. Thank you, Gaia. Thank you, Akshat. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.

That's the sound of a Canadian firefighting aircraft scooping water to fight the LA fires. You can read more about how those water bombing planes were quickly put into production at bloomberg.com slash green. It's a fascinating piece. We'll also put a link in the show notes. There's also a lot more coverage of the LA fires from my colleagues at Bloomberg Green. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Share this episode with a friend or with someone who loves jackets. You can get in touch at zeropod at bloomberg.net. Zero's producer is Maithili Rao. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Sage Bauman. And head of talk is Brendan Newnham. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly. Special thanks to Michelle Ma, Brian Khan, Sharon Chen, and Jessica Beck. I am Akshat Rati, back with you.