Climate Change Drives Millions to Migrate Due to Flooding

Research predicts significant flood risk in the Midwest by 2053, while cities like Louisville, Detroit, and Chicago offer safer alternatives.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the threat of flooding convinced more than 7 million people to avoid risky areas or abandon places that were risky, according to a paper Monday in the journal Nature Communications and research by the risk analysis organization First Street Foundation.
Climate change is making bad hurricanes more intense and increasing the amount of rain that storms dump on the Midwest. And in the coming decades, researchers say millions more people will decide it is too much to live with and leave.
First Street found that climate change is creating winners and losers at the neighborhood and block level.
When First Street projected out to 2053, many of the new climate abandonment areas were in Michigan, Indiana, and other parts of the Midwest. Flood risk is just one factor driving this change and it doesn’t mean communities are emptying out, said Philip Mulder, a professor focused on risk and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Louisville, Kentucky, Detroit, and Chicago as well as several other big cities have a lot of space with little flood risk, which will be attractive in the future, First Street found.