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Three years ago I wrote about a member of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation named Theresa “Betty” Billiot. She reminisced about how the area around her Louisiana home was once filled with cattle grazing in pastures, cotton fields, and wild prairie dotted with duck ponds. That strong memory is fleeting, as today a rising sea is all that comes into view out that same door. Flood relocation became necessary.
Isle de Jean Charles was the first US location where the federal government funded a climate-…
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Three years ago I wrote about a member of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation named Theresa “Betty” Billiot. She reminisced about how the area around her Louisiana home was once filled with cattle grazing in pastures, cotton fields, and wild prairie dotted with duck ponds. That strong memory is fleeting, as today a rising sea is all that comes into view out that same door. Flood relocation became necessary.
Isle de Jean Charles was the first US location where the federal government funded a climate-driven relocation project. Future homes were envisioned as energy efficient; able to withstand 150 mile-per-hour winds; well-insulated in the walls, ceiling, and under floors; supplied with certified energy-efficient appliances; and, compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Yet former island residents like Billiot aren’t happy. They describe their new homes as substandard. Rain seeps through doorways. Malfunctioning appliances and flooded yards force costly repairs.
These 37 flood refugees are not alone. Did you know that there are an estimated 2.5 million US residents who could be forced to relocate away from the coast over the next 25 years? A whole lotta planning needs to take place between now and then. Breaking up tightly-knit communities, land-use decisions about geographic flood relocation sites, property pricing equations, and ensuring the constitutionality of property rights all will need to be addressed.
And where in these discussions of climate victims is the fossil fuel industry, which has caused the catastrophe?
Hold the Fossil Fuel Industry Accountable for Sea Level Rise
Sea level rise is the most profound long-term impact of the climate crisis.
Rising sea levels driven by the climate crisis are overwhelming many of the world’s coastlines and waterways. Fossil fuel burning, which causes global heating, is to blame. Recent scientific studies show 1 meter (3.28′) of sea level rise is now inevitable within a century or so — and it could come as early as 2070 if ice sheets collapse and emissions are not curbed. An even more catastrophic rise of 3 meters is probably inevitable in the next millennium or two, scientists say, and could arrive as soon as the early 2100s.
With each additional degree of warming, we will witness more deadly, irreparable, and ruinous impacts from climate change. Democratic lawmakers in a dozen states want to force the world’s largest fossil fuel companies to help pay for the recovery costs of climate-related disasters. A new study published in Nature offers a framework to potentially strengthen such legal arguments by enabling plaintiffs to calculate contributions made by individual companies to rising temperatures, tying their emissions directly to extreme heat disasters.
Yet the White House is looking the other way. FEMA is under attack by the self-serving Trump administration. As NWF notes, it is often state agencies and programs that are primarily responsible for identifying impacted communities, initiating conversations with those communities, and, ultimately, collaborating with those communities to advance relocation efforts.
The Case Study of the Isle de Jean Charles
Coastal wetlands in southern Louisiana provide essential ecosystem services including reducing inland flooding, controlling erosion, and serving as natural habitat. A particular case can be made that Louisiana’s malpractices in the petrochemical sector, high cancer concentrations in these “Cancer Corridors,” and wetland demise are interconnected.
Economic prioritization (read: fossil fuel industry profitability) has led to wetland demise and destruction of livelihoods.
The Isle de Jean Charles is a narrow ridge situated in the southeastern Louisiana wetlands. Longtime inhabitants are indigenous peoples — the homeland for the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians since the 1830s. Reliant on the natural surroundings for sustenance — think crabbing, shrimping, fishing, hunting, and agriculture — the inhabitants of the Isle hold a strong sense of place as identity markers.
The island used to encompass more than 22,000 acres. Now it has just 320 acres due primarily to sea level rise caused by the fossil fuel-industry and their secondary effects of erosion, land loss caused by severe storms, and human-made canals.
In 2016, Louisiana received $48.3 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money to relocate 37 residents or families of Isle de Jean Charles as climate-charged hurricanes and sea-level rise made the once thriving community uninhabitable. The plan was the first relocation of an entire community that was fully funded by the federal government. The move carried with it unsettling reminders of the forced displacement of this community’s ancestors during the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Louisiana is the state projected to have the most land impacted by coastal flooding caused by rising sea levels and severe storms in the US. The state also has a greater likelihood to experience severe coastal flooding — approximately 9,200 square miles — over the next 25 years, as revealed by the nonprofit Climate Central.
Although Louisiana officials have no specific relocation plans for coastal residents, they have developed strategies, titled, Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE), for moving away from the shifting shoreline.
- Unless there is a “clear and present risk to life,” all relocation initiatives must be community-driven and voluntary.
- If possible, resettled communities should retain access to abandoned lands for cultural, social or economic reasons.
- All relocation efforts must lead to a demonstrable reduction in risk.
- All resettlements should entail total residential abandonment of the original community.
Flaccid Flood Relocation Blueprints
Changing precipitation patterns, droughts, land degradation, flood events, and sea-level rise already affect many coastal socio-ecological systems. US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) says the rising seas present coastal homeowners with “a continually degrading situation.”
New settlements, at first glance, seem to offer more stable habitats, enhanced protection from food insecurity, expanded access to public resources, and improved healthcare. Yet the framing of resettlements as strictly an adaptive measure fails to take into account place-based attachments, such as deep connections to the land and historical memories. Moreover, the process all-too-often characterizes climate refugees as resilient and willing participants — when their buy-in to the flood relocation may not have been sought nor personally desired.
“It made us angry,” Chief Deme Naquin, the leader of Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, told Floodlight News. “We thought we were going to have a community, and we were going to be able to own and run it as a tribe. Once that (money) was awarded, then we were pretty much pushed away.”
Climate-induced, community-scale resettlements during the 21st century had been largely determined to be unsuccessful by those who moved. Scholars interpret flood relocation to be a result of unequal power dynamics; planning gaps need to address careful and inclusive engagement of those who would be moved.
The US Government Accountability Office has confirmed that the US has no national strategy for relocating coastal communities from harm’s way. Federal programs generally are not designed to address the scale and complexity of community relocation and generally fund acquisition of properties at high risk of damage from disasters in response to a specific event such as a hurricane, according to a 2020 report to Congressional requesters.
Isle de Jean Charles today is largely abandoned. Because the owners demanded continued access to their property after resettlement, however, an occasional former full-time resident visits their Isle de Jean Charles property for a night or two. Maintaining such land access allows continuity of place. It also prevents marginalization, colonization, and exploitation from powerful developers, Tharakan and Neef outline in the (2024) De Gruyter Handbook of Climate Migration and Climate Mobility Justice.
Socio-cultural justice and values of resettlers need to be taken into account in any national flood relocation blueprints. Importantly, the fossil fuel industry needs be held financially accountable for the environmental damage they have caused and the lives they have damaged.
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