Louisiana’s climate refugees are part of a global shift
28th November 2016 · 0 Comments
By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer
Earlier this month, the United Nations warned that the world’s climate refugees will swell if more isn’t done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions soon. As the earth warms and sea levels rise, Louisiana’s coastline is shrinking rapidly. Some residents are moving before Gulf waters usurp their homes. One Native American community, Isle de Jean Charles south of Houma in Terrebonne Parish, this year won federal money to relocate.
Residents of the now two-mile-long isle—which has dwindled in size in the last 60 years—plan to move together, using $48 million in funds awarded in January in a National Disaster Resilience Competition. That contest was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Most of the isle’s roughly 60 residents belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe.
This was HUD’s first big grant to climate refugees. The state is overseeing the resettlement project. “We’ve completed the initial data-gathering and planning, and are moving into the master planning and design phase,” Patrick Forbes, executive director of Louisiana’s Office of Community Development, said last week. “Land acquisition for the new community will be completed during this phase. Sites under consideration at this point are in Terrebonne Parish.”
As they form a new community, “Isle de Jean Charles residents will have to decide on a place that’s far enough from the coast to be safe well into the future, without being too far from the marsh and water they’re used to living with,” Forbes said. “And they must come to grips with leaving their homes.”
Other south Louisianians have moved already. “After Katrina and Rita, many people decided to relocate to homes that were either further inland or behind hurricane protection,” Forbes said. “Over time, many residents have gone to safer ground.”
But it isn’t a rush yet, and here in Sportsman’s Paradise people still want to live by the water. At the bottom of Jefferson Parish, home sales in Grand Isle are booming, realtor John Moore at Latter & Blum in Algiers, said last week. “People with money are building multi-million-dollar houses in Grand Isle and other coastal areas,” he said. Moore owns a Mississippi residence that’s only a few feet away from the Gulf.
In Jefferson Parish, home sales in coastal communities of Lafitte and Barataria have been slow in recent years, but they’ve also been tepid on the west bank, which is perceived as safer. “I haven’t seen an exodus from Lafitte and Barataria to Marrero and Westwego,” Moore said.
The west bank market has improved this year, however, helped by new Federal Emergency Management Agency flood-elevation maps. Increased levee protection since Katrina has lowered owners’ flood-insurance costs in former high-risk zones, Moore said. The U.S. Army Corps’ West Bank and Vicinity Project is intended to protect the most populous parts of West Jefferson Parish and Algiers in Orleans from storm surge.
“In southeast Louisiana, we saw a real desire to live by the water about 15 years ago,” Moore said. “Right now the thing is to be in the city.” But that’s because of an influx of young people, rather than coastal residents. Realty sales are sizzling in the Bywater of New Orleans and along Magazine Street by the museums, into the Irish Channel and up, he said. On the west bank, dwellings in Gretna and Algiers Point are in demand, partly because of their old-timey appeal.
Greater New Orleans residents, meanwhile, worry about what the city and Louisiana have at stake as seas rise. People in other coastal communities and states are concerned too. A year ago, Democratic legislators in New York, citing Superstorm Sandy’s damage in 2012, wrote a letter to President Obama supporting a strong, global climate accord. California sent observers to the United Nations climate talks in Marrakesh, Morocco this month. Native peoples of northern Alaska, suffering as temperatures head higher, have clamored for more input at global climate conferences.
The Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions became effective on November 4. Delegates from more than a hundred signatory nations met in Marrakesh from November 7 to18 to discuss climate change and draw up rules for last December’s draft accord. China, the United States, India and Russia are all big emitters. For its part, the Obama Administration has pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 26 to 28 percent from year-2005 levels by year 2025.
This month, President-elect Donald Trump chose climate-warming doubter Myron Ebell to oversee the transition team at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Trump has said he doesn’t believe in global warming and has signaled he would like to pull the United States out of the Paris accord. The withdrawal process would probably take several years. But if that happens, state governments in this country could draw up their own plans to comply with the agreement and become honorary signatories.
This article originally published in the November 28, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
