After the Fire - A World of Climate Refugees

     Downtown Paradise November 2018                                                                                                           Guardian   

Human behaviour has created the global climate emergency we now face.  We have inadvertently placed our own existence in danger through ignorance and, more tragically, greed.  Examining the aftermath of Northern California’s Camp Fire, it is possible to get a glimpse of the future as climate disasters become more frequent and more destructive.

The Camp Fire’s destruction was magnified by years of climate change driven drought, but it was also the direct result of decades of human behaviour that placed whole communities in parlous locations without adequate protection.  The town of Paradise was built over the decades in the wrong place and with little regard or provision for the potential fire peril it faced.  There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of communities all over the world that are exposed to this sort of explosive wildfire danger.  Just as there are even larger numbers of communities that now routinely face 100 year flooding ever few years.  And, let’s not forget all the coastal regions that will be inundated by the ocean within the first half of this century. 

The question we now face is how can we mitigate the damage already done to our environment and, critically, how do we deal with the victims of the inevitable climate change driven disasters in the future?

Part of the fallout of the Camp Fire was a massive influx of climate refugees from the devastated area into the closest community, the city of Chico.  The small college city of 100,000 immediately welcomed thousands of people who essentially had nothing more than the clothes on their back.  But, over time that welcome and compassion wore thin.  Business had to move on and parking lots filled with refugee tents were in the way of Black Friday sales patron.  The limited stock of available housing was soon exhausted which drove up rents in the college town.  Real estate speculators moved in which resulted in Realtor.com, a real estate website, to unironically claim that the Chico real estate market was the “hottest housing market in the nation.”

The hope here is that Chico’s residents and leaders realized that they had the opportunity to create a new model for their city’s future and provide a blue print for communities to prepare for the coming waves of climate refugees.  Chico has embraced a city specific version of the Green New Deal (GND).

“Your city council has heard the call of its community that has resounded locally and across the nation,” said Chico Vice Mayor Alex Brown when the plan was announced. “We are choosing to walk the walk of this movement and to take the leadership being demanded of us.” In an interview, Brown told me that the Camp Fire’s impact on both Paradise and Chico was a glimpse of the future unless action is taken to both radically lower emissions and build “communities that are more resilient to these shifts.” Brown is well aware that a small city like hers isn’t going to make much of a dent in global emissions. But, she said, “We can demonstrate what a Green New Deal looks like at the local level.”

Hopefully, the learning process doesn’t have to be done on a city by city, disaster by disaster basis to change human behaviour.