Is the Pacific Northwest ready for a wave of climate migration?

Jason Dove Mark threw a bucket of scraps to the chickens and checked for eggs – slim chance in November – before he and his big, friendly mutt, Cody, descended into the forest for their midday walk. The rain had just started, but they didn’t mind.

“It seriously is like a balm,” he said. “I grew up in Arizona. I lived for 20-plus years in California, and I cannot get over that I live in such a fecund, moist, moss-draped place. I'm still pinching myself.”

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Mark’s family moved from Oakland to Bellingham in 2020, in large part because of the drought and wildfire risk in California. He’s an environmental writer, and at the time he was running an urban farm in San Francisco, both of which heightened his sensitivity to climate risk. Mark and his partner wanted to be closer to family, which meant Arizona or Washington, where she’s from.

“ If I'm thinking about my daughter, who's going to live into the latter parts of the 21st century, I just don't see Arizona as being a place of high ecological resilience,” Mark said. “So then if it's like, are we going to go to Phoenix or Bellingham? Well, knowing what I know about climate change, the answer is Bellingham.”

Mark’s story isn’t unusual. KUOW heard from more than a dozen families that said climate change was a driving factor in their decision to relocate to the Pacific Northwest.

Climate migration is difficult to study, and even harder to predict, because a complex constellation of factors guides the decision to pick up and move. But some experts, like Abrahm Lustgarten, say a historic population shift has already begun, and Western Washington should start preparing now to become a “climate haven.”

“ The big numbers are hard to pinpoint with any kind of accuracy,” Lustgarten said. “The range that I use for the United States is that we could see anywhere between 13 and 160 million Americans displaced by the kind of climate forces that I'm looking at. And there's research that suggests that when Americans migrate, the demographic effect of 10 people moving, could be 150 people after a generation as they have families and have children and build an economy and the workforce expands around them.”

Lustgarten is the author of "On the Move" and editor at large leading climate coverage at the investigative newsroom ProPublica. He says regions that are seen as climate refuges should plan for growth now, before financial markets catch up to the true cost of environmental disasters.

“ The municipal bond market itself is a fascinating little corner of this conversation because it supports something like 75 or 80% of all investment in building in the United States by cities and states and small towns,” he said. “When the climate risks become more apparent to that market, the cost of borrowing will go up.”

A literature review by the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group acknowledges that climate migration is likely, but predicts it will happen slowly over time. The report says that while environmental factors can influence decision-making, people primarily move because of economic factors. But economic factors are increasingly tied up with climate change, according to Lustgarten.

“ All of it's an economic story … gross domestic product is estimated to decline in at least a third of the country in every place that faces climate risk,” he said. “That's partially because disasters are expensive to rebuild from, but it's also partially because workers are less productive in extreme heat environments and because housing becomes less valuable as those pressures wear on.”

A recent analysis by the New York Times found that in cities with the highest hurricane and wildfire risk, homes sell for about $40,000 less than they would otherwise. Home prices are declining or softening in a number of Sun Belt cities as migration slows to the region, according to a study by the financial firm James Moore.

Often those declining home values are associated with increased insurance costs. Flooding risk in Gulf states and wildfire risk in California are making some areas uninsurable, forcing more residents onto expensive state-run insurance plans. More than 450,000 people are using California’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan, a 61% jump from the prior year. The Florida government's plan ballooned to more than a million policies, making it the largest property insurer in the state before legislators stepped in to reform the market.

“The FAIR plan is the insurer of last resort, and so that's a bellwether for what's coming,” said Washington state’s insurance commissioner Patty Kuderer, who noted that Washington only has about 400 people on its state plan.

For many years, California’s FAIR plan was the only option to insure Cam Goldman’s home in Los Angeles. The property was on what’s sometimes referred to as the wildland-urban interface, where wildfire risk is particularly acute.

“ I used to live in a very rustic little canyon area in Burbank,” she said. “Beautiful and peaceful, about 20 minutes away from downtown LA on a good day, and you would never know it. There were oaks and sycamores, but also every year it was the big question of whether that was going to be the year that we lost everything. That a fire would just rip through.”

Eventually she moved to another house in LA, where she could get insurance on the private market.

“ But in retrospect now, having seen the Eaton fires and the Palisade fire and all the devastation that was caused, we weren't safe there either, because if the conditions are just right, or just wrong, nothing's going to stop the flames.”

So Goldman picked up and moved to Bellingham during the pandemic, not far from her daughter’s home.

“I feel so much safer up here,” she said.

Most of the western Pacific Northwest is under “relatively moderate” climate risk according to FEMA’s index. Climate migrants interviewed for this story said access to fresh water sources, less extreme temperatures, and lower flooding risks caused them to leave places like Minnesota and Louisiana for Washington.

Still, they acknowledged that sense of safety is relative. Changing weather makes it difficult to predict when and where the next environmental disaster will hit. The Pacific Northwest is prone to drought too, especially east of the Cascade Mountains, and it's seen its fair share of wildfires.

“ There is no away,” Mark said. “No place is completely immune to the shocks of climate chaos.”

But there is one thing that gives Mark a sense of security in Bellingham: He’s close with his neighbors.

“The most important climate resilience factor of a location is not its physical attributes, it's its social attributes,” he said. “It really is community. If you are in the midst of a climate change disaster or extreme weather event, your best disaster response is neighbors, is neighborliness.”