How Florida's need to 'adapt to climate change' has ignited debate over whether to rebuild high-risk areas

04 October 2022

As of Tuesday morning, October 4, the death count from Hurricane Ian had passed 100 in Florida, making it, according to AccuWeather, the deadliest storm in the Sunshine State since 1935 (when the Labor Day Hurricane killed more than 400 people). Meanwhile, in North Carolina, four deaths have been attributed to Ian so far.

Florida is going to need a lot of rebuilding in the weeks and months ahead. Liberal Washington Post opinion writer Eugene Robinson, in his October 3 column, stresses that any successful rebuilding in Florida is going to require extensive preparation for the realities of climate change. Meanwhile, some Americans who are recovering from climate change-related disasters — whether it’s hurricanes in Florida and Louisiana or wildfires in California — are wondering if it is even worth rebuilding in places where climate change is taking such a toll.

“If one definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, then rebuilding some devastated parts of Florida just as they were before Hurricane Ian would be truly insane,” Robinson advises. “The instinct to restore exactly what was lost has an emotional logic, but a short-term attempt to salve the grief of people in devastated communities only sets them up to be flattened once again. It would be wiser to turn Ian into an opportunity to reimagine Florida’s climate-vulnerable cities, turning them into a vision of the resilient future, rather than a doomed monument to an unrecoverable past.”

Robinson notes that hurricanes, thanks to climate change, are becoming “bigger, wetter and more intense.”

“We know that sea levels have risen globally by about nine inches since 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” Robinson explains. “That change has been more pronounced in the Gulf of Mexico than in most other regions of the global ocean, with gulf waters expected to rise an additional 14 to 18 inches by 2050…. Storms such as Ian make clear that there is no choice but to live with, and adapt to, the climate change we have caused. The first step in adaptation is facing the facts.”

Robinson notes that areas of Florida that were hit especially hard by Ian, including the Fort Myers area, will need to be “rebuilt in ways that take into account those new risks.”

The columnist writes, “Building codes are one obvious place to start…. The best way to defend the Florida lifestyle is to reimagine it, not to sentence it to perpetual destruction.”

The issue has spotlighted the debate over whether communities that are most prone to redundant climate catastrophes should continue the cycle of "build-destroy-rebuild-destroy."

During a Sunday, October 2 appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Deanne Criswell — administrator for the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — urged Americans to “make informed decisions” about rebuilding in areas that are seeing more devastation from climate change.

Criswell advised, “People need to understand what their potential risk may be whether it’s along the coast, inland along a riverbed or in Tornado Alley. People need to make informed decisions about what their risk is and if they choose to rebuild there, they do so in a way that’s going to reduce their threat.”

Climate change deniers often point out that hurricanes are hardly new to Florida or Louisiana, just as California residents have been coping with droughts and wildfires for generations. But climate change, according to scientists, is making such disasters both more intense and more common.

In an article published by the Los Angeles Times on September 27, reporters Erika D. Smith and Anita Chabria take a look at Californians who are wondering if it is even worth it to rebuild in parts of California that are especially vulnerable to droughts and wildfires.

“One day, in a not-so-distant future ravaged by climate change, many of Northern California’s far-flung rural towns — founded in another time and for another economy — might not get rebuilt at all,” Smith and Chabria explain. “Gone could be the political and public will to spend hundreds of millions of dollars — with Southern California taxpayers footing a big chunk of the bill — to replace homes and businesses for a small number of people, knowing that it’s all likely to burn down again as extreme heat and drought keep decimating unmanaged forests.

Ken Donnell of Greenville, California — a Sierra Nevada town that was devastated by a wildfire in 2021 — wonders if it is even realistic to rebuild in Greenville.

Donnell told the Times, “Resources are going to be drained. It’s just the reality…. These disasters are going to occur more and more frequently, and in more and more places.”

Scientist Daniel Swain, who studies climate change at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), argues that some California communities were built “in a particular historical context that no longer exists.”

Swain told the Times, “Whatever risk tolerances that we collectively decided were acceptable, for whatever reason, in whatever context, are no longer valid…. The problem is, these are places that were already high-risk, but the risks have dramatically escalated from high to extreme. It’s getting increasingly likely that we see these small towns in high-risk zones wiped off the map every passing year.”

During an October 3 segment on NewsNation, host Ashleigh Banfield warned that in the future, parts of Florida may be uninsurable — or at the very least, insurance may become increasingly unaffordable in those areas.

Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute told Banfield, “Insurers are going to charge you for that risk. And in many cases, you may not be able to get coverage because no insurer is going to risk at that high a level.”

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