"This island is disappearing quickly.."
In January 2016, the residents of Isle de Jean Charles in the United States, were thrust into the spotlight
Less than 10% of land that stood six decades ago remains today.
The United States government allocated $48 million dollars to move the community in Louisiana
to higher ground – the first federal assistance of its kind.
The new town, named/dubbed “The New Isle,” is located forty miles northwest of the community
on a former sugarcane farm.
Although there will be fishing ponds, it will be different than the crabbing and fishing
possible off the Gulf of Mexico.
People with roots in Isle de Jean Charles are descendants of Native people forced to
settle on the land in the 1830s.
Some worry that the cultural heritage of their community will be lost by moving,
and have chosen to stay behind.
Five and a half years after the initial announcement, residents who have decided to relocate have
seen a glimpse of where their new homes will be built.
Across the world, similar difficult decisions will have to be made.
Researchers like Marjolijn Haasnoot believe the key to successful relocation is breaking
down the decision into manageable steps.
We need to unravel this big decision.
What does it take over time?
What could be no regret measures to do now?
And maybe we don't have to make the full decision yet.
Because there's also uncertainty about the amount and rate of sea level rise,
but at least we keep the options open.
Managed retreat, proactively moving people away from risk,
has become a prominent area of research.
It starts with identifying what are the risks, now, but also in the future,
what could be potential options to adapt.
And then the next step would be to identify the effectiveness of these options
and the costs and benefits and then sequence them.
Once you've done that, you can evaluate these adaptation pathways, and then identify,
okay what are the near term actions to prepare, and possible long term options to adapt if needed,
and that can be implemented as the future unfolds.
Near term actions could include protective measures that buy time before relocation.
But fortifying coastlines with infrastructure, such as sea walls, is not always the answer.
We cannot protect everything.
Because that's very costly and the costs are long.
So where do you want to protect?
And where do you make the difficult choice to retreat?
There are places in the world like the Netherlands, but also in Japan, where there are already
these high sea walls—to some extent, they can be built.
In Bangladesh, we do have embankments.
We have boulderss, we have places where we can build something of a seawall to protect
some infrastructure, but we can't do it everywhere.
And we certainly can't do it for agricultural land anymore.
And as a result, some people are not being able to continue to live there.
They’re losing their livelihoods.
Huq’s work emphasizes the importance of building economic opportunity into relocation plans.
One of the biggest challenges we have is that everybody moves to Dhaka in Bangladesh.
So anybody being displaced from any other part of the country, ends up in a slum in Dhaka city.
And Dhaka can't absorb the projected numbers of up to 10 million climate refugees or migrants
coming in over the next decade or so.
So we're exploring different ways in which we can make these other towns that are about
20 of them with a population of about half a million to a million each, that we can
help them absorb another half a million to a million each over the next decade.
And enabling them to settle there, enabling them to become part of the community, enabling
them to get economic opportunities.
These are things that we work on in terms of local adaptation.
Throughout the relocation process, the people being displaced must play a role in decision making.
I've been doing a lot of work on what we call bottom-up consultation, making sure the voices
of the vulnerable are taken into account—making them agents of change.
Less-economically developed countries will be disproportionately impacted by climate change.
But early decision making can help prevent catastrophes in the future.
Sea-level will rise in the future.
And no matter what we do, it will rise for decades, and even in the next centuries.
Many decisions that we take now have a very long legacy into the future.