A receiving community is a city, town, or neighborhood that accommodates people displaced by a disaster. People have often migrated to escape environmental changes, war, or religious persecution. Others were pushed out of their native lands. As the global impacts of climate change increase, more intense weather events and natural hazards will force more people to search for less vulnerable places to live. Some will adapt in place, but many will choose to move. As Louisiana continues to experience major disasters and accelerated coastal land loss, population shifts become inevitable. Planning among communities that may receive migrants after a disaster can affect the well-being of those who move and those who already live in the communities that absorb them.

Migration as Adaptation

Climate change is leading to more frequent and severe rainfall, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires, prompting many residents to leave their communities temporarily or permanently. Relocating is one way people adapt to the impacts of climate change. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, in 2022 alone, weather-related disasters displaced 32.6 million people across 140 countries and territories, including 675,000 people in the United States. Louisiana residents are often displaced by riverine and coastal flooding and major weather events like hurricanes and tornados. For example, 1.5 million people were displaced across the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and nearly one-fifth of New Orleans’s residents moved permanently.

Types of Receiving Communities

Receiving communities describe the places where people resettle away from a hazardous environment. They can be what Anna Mirandi and Kelly Leilani Main have termed a “recipient city” that may be unprepared and often unwilling to accept an influx of new residents following a disaster. Examples of recipient cities or parishes include Baton Rouge, St. Tammany Parish, and Houston, which were overwhelmed with thousands of new residents following Hurricane Katrina. Mirandi and Main also call “climate destinations” or “climate havens” places that are strategically designed to absorb people in a safe and culturally appropriate manner through equitable planning and preparation. Examples include Cincinnati, Ohio, and Buffalo, New York. After Hurricanes Delta and Laura in 2020, Lake Charles became a recipient city, immediately accepting people displaced by the storms despite losing a significant number of its own population. Lake Charles has become a climate destination as the city has planned to accept and support new residents through the region’s fifty-year resilience master plan, Just Imagine SWLA.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “managed retreat” is a last resort adaptive measure that resettles an entire group of people from an imperiled location to a new development in a receiving community. This strategy is intended to preserve the social ties and cultural practices of communities threatened by natural hazards. However, the receiving community is often not near the original community and can isolate new residents. In addition, there is opposition to this term and mistrust of who is “managing” the retreat—the government or the people moving. One example is the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles residents to a community forty miles inland after their ancestral island lost 98 percent of its original landmass and multiple hurricanes damaged or destroyed their homes.

Louisiana as an International Model

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that 40 percent of the nation’s population lives in coastal communities, with many of the country’s largest cities found along the coast. Coastal communities are particularly vulnerable as sea levels continue to rise and storms intensify. The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) estimates that by 2050, approximately 1.2 million people in Louisiana—about the population of New Hampshire—will be at risk of coastal flooding due to coastal land loss and storm surge. Losing more land than all other states in the contiguous United States combined, scientists view Louisiana as a predictor of coastal ecosystem stress worldwide and a laboratory for coastal restoration and climate adaptation efforts, as noted by scholars Traci Birch and Jeff Carney. Increasing exposure to natural hazards combined with population concentration in the coastal zone makes the need for adaptation urgent.

Planning for Migration

The CPRA mitigates land loss and flood risk in Louisiana’s coastal communities through the state’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast. The projects included in the master plan are intended to protect the coast for the next thirty to fifty years, giving the state time to prepare for and adapt to people migrating due to environmental stressors. However, they may move to communities unprepared to provide adequate housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and employment. Understanding these challenges can help communities adapt to a changing coast.

When people migrate it is often a personal choice. Some sell their homes as their own perceived risk becomes too high. Others take a federal buyout in response to repeated storm damage to their home or business. Some evacuate during a storm and do not return. However, scholar Michael M. Cernea emphasizes that piecemeal relocation often fragments coastal communities over time and diminishes mental and physical health, food and water security, access to homes and land, social and economic networks, and cultural traditions.

People migrating from the coast seek new communities to welcome them and improve their well-being. Planning receiving communities that reduce environmental, economic, and social vulnerability supports coastal residents when they decide to move. This strategy helps prepare communities for the slow migration that happens over decades and the fast migration that can occur after a weather event.

New residents are looking for well-paying jobs; affordable, high-quality housing, education, and healthcare; food and water security; and places where they already have friends or family. In addition, maintaining a connection with the coast helps preserve migrants’ way of life, culture, and heritage, as some wish to commute back to the coast weekly because of family land, work, and social connections. They also often seek places with a strong cultural identity, with spaces for people to come together, make social connections, and share culture and traditions. Other factors supporting new and existing residents include social services, good farmland, evacuation routes, transportation options, protected habitats, economic diversity, and job training.

People are already migrating from Louisiana’s most exposed coastal communities, and studies show that tens of millions globally will follow as sea levels continue to rise. As they relocate it is important to plan for the social, environmental, and economic well-being of current and future residents of receiving communities.