Climate change will make Arizona more urban and expensive, says reporter and author Abraham Lustgarten

The impacts of climate change could cause 100 million Americans to leave their homes and move to another part of the country over the next thirty years.

Additionally, more than 850 counties in the United States could suffer more than $1 million in economic damage from climate change by 2040.

These are some of the findings that Abraham Lustgarten writes about in his new book. Lustgarten is a climate change reporter for ProPublica; his book is called “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.”

He joined The Show to talk about what he found – and what it could mean for Arizona and the Southwest.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Seth Smoot

Abraham Lustgarten, author of ‘On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America’

Full interview

MARK BRODIE: Abraham, we’ve heard so much about climate change and migration in other parts of the world, where people often leave their homes to come to the US. What have you discovered about what climate migration in this country might look like?

ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN: We Americans won’t be as bad off as other hard-hit parts of the planet’s equatorial regions, but we will still be affected. There is really no place in this country, in North America, that will not be dramatically affected by climate change. And some of the same science that I’m looking at suggests that billions of people will be displaced worldwide, suggests that about 160 million Americans will also see a change in their environment that is traditionally associated with migration.

BRODIE: And which parts of the country are most prone to these kinds of conditions that make people feel like they have to leave?

PLEASURE GARDEN: So I collected data and mapped out some primary risks: wildfires and hurricanes, sea level flooding and drought and things like that. And what it actually suggests is that the United States will be pressured from the sides and especially from the south, and that the southern region that we’re in will be most dramatically affected by some of these dangers. And that essentially suggests that people will shift north in the coming decades.

BRODIE: Does this also apply to the southwest? Does that also apply to places like Arizona?

PLEASURE GARDEN: Absolute. Arizona, as you well know, will experience extraordinary heat – is already experiencing extraordinary heat, but it will experience even more heat and greater water scarcity.

BRODIE: So what does that mean? Let’s start with what that means for the places north of here. If some – hundreds of thousands or millions of people from Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, places in the South and Southwest move north – what does that mean for those places?

PLEASURE GARDEN: For host communities – which is the nice term applied to those places – this means that many of these places can expect significant growth. And not all of them lie exclusively northward.

One of the phenomena surrounding migration and climate migration is that people move over the shortest possible distance. And that could actually mean that Phoenix continues to thrive and grow as a city. But the rural areas around Phoenix, in the southwest, are starting to empty and heavy urbanization is taking place.

BRODIE: Does all that further potential growth in the Phoenix area make it less likely that all those people will be able to continue living here?

PLEASURE GARDEN: It will continue to put pressure on water resources in this region. The temperature increase will mainly be distributed along welfare lines. Energy costs will rise and the need for air conditioning will increase dramatically.

And so there’s going to be a greater division between the people who have these resources and these facilities, and the people who can’t afford them. And as the city grows, there will obviously be a larger customer base and citizen base to support.

BRODIE: Does emigration also follow these economic lines? Could it be due to the fact that only the people can afford the air conditioning bills and they may be the only people who can afford to live in a place like Phoenix in the future?

PLEASURE GARDEN: The collapse of traditional migration patterns suggests that the very wealthy will stay and likely remain in a stressed environment for longer. It is the middle class, the upper middle class, that is most likely to be mobile.

And poor communities, marginalized communities – especially people of color who have been disproportionately harmed by past policies – will be more vulnerable to these environmental changes in the future and likely less mobile as well. As well as the aging of the population.

BRODIE: So Phoenix and Arizona, of course, have had problems for a number of years with wildfires and water scarcity and – especially in the Phoenix area – rising temperatures. And these are things that many climate scientists have pointed out that other parts of the country are relatively new compared to Phoenix.

So I’m wondering if there are any lessons from Phoenix that other parts of the country can learn, either to address these types of things or to ensure that people don’t have to leave to go somewhere else. .

PLEASURE GARDEN: Phoenix has been growing for some time despite water scarcity and extreme heat, and continues to do so. There is some foolishness in that, but there is also a lot of wisdom gathered. Phoenix thus has lessons to learn about how to evolve in the face of severe water shortages; how more water-smart technologies can be deployed for nature conservation; and also how to build and construct buildings with materials that are comfortable to live in in a warm environment, and how to integrate indoor and outdoor spaces for extreme heat and things like that.

BRODIE: One of the other topics you write about is agriculture and how all these changes in climate will affect how food is grown, where it is grown and who grows it. That’s obviously a very big part of both the economy and people’s lives, not just in Arizona, but in California and other parts of this region.

How might the Southwest and how might the West more broadly be affected by all of this, especially if people feel like they need to move somewhere else?

PLEASURE GARDEN: Changes in agriculture are likely among the most dramatic ways the United States will change. And crop yields across the country have fallen by about 12% since 1960, due to climate change alone. And the data I’m looking at suggests that they will drop dramatically in some places in the southern part of the country – parts of Texas up to 90%; parts of Arizona, New Mexico 50-60%.

So we’re looking at an expected dramatic decline in our ability to grow crops. Combine that with the water shortages in Arizona and Southern California, and I think this necessitates a real rethink. It will force a rethink of how food is grown and where it is grown and what other crops are grown besides food.

But I would expect agriculture to become a smaller and smaller part of Arizona’s economy and of the Southwest’s economy.

BRODIE: So I guess the big question here might be, has the ship sailed on this? Do all these Americans have to move because of the climate? Or – as some sort of climate scientists suggest – there’s still time to maybe put the toothpaste back in the tube here and try to stop the warming that’s leading to so many of these things, including, as you write, migration.

PLEASURE GARDEN: Both things are true at the same time. Our fate is not sealed. And what we do now makes a huge difference in everything we talk about. I rely on a lot of astronomically high projections in some scientific studies about how many people could be displaced worldwide. Those same estimates will be halved if emissions are sharply reduced from this point.

That said, there is already some degree of warming baked in by what we have already done in the past. There is a delay in that cycle. And so if we are perfect from here on out and we were 100% renewable tomorrow morning, we would see warming for quite a few more years, and we will still see all the consequences of that warming, to some extent. lesser degree.

I really like to think of all these consequences as ultimately economic consequences. And I think that’s how Americans are going to experience them. And part of the shift that we’re seeing is a shift away from climate change as a kind of sociopolitical issue and more as an issue of household wallets.

And it’s only when it starts to erode people’s assets, their savings and their safety nets that I think migration will result. So the starting point is not so much that people are going to say: “Gosh, it’s hot” or “I’m really afraid of the forest fire, and I’m going to move.” It’s that they’re going to say, “I can’t get home insurance because of the risk of wildfire,” or “The cost of air conditioning is going through the roof, and I want to live somewhere where it’s a little cheaper.” And that’s what’s going to drive this change.

The transcripts of KJZZ’s The Show are done on deadline. This text may not yet be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio recording.

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