Climate refugees' growing tab.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: ECONOMIC OBSERVER - Hurricane Katrina's impact

THOSE OF US WHO TRACK the effects of global warming had assumed that the first large flow of climate refugees likely would be in the South Pacific with the abandonment of Tuvalu or other low-lying islands. We were wrong. The first massive movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the Gulf Coast of the U.S. Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in late August 2005, forced 1,000,000 people from New Orleans and the small towns on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts to move inland, either within those borders or to neighboring states, such as Texas and Arkansas. Although nearly all planned to return, many have not.

Unlike in previous cases, when residents typically left areas threatened by hurricanes and returned when authorities declared it was safe to do so, many of these evacuees have found new homes. In this respect, the hurricane season of 2005 was different. Record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico's surface waters helped Hurricane Katrina become the most financially destructive windstorm ever to make landfall anywhere. In some Mississippi Gulf Coast towns, Katrina's powerful 28-foot-high storm surge did not leave a single structure standing. There was nothing for evacuees to return to. The destruction of housing and infrastructure in St. Bernard Parish, a low-lying 40-mile-long peninsula extending southeast from New Orleans, rendered most of it uninhabitable. The Katrina storm surge that raised the water level in Lake Pontchartrain so high that it breached the levees and flooded New Orleans left much of the city unfit to live in. Even today, almost two years later, parts of the city are without basic infrastructure services such as water, power, sewage disposal, garbage collection, and telecommunications. Interestingly, the country to suffer the most damage from a hurricane also is primarily responsible for global warming.

Many evacuees were able to return in a matter of days, but many more were not. A year after Katrina struck, New Orleans, three nearby parishes (or counties), and three counties in Mississippi had lost a total of 375,000 residents because of the destruction. Some evacuees still are heading back, but the flow has slowed to a near trickle. We estimate that at least 250,000 of them have established homes elsewhere and will not return. They no longer want to face the danger and financial risks associated with rising seas and more destructive storms. These evacuees now are climate refugees.

While...