One House, 22 Floods: Repeated Claims Drain Federal Insurance Program
Brian Harmon had just finished spending over $300,000 to fix his home in Kingwood, Texas, when Hurricane Harvey sent floodwaters “completely over the roof.”
The six-bedroom house, which has an indoor swimming pool, sits along the San Jacinto River. It has flooded 22 times since 1979, making it one of the most flood-damaged properties in the country.
Between 1979 and 2015, government records show the federal flood insurance program paid out more than $1.8 million to rebuild the house—a property that Mr. Harmon figured was worth $600,000 to $800,000 before Harvey hit late last month.
“It’s my investment,” the 49-year-old said this summer, before the hurricane. “I can’t just throw it away.”....
And the headline story from ScienceAlert, June 21, 2021:
It's imperative that human societies factor a strategic 'managed retreat' into the ways they respond and adapt to climate change, researchers say, and figuring out how is a conversation that needs to be happening now.
Managed retreat is the coordinated movement of people and buildings away from risks, which, in the context of climate change, are approaching from numerous fronts, including sea level rise, flooding, extreme heat, wildfire, and other hazards.
While the notion of retreat may be an unpopular idea, it's vital that we reframe the conversation around what managed retreat really is, researchers say, to give ourselves the best chance of facing climate change with a full set of viable options that will be effective in the long term.
"Climate change is affecting people all over the world, and everyone is trying to figure out what to do about it," says disaster researcher A.R. Siders from the University of Delaware.
"One potential strategy, moving away from hazards, could be very effective, but it often gets overlooked."
Amidst other forms of adaptation actions – academically categorized as resistance, accommodation, avoidance, and advance – retreat is often looked down upon, researchers say. But it's important, they urge, given the scale of the climate crisis, that we don't view retreat as a form of defeat.
"Retreat has often been viewed as a failure to adapt or considered only when all other options are exhausted," Siders and co-author Katharine Mach, a climate risk researcher from the University of Miami, explain in their new study.
"But this conceptualization ignores lessons from numerous disciplines drawing on a long history of human movement and limits adaptation researchers and decision-makers in preparing for a broad range of futures."
In the new research, Siders and Mach review existing scientific literature on the strategy of managed retreat, and outline a roadmap of what a successful, strategic retreat from climate change might look like in the future.
Notably, they say, future managed retreat instances will be different from instances of managed retreat in the past, focused on localized, isolated, and smaller-scale disasters....
....MUCH MORE
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