Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati. This week climate migrants. As the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn, displaced residents are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives in an evacuations shelter in Westwood, Bloomberg reporter Michelle Ma spoke with a seventy two year old man named Paul letter.
Where and can I ask where you live? Well?
I used to live in the Palaceades.
Okay?
And do you know what the state of.
Your home is? Ninety nine percent.
Correct? I'm so sorry.
I mean they called it a war zone, app apocalyptic, it's you've seen the pictures. It's it's unbelievable. And when did you leave?
Paul had just enough time to grab his two cats, a few sentimental items before he left, but not much else.
I and two jackets, my jacket my father used to wear a sports jacket and a fifty year old leather jacket that I get complimented on.
Where will he go next? He does not know. Each year, the number of people making decisions like the ones he's facing grows. In the US alone, a Census Bureau survey found that at least a million people were displaced by climate catastrophes in twenty twenty two, and the International Organization for Migration estimates that there might be as many as a billion environmental migrants around the world within the next thirty years. It's something Gaya Vince has written about in
two superb books. In her twenty fourteen book Adventures in the Anthroposcene, she traveled the world to document what people in places like Nepal and Bolivia are doing to deal with a warming climate, and then in her twenty twenty book No Matt Century, that thesis forward by talking about places where people cannot adapt and will need to move as these fires rage on. I wanted to talk to her about what it will take for us to adjust to this new reality.
This is just more evidence that we are now living in a different world. We're living in the post climate change world.
Gaya, as you'll hear, thinks about global solutions to these kinds of problems, but local solutions are needed to The geography and politics of the Los Angeles area poses its own challenges. So I also spoke with climate reporter Jake Bittle about what California's government is doing when it comes to the challenges of rebuilding. He's a staff writer for Christ and the author of The Great Displacement about migration in the uas Cheke, Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
We're speaking as fires continue to burn in Los Angeles, and one of the many questions that is on a lot of people's mind is what happens after the disaster, what gets rebuilt and what is not going to be built. And you had a very interesting thread on X about the economics of which neighborhoods get built after a fire and why they might sometimes be surprising. So, given what we know of LA right now, how do you think this plays out.
Yeah, it's difficult to tell for sure, because you know, the housing market that burned, you know, in the Palisades fire especially, is just one of the most valuable and desirable in the world arguably. But I think that what we've seen in the past in California is that some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most complex terrain, not only do they tend to be under insured because they're
so high value. Also, you know, the permitting and construction process can be really difficult and take a really long time because you're building just on really really difficult ground. Right, Like, there's really steep slopes. Developing those canyons is really hard to begin with, so redeveloping them is also going to be hard and expensive.
But is there an assumption that given how wealthy the people were who could afford to live in the palisades versus say, the people in the eating fire in places like Alteradina aren't as wealthy. That is, the palaces that get rebuilt and Alternina not.
Yeah. Yeah, you might think right that, oh, well, the rich people have more money, so they're going to be able to rebuild faster. But very few people have enough money on hand to just rebuild a home out of pocket.
Right.
You're talking about almost a million dollars of rebuilding costs in some of these cases, right, So you know, it really comes down to how much insurance you have, and in particular, I think how much of the proportion of the value of your home is insured. Right, So if you're in a home that's maybe six hundred and seven hundred thousand dollars, you can probably cover that with a
typical insurance policy. And the insurance situation in Altadena actually turns out to have been better than in a lot of other places in California, in part because the insurance hadn't gotten around to dropping these people yet, because they hadn't had a fire in a while, and the homes weren't you know, super super high value. But then in a place like the Palisades, right, Okay, these homes are worth millions and millions of dollars, it's hard to find
market insurance coverage that covers that. So if you lose your home and you didn't have insured the full value, okay, what are you going to do? Either you dip into your savings to just rebuild it out of pocket, which I'm sure some people would do, right, like the wealthiest. But if you are wealthy and you had a big home, but not that wealthy to where you can just sport you just build a new one with the money you have in your you know, Merrilynch account, then you're really
in a pickle. And I saw this happen in Santa Rosa after the twenty seventeen Tubs fire. There was a hillside neighborhood with relatively wealthy homeowners and on complex terrain, and they really struggled to rebuild.
The other thing that is a wider problem, which is just housing in general, and building new housing is now competing with sort of rebuilding after a disaster. We heard from Governor Gavin Newsom that he wants to see if the legislature will suspend some of the Environmental Assessment Act
and the Coastal Planning Act. What do you think happens in these situations where a government goes beyond in a desire to want to rebuild, but in the process perhaps encourage is building in the very same places that are risky and vulnerable to these disasters in the future. Again.
Yeah, yeah, it's really really hard. In the past couple of years before this fire, California and Gavinism, they've been trying to suspend SECO and the coastal like just to build regular housing, right, just to build multi family housing. And they've they've made some progress in getting some of that permitting streamlined. I think it's a little rich for the governor to say, oh, I'm going to suspend this stuff. It turns out we can just do this the whole time.
You know, rebuilding after disasters is really complicated, and permitting is one part of it. But the truth is it takes a couple of years even in the best case scenario, right, But I think that the conversation about whether to rebuild or where we're going to rebuild is one that the governor seems, you know, intent on sort of trying to move past that as fast as possible, which is pretty typical.
But you know, in his defense, I guess it's a pretty hard conversation to have, right, Like, the land is still owned by the people who live on it. They technically have a right to come back, right since they own the property, And you know, saying let's not do this is really tough, and very few places really try to do it, especially in California where property values are so high.
And we should talk about insurance because there are two layers to this, which is one, you cannot really rebuild without insurance, but also the way insurance is playing out, especially in California but a few other states in the US, there is perhaps misbuilding happening because the insurance that is being provided is not private, it's not really taking risk into consideration, it's being backed by the state, and so you're building in the very places that will burn again.
So talk goes through what the changes in the California insurance system have been and whether you think they are actually going to work in this hot world that we are creating and caninue to heat up.
Yeah, it's a really interesting situation in California and sort of like a far more acute version of what other states have experienced, where I think as the fire damage has gotten worse, they've sort of encountered this trade off between you know, price pressure and consumers and the availability
of coverage. And for a long time, California basically chose to limit price pressure and consumers and then they're paying the price with affordability where you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of people have lost their coverage and the state basically like two weeks before these fires finally finish this failuatory process that Okay, insurers, you can charge more money, you can you can account for the risk of climate change, you can pass on your costs in an exchange, Please
stay in these areas. And so I think that you know, it remains to be seen. And the big question I think for the post La fires world is whether you know, if insurers feel like they can set an adequate price, whether that acts as an effective signal to the homeowners that you know, from the perspective of fire risk. There really shouldn't be living in these homes in these places unless they take substantial mitigation action, right, because that's what
insurance is supposed to do. It's supposed to be a signal about climate risk in the rational way of viewing it, and it hasn't been in California effectively. And the question now, I think is if you have people paying, you know, upwards of five, six, seven, ten thousand dollars a year for insurance and it won't go down unless they mitigate or get out of the way, does that start to
change the building patterns? I'm not sure what the answer would be, but that's sort of the big, big question I think.
So now we take a step back and just look at the book that you've written on the Great Displacement. You make the case that you're already starting to see in some pockets real climate change driven migration within the US, and that'll get super charged as extreme weather events get worse. Could you talk us through what kind of notable stories have stuck with you?
Yeah, I think on the fires specifically, there's sort of two big things that stuck with me.
Right.
One is that for people at the lower end of the income scale in really tough rental and housing markets. A lot of times what happened is they either got pushed out of home ownership and into a really chaotic rental market where they're being price gouged, or they just sort of bounced from apartment to apartment. You know, this happened in Santa Rosa. It was almost impossible to get
an affordable apartment even before the fire. But then you lose five thousand housing units in the night, and it's just really really hard to find a place to settle. The other thing that's really interesting, I think, and you may see this happen too in La but maybe to a lesser extent, just given the political geography of the place.
Because a lot of people in Northern California, in places like Paradise, which are relatively conservative and compared to the state as a whole, which is trending left, they took them insurance payout that they got from the fire, and they just made an elective move to a different part of the country.
Right.
So I think most notably, like a lot of people from Paradise, I want to say it's in the dozens ended up moving to Boise, Idaho, which is obviously more conservative state. These people were not on the wealthy end of the income scale in California, but in the Boise housing market they were like titans. You know, they could get huge houses in the suburbs of Boise, and you
know that they went through a lot. I'm not trying to say that they made out great, but like you can either for people who are maybe have less equity in their home or they're renting to begin with, it just ends up being this sort of scramble. You know, a disaster could honestly be a sort of unsticking point where it, you know, induces a move that they maybe otherwise wouldn't have made.
But there's also a sort of stunning admission in the book where if you look at current migration patterns, yes, California and perhaps Louisiana the two states from where people are leaving, and some of that might be climate links, some of that might be just affordability link, but more to the migration is actually happening towards stages that are being affected by climate change. So Florida is seeing a lot of migration. State that gets hit by hurricanes all
the time. Arizona another state which gets hit by droughts and heat. Is that just us seeing an old pattern of economic migration, or are we going to start to finally see a reversal because of climate change? Like how do you square the circle here?
Yeah, this was the most deviling question that still remains with me from the book. You know, it's climate migration. It's just people not liking the climate in Michigan and deciding to move to Fort Lauderdale, you know. And that's the median form of climate migration, even in just in
the twenty first century so far. I don't know at what point that trend reverses itself, but I do think a lot of the places that the post war housing boom took place in the United States, where there was a ton of cheap land, I think we've sort of gotten to a point. This is true in Colorado too, like at the Front Range. You've gut to a point where we're just pushing out from what was the sort of central cities at those times into really really risky land.
And in Arizona, of course, it's just very hot there. I think insurance, you know, probably is the mechanism, at least in the case of Florida, right, that would sort of force like a slow down or a cessation of this dynamic. I think like Florida is probably the place to look for this, right because you also have to
pay for flood insurance and wind insurance there. And I've spoken to people and these these rapidly developing metroplexes right like Fort Myers or Tampa where I'm from, sometimes they can pay upwards of twenty thousand dollars a year and insurance costs combined between the two formats, and that is just not sustainable for almost anybody. And then you know,
the rebuilding rules are really tough too. So I think that it's possible that in the next couple of decades, in a geographically specific way, you might sort of start to see the housing market be unable to tolerate further expansion into these areas. And then what comes out to that is another big question.
So most climate change link migration, as we know, happens within countries. Obviously, you focused on the US with your book, but are there lessons that the rest of the world can take from it? Noting that, of course the US is is, you know, the world's largest economy, one of the richest countries in the world has a much more developed and widespread insurance market. But still are there lessons that others can take.
Yeah? Absolutely. I think that the main lesson is that for a lot of disasters, climate displacement just kind of looks a lot like regular housing displacement does, right, And so I think like La is a good example. Right, this is like a giant housing market, and it's a giant rental market. It's like one of the biggest in the country. So you're not likely to see people get up out of their house in Altadena and walk up to North Dakota, right, or to Canada.
Right.
They can go to the suburb or the next suburb of, or the next suburb of. And that's the way that housing displacement works in LA generally, Like if you get evicted, you're not going to go to North Dakota, right, So, and I think that's probably true in other countries too, right, Like people sort of move in ways that are typical
of those places. I think that the typical image in the United States and other places of a climate migrant is someone who you know, flees from one climate to another, right, Like they want to make an elective move away from, you know, one type of weather event, and I think that it's probably better from a policymaking standpoint if we just think about climate change as being kind of a factor that exacerbates all the other weaknesses in the way
that we house people. In the United States, we have specific weaknesses, as you know, and then in other countries there are other weaknesses.
Thank you, Jake, No problem. After the break, Guy Evins on why climate upheaval is a global problem and needs global solutions. If you've been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show. Kaya, Welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here Atala now. Both of us have been watching
the news from Los Angeles. The fires are still burning as we record this, and there's a lot that we aren't going to know about how communities in the Pacific Palisades or other areas will recover. In the intro, we heard from Paul who was living there. He has no idea whether he's going to get a chance to go back and move into the Pacific Palisades. What has surprised you or perhaps confirmed conclusions from your own reporting as you've watched the story.
Well, I mean, obviously I'm seeing it from London, so I don't have that very first hand view. But it's so photographed, isn't it. Because it is, and I think what we're seeing here is perhaps the first example of wealthy climate migration, right, because we're seeing some of the richest people in the world having to move. But I think it's a reminder that we are all at the bottom of everything, a puny mammal that has certain needs.
Right.
We can't live under certain temperatures. We can't live where there's flames around our homes, you know, we can't breathe air that is infused with smoke. We have to move. And so for all our luxury mansions and our dreams of paradise, we are actually an animal that needs to find a safe home. And we are seeing the very real dangers from these huge, huge earth systems, and we can't just push them back, you know.
So in the two books, out of the many books you've written, in the Adventure in the Anthroposy, you documented how people in different parts the world, especially in the Global South, are starting to adapt to the warming that exists already. But then in no matter century, you took this one step forward to think about places which are beyond adaptation. When did that hit you that these places are there and they're growing in size.
I think I took a two and a half year journey around the world to research adventures in the anthroposcene, and it slowly sort of crept up on me that what I was seeing was enormous amounts of climate migration, even though people themselves didn't recognize themselves as climate migrants. They thought that they were perhaps you know, moving for a better job, leaving rural areas because the economy wasn't working there. But actually, when you dug into it, why
wasn't it working? It was because of persistent chronic drought that had got worse over the last decade or so. It was because of the encroachment of salt water from rising sea levels into Agrica cultural fields. It was because the coastline had completely eroded through you know, more vicious storms, and that constant rising of sea levels, and all of these things made me recognize that we don't have an honest level of debate at all anywhere, certainly not from leadership.
We're not talking about the climate change that has already occurred. We're not talking about what our cities will look like over the coming decades. You know, what will la look like in twenty forty, twenty sixty, What will London look like? What will New York? What will Miami? Because we need to adapt right now to those changes, and we need to recognize that some of those places are just not going to be livable. So we're not having that conversation and people are going to have to move.
What is the scale of migration that we're talking about.
It's impossible to put a figure on that because it depends on a lot of things. We've just had the first full year where the average temperature was one point six degrees above the pre and US average. You know, temperatures may go down slightly, but they are on an upward trajectory, and if we look ahead, it's quite likely that we will end up by the end of the century somewhere between three and four degrees above the pre
industrial average. We already have people living in unlivable zones, some of them heavily adapted and some of them suffering horribly. Places from Sudan to Malia have hunger because of drought or floods. We have people in Asia farm workers who are now working at night with head torches because it's simply too hot during the day. We already have these unlivable areas, but what will happen is they will increase in severity and intensity and last for many months of
the year, if not throughout. Some studies have put the zone of unlivability this kind of climate niche of humanity sort of shifting up, and that area will encompass some three billion people by twenty seventy according to one study. That doesn't mean three billion people will have to move, but it means that vast areas will have to be adapted and people will have to be accommodated, either within
their own nation or increasingly across borders. But you know, if we want fewer people to have to move to be forced to move, we can do a lot in terms of mitigating the temperature rise to come through decarbonization, but also through adapting and making some of these desperately difficult places more habitable longer term. But at the moment we're really not doing any of that. We're not even adapting places in the rich world, let alone the poor world.
And these projections become more uncertain the further out in time you go. But are there specific countries or regions that you've looked at where we can definitively say that climate change has caused or has been the primary reason for people migrating away.
Yeah. Absolutely, Like the majority of climate migration is occurring within countries, and we see that in a lot of the most hit places. Obviously, Bangladesh has huge amounts of climate migration from the Bay of Bengal to other areas. But you know, there was a really interesting study out recently that showed that drought in the growing season in meso America is directly correlated with the number of migrants
at the US border. So when it's particularly dry during the growing season, it pushes up food prices across Central America, and then we get this wave of increased migration towards the US border. And that's perhaps the most kind of beautiful correlation that I've seen. But we also see in parts of Africa, we see a lot of climate migrants. We just had a really horrific flooding in East Africa,
a place which is also suffering from chronic drought. What we're seeing is these cascading effects of one impact then leading to another impact. I mean, if we look back to Pakistan a couple of years ago, they had months of intense heat which was concurrent with extreme drought, which hit food prices and caused harvest losses. And then they got this terrible precipitation, this flash floods that caused thirty three million people to be displaced within a week. And
then that's followed by landslides. Because the drought dries the soils and pulls it away from infrastructure, from houses and bridges and so on, making it much more susceptible. When those floods come, you get the loss of the top soil, which can take a decade sometimes to be replenished, so terrible harvest problems. But also you get that loss of huge amounts of erosion loss of the soil. And we see that everywhere.
These impacts are being felt very widely, are being talked about at a level where there is awareness of the problem. We also know there are potential solutions, but there aren't that many places that are following through with those solutions. We know the amount of adaptation funding is vastly smaller than the funding that goes to reducing emissions. We need to do both, but definitely there's a huge gap and adaptation.
So are there places that are starting to or perhaps are already doing a good job that others can look at and learn from.
I think Bangladesh is a really great example actually of how adaptation can work well. So they have cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, and they have become progressively worse, more intense, more frequent, more severe, and yet they've put in place a brilliant adaptation strategy where everybody knows what to do in the case of a cyclone. There are early warning systems. People get alerts, they know where to go, they know where to bring their animals, they know that
they will be allowed to return if they want. So there is a lot of trust there in the institutions, and that's one of the most fundamental things to adaptation. Now, what's happened is, even though the severity and the frequency of these cyclones have become far more intense in recent years, the death toll has absolutely plummeted. Very few people die comparatively to how many used to and we can all
learn from that. I mean, we should all be preparing ourselves for an extreme event hitting us in our town. You know, is your bag packed? Where would you go? Where's the safe place that you would drive to or walk to? Do you have your friend's numbers written down? Do you have the numbers of relations? Do you have enough food and fresh water to survive for a few days?
Do you have battery pack? All of these things are conversations that we should be having, especially if we live in places that are a bit further out, are a bit more rural, as people in la are realizing today. You never know when something can hit.
There is this quote that crops up on social media every so often, especially when there's a disaster unfolding from scientists called John Holdron, who eventually became the science advisor to Barack Obama, the former US president, and the quote said, there are basically three choices, adaptation, mitigation, and suffering. We are going to do a mix of all of that. But the more we mitigate, the less we'll have to adapt,
and the less there will be suffering. Now, what we are seeing in front of us is obviously a mix of all that, but we are seeing not enough mitigation. Definitely not enough adaptation and does more suffering, and that causes or will cause in much larger numbers, migration that's already become a hot button issue world over. Right, we've seen politics turn to the right, turn to be anti immigrant in most Western economies over the past few years.
How are we going to deal with the challenge of migration if the politics is already so toxic.
You know, we are living in this time when the narrative around migration is truly toxic. We have leaders that are far right, that are populists, that are slogan driven rather than vision led leadership to try and bring us together to solve these planetary scale crises. What we need is honesty. We need honesty over the scale of the climate disaster, but we also need honesty about migration. Right,
it's completely normal and natural people move. We need to counter some of the toxic tropes that come out that immigrants increase on employment. The opposite is true, that they lower wages. Most economists would agree that immigration is absolutely essential in order to keep productivity, especially at a time
when our birth rates are absolutely plummeting. You know, in a few decades, if not just one decade, nations will be competing for immigrants, and you know, those nations that manage to endear themselves to people who want to move there are going to be in the better position. But ultimately we have to be pragmatic. You know, migration is inevitable,
it's already underway. It is only going to increase. What we need to do is engage with the reality that we have right in front of us and make it work for us, because there are so many benefits to it if we get it right.
There are reason which you can get migration right, and there are clearly reason which you can get migration wrong. Are there any places where there are politicians that have successfully made the economic case for migration, pulled it off and actually won an election.
Well, so it's a kind of sort of the dog chasing its tail in a way. So the reason quite often that leaders are chasing the anti migrant vote is because they themselves have made such an anti migrant case, and they're sort of supporting media that is also making
the anti migrant case. So the public therefore think that they want no migrants, and nobody really is making a positive migrant case, so they're sort of like locked in this ridiculous vicious circle, which is completely unproductive for anybody. But I mean, if you look at Australia, for example, I think it's like almost a third of Australians were born out of the country and about half of Australians have at least one parent that was born out of
the country. Now, Australia is quite a weird example because on one side it's vehemently anti migrant and on the other side it's incredibly pro migro, so they haven't quite got that right. But there are definitely aspects which are very pro migrant. And again the same situation with Canada. I mean, you only have to spend two seconds in Toronto to realize that this is an immigrant city, as.
All cities are.
You.
Yeah, I mean London has the same qualification of having half the population actually not being born in the UK, And yeah, that's true of most global cities around the world, but it still doesn't quite translate into the politics of.
Actually but if you look at the politics of cities, you will find that they are very pro migration. The anti migrant sentiments are generally in the places which see very very few migrants. But that's the world we're living in now. And that's the great rift in the United States. It's the great rift that we saw with Brexit and that we're seeing actually across the European Union. And it
is very, very worrying. And so these are the challenges that we need desperately, desperately to resolve and that takes leadership ACTA. And this is the big problem that we don't have the honesty from leadership. We don't have that courageous visionary person in leadership really that I can see Antonio Guterrez perhaps you know, but he's not the leader of a country who is speaking honestly about the crises we face in climate, in migration, in poverty. We don't hear it.
Well, you've tried to make a case for a global body that oversees immigration worldwide. You brought up Antonio Gute as the Secretary General of the United Nations. Should the United Nations be doing this? And how in the hell isn't going to get the powers to actually do this across nation states sovereign states that so fight to keep that status of independence and spend so much money on defense to ensure that stays.
Yeah, Now, the United Nations, these bodies were set up at a time of huge crisis, just after the Second World War, when nations had been ripped apart, when millions had been displaced, entire cities had been flattened. Leaders hated each other, they'd literally just been at war with each other, and yet they came together to produce these international bodies that would eradicate the curse of smallpox and polio, that would set out a declaration of human rights, all of
these things. They came together to do that, and that was remarkable. And yes, you know that there are flaws with that system. But where we are now, this planetary scale of crises that cannot be solved by drawing imaginary lines on maps. It needs a response that is also planetary, and I think that we need a United Nations that
is a stepped up version. We are now our population of more than eight billion people, resources are now more scarce, and we're living in this extreme dangerous world of climate change. And I think the only way we can deal with planetary scale human mobility and climate crisis that's helping to cause that is through a body that can help to manage that.
Well, you joined the illustrious company of Kim Stanley Robinson, who would also very much like the members of say, the G twenty or the United Nations to actually act like members of a body that has deeth to make global policy work. Thank you, Gaya, Thank you, actually, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week. That's the sound of a Canadian firefighting aircraft scooping water
to fight the LA Fires. You can read more about how those water bombing planes were quickly put into production at bloomberg dot com slash Green. It's a fascinating piece. We'll also put a link in the show notes. There's also a lot more coverage of the LA Fires from my colleagues.
At Bloomberg Green.
If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who loves jackets. You can get in touch at zero board at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Mike lee Raw, Bloomberg's Head a podcast is Sage Barman and Head of Talk is Brendan newnam Our. Theme music is composed by Wonderly Special. Thanks to Michelle ma Bryan Kahan, Sharon Chen, and Jessica beck I am Akshaldrati back soon.