Destroyed Communities & Climate Migrants: Climate Change Upends Small Towns

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: And now, we turn to a story closer to home. Hurricanes, storms, and wildfires are forcing Americans to abandon their homes as nature lashes out against human made climate change. Over 3 million Americans have already moved due to a risk of flooding, and climate experts expect some 13 million coastal residents to be displaced by the end of this century. Our next guest, Jonathan Vigliotti, has reported from the front lines of climate change and he’s speaking now with Hari Sreenivasan about how American towns can become more resilient and why it’s crucial to listen to the science.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Jonathan Vigliotti, thanks so much for joining us. Your new book is based on all the time that you have spent as a network correspondent covering climate disasters, and it’s called “Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Frontlines of Climate Change in Small Town America.” Why small towns?

VIGLIOTTI: Small towns lack the engineering, the infrastructure, and the budgets to survive the kinds of storms that increasingly more and more of these small towns are being impacted by. And I call them canaries in the coal mine for what larger cities will experience more and more of as mother nature outpaces our ability to hold her back as all of our modern tools are no longer good enough. And we’re seeing this unfold in big cities. And I cover big cities in this book as well, most notably following Superstorm Sandy. I was there on the ground working for WNBC at the time and saw firsthand the impact that storm had in knocking offline New York City, one of the greatest cities in the world for not just days and weeks, but months. And it’s a story that we continue to tell all these years later. In smaller communities, which are right now on the front lines, in real- time being impacted, these stories are being forgotten. And it’s important for people to pay attention to these small towns, to learn from their lessons, and to take action to build more resiliency.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s take our audience through a couple of these towns that you’ve been to and witnessed firsthand. Paradise, the — in California, the fire that ran through there. And what went through your mind as you started covering the story and seeing the absolute devastation?

VIGLIOTTI: You know, the camp fire in 2018 destroyed 95 percent of that community. 85 people were killed. I was in London at the time. I was based as a foreign correspondent there when the fire hit and then moved to the West Coast a few months later. And six months later, I visited Paradise. And I had seen the destruction through the lens of the camera remotely and was struck by the disaster zone that I had arrived to. And most struck by the people, the survivors that I had met who made the decision very early on, instead of leaving town, moving elsewhere, made an effort to move back in and to rebuild. And the lessons from these survivors offer survivor guides, if we listen to their stories. How to prevent a disaster, and God forbid, if one happens, how to navigate through the red tape to rebuild. I was most struck by Kelly — Kylie and Ellie Warble, a mother and daughter team who moved back immediately. And while their family and friends thought that they were crazy, they saw an opportunity to rebuild their town in a resilient way. Power lines today in Paradise are all built underground, and every home that’s rebuilding has to create what’s known as defensible space by removing dry grasses, shrubs, trees from around homes, building with more fire-resistant materials. They saw a way to create a more resilient community, and I think that their story is very powerful to other communities who have time to take action and those communities that have been impacted how to navigate through all of the bureaucratic red tape to rebuild and to create a new start over for these towns.

SREENIVASAN: So, how many people came back to Paradise after that?

VIGLIOTTI: Yes, only about a quarter so far have returned, and this is now five years in. I spoke with the mayor a few years ago and he said it would take about 15 years to get half of the population to return. So, this is a community that is struggling. Ad had they taken early action before the storm hit, they wouldn’t be in this situation right now. Of course, so many people that I speak with imagined nothing like this happening to them until it does. And now, with new eyes, they see the things that could be done differently, to create a safer place to live.

SREENIVASAN: And you point out in your book that there is kind of a longer- term ripple effect of what happens when essentially there are climate migrants, even inside this country. What are the things that you discovered?

VIGLIOTTI: In a most notable way, if we go back to just Hurricane Katrina, you had a million of these climate migrants who dispersed around the country. Georgetown University, early on in their research, found that some host communities became less receptive and supporting of funding to help the poor and African-Americans. Going back to Paradise, we’re seeing the same thing in nearby Chico, about 20,000 people from Paradise moved into Chico. And you’re seeing this friction when you have communities that are suddenly starting to mix where voters today are opposing affordable housing measures. And this is a similar conflict that we see time and time again. Two and a half million Americans were forced from their homes last year, according to the U.S. Bureau — Census Bureau, two and a half million forced from their homes because of extreme weather. And new research out last month show that half of all American homes are threatened by climate change. So, as the climate continues to fuel the kinds of weather events that we’re seeing, we’re going to continue to see more of these migrants and fault lines, and other communities as they deal with absorbing new people moving in who have lost their homes.

SREENIVASAN: Jonathan, where is the sort of free market in all of this, right? Ideally, we’re supposed to have a system where, OK, you can live in a more dangerous area. It’s just going to cost you more. But as you point out, that there are insurance companies who are actually walking away from entire regions.

VIGLIOTTI: Yes, the insurance industry and the federal government and local government have all played a role historically in where we build. I believe it’s the insurance industry’s responsibility to support current homes while, at the same time, discouraging risky building in unsafe places. And we are seeing that happen in places like California and along the coasts on the East Coast, where you’re having certain industry — certain parts of the industry pull out from certain markets. What we’re seeing is business as usual is no longer sustainable. And where I live here in Hollywood, I bought my home four years ago. And I had an issue finding insurance. First, everything that I was finding was about $1,000 a month. Until I found an insurance agency that had an affordable monthly bill, but what I had to do as a result was meet their regulations, including that defensible space around my home, where we had to remove bushes and trees so that our home, in the event that there was a wildfire, would not be impacted. And we’re seeing this happen also along the coast and with local governments taking action. In the State of New Jersey, they have Blue Acres, and it is a program that identifies properties that are at risk of flooding and whether or not it’s safe to have those people stay where they are, build their homes on stilts, which is federally funded, or through federal funding, move those locations, move those homes to safer places. So, across the country, we’re seeing new programs put into place by the federal government, also dictated by the insurance industry on where it is safe to live.

SREENIVASAN: You know, speaking of defensible homes and thinking about that and planning about that, tell us a little bit about “The House With The Red Roof.”

VIGLIOTTI: So, this is Lahaina. And before I wrote this book in my journal, I wrote a sentence before every disaster, there is usually a science that has been ignored. And unfortunately, Lahaina is a perfect example of that. My team and I were one of the first network crews to arrive. And what was left of Downtown Lahaina, 80 percent of the community was destroyed and more than 100 people were killed. I equate it to an environmental holocaust when we finally arrived. We chartered a boat to get there to this cindered shoreline where home after home was destroyed, business after business. In the immediate aftermath, we listened to local leaders as they described this fire as an explosion. It was like a bomb going off. The implication there being there was no time to take action. But there was, as we learned, a nearly decade long fuse that could have been put out at any point because scientists on the island 10 years earlier, in 2014, came out with a report that said the warming climate had increased the vulnerability of wildfires there on Maui and specifically in Lahaina. They even recommended steps that could be taken to avert disaster, including conserving water, restoring wetlands, removing dry invasive grasses, and building and updating homes with fire resistant materials. Unfortunately, that report was filed away and action was not taken in time. But in the miles on path of destruction that we witnessed firsthand, there was this home with the red roof. The homeowners, prior to this fire, had updated that home, implementing those scientific remedies, including removing bushes and trees from around the house and putting a metal red roof on top of the house, which qualified for tax credits and reduce the insurance costs. Unfortunately, every other home in that neighborhood was destroyed. But across the country, we’re seeing examples of other homes with the red roof that have survived other storms by other names. Really, the message here, people as individuals have the power to protect their properties. And as individual communities, we all have the power to protect our communities, to build more resilient communities that can withstand the impacts of climate change.

SREENIVASAN: When you’re out there, I’m sure there are people who approach you and they are automatically predisposed to think that, well, you have a bias, your mainstream media, you’re going to talk about this climate stuff, right? I mean, there is still climate denial and climate science denial out there. How do you deal with it?

VIGLIOTTI: I think that denial stems from a lack of understanding the climate science. Climate change can be overwhelming and the solutions can be daunting, but people that are impacted by extreme weather, their eyes are immediately opened and they see things and they see trends that beforehand they may not have been open to receiving, that their imaginations failed to understand imagine a world where they could lose their homes. I think more and more as I talk to people on the front lines, especially those impacted by extreme weather, they recognize that the weather is changing. All of them, and many people I have spoken with never even once really considered climate change as a threat until they saw it visualized and in action in extreme weather. So, I try to point out, whenever I’m in the field, I try not to hit home climate change to these people who are oftentimes going through the worst moments of their life, but they all recognize that something has changed, the weather is no longer what it used to be, and they can’t just rebuild business as usual. Things need to change.

SREENIVASAN: You also make it a point to kind of draw this connection that it’s not just here in the United States that there are climate migrants who turn into, well, climate refugees as they cross borders because conditions became unlivable where they were, then that has a domino effect of its own.

VIGLIOTTI: That’s correct. And we saw this and it’s a very extreme example. But in Syria, I was there covering the civil war at that point 10 years in, and that war had its roots in a drought. And back in 2006, you had farmers in the agricultural veins of the country warning local leaders that without water, there was crop failure and there would be a mass migration. But action wasn’t taken and that mass migration unfolded as more and more people from rural areas moved into urban areas. And there was a conflict which led to protests, which led to the government responding in violence and — which initially sparked this — not just protests, but the uprising that led to the civil war and gave way to groups like ISIS. Closer to home, we see situations like that unfolding as well on the border with Mexico. A number of the migrants that are coming through, and we’re talking millions every year, are coming from areas that have been impacted by historic storms, historic droughts, and crop failure. So, we will start to see more and more of this while Syria is an extreme example. Migration is something that is taking place worldwide. And it is something that we are starting to see more and more of here in the U.S. Two and a half million people forced from their homes last year because of extreme weather is a daunting number. And unfortunately, with the way that our weather is trending, we’re going to see more and more people that are being uprooted and moving from their homes voluntarily, but mostly by force.

SREENIVASAN: What were the kind of hopeful lines that you found in this reporting? Because it would have been easy to just kind of rattle off a list of disasters and say, oh, look at this one that I covered and that one. But you do have a through line here of solutions that are working. And we talked a little bit about kind of the house with the red roof. But what else did you find that, you know, gave you some bit of optimism?

VIGLIOTTI: The call to return our land back to a more natural state to me has been very powerful to say, and a perfect example of that is the beaver. So, here in California, a researcher by the name of Emily Fairfax found after a massive wildfire, there was a stretch of land, a lush land that was not impacted. And she found at the center of this all was a beaver dam that had been recently built, that was able to contain the water and build a resilient ecosystem there, a wetland that was able to resist fire. As a result of this discovery, more and more communities across the west are now welcoming the beaver, which historically has been seen as a nuisance critter because they created flooding through their dams. I was in Coalville, Utah, where a rancher that had eradicated beavers from his property, asked for them to be brought back in. There’s a group of people now who are building what are known as analog beaver dams to help reintroduce beavers to create more resilient ecosystems. And today, that Coalville ranch has a thriving, lush ecosystem because of two beavers that they brought in, and these are animals that are working free of charge and are helping restore a community and an ecosystem in a way that even engineering and all the money that we have, perhaps can’t do nearly as well.

SREENIVASAN: But where do you see this kind of happening generationally and how people perceive the threat of the disruptions that the climate is going to bring to us?

VIGLIOTTI: young people are definitely leading the charge and are much more receptive to the information. And I think the message that they sent to all of us is we all need to be receptive to the information. I mean, as I travel from community to community, regardless of what their politics are, these are people that after a storm, they all do wake up to the realities that they face. But I think more and more, it’s important that we do listen to the research. We do listen to survivors. We listen to the next generation who will inherit this earth. And we take steps to build back safer and to update our communities that are in harm’s way. There’s the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure deal, which offer billions of dollars in funding to help communities across the United States. But you don’t have the federal government going and knocking on doors of each of these towns saying, take this money. Local leaders need to listen, and they need to listen to their communities and they need to help get access to that funding. Grants are available, but it’s up to each community to identify the risks and then to apply for those grants. And I think the first step is listening. And oftentimes, listening to the next generation, which has been much more vocal than most.

SREENIVASAN: Author of the book “Before It’s Gone,” Jonathan Vigliotti, thanks so much for joining us.

VIGLIOTTI: Thank you for having me.