Asheville tragedy shows there are no climate change safe havens: Experts

(NEW YORK) — Asheville, North Carolina, has been called a potential safe haven for climate refugees by real estate researchers, praised for its temperate mountain weather, distance far from the coast, experiencing less extreme heat and fewer wildfires.

The city of around 95,000 people was believed markings of a place where those escaping the harsh impacts of the climate crisis could go for safety.

Certainly, there are locations that are going to be able to withstand some of those impacts more than others, according to Dave Reidmiller, the director of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Climate Center.

However, the fatal floods and landslides seen after Helene ripped through Buncombe County, which encompasses Asheville, highlight that “no place is truly untouched by climate change, anywhere in the world,” said Reidmiller. Asheville is nearly 400 miles away from where the storm made landfall in Florida last Thursday.

Experts say human-caused climate change has caused an increase in rainfall, increasing the severity and frequency of rainfall events, and more across the country. As extreme weather worsens amid global heating, the crisis is displacing people not just in the U.S., but around the world.

Because of this, Antonia Sebastian, a professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Depar​tment of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences, doesn’t believe in climate havens.

The designation of a “climate haven” has been denounced by climate experts, who told ABC News that it’s not a widely accepted or official term and that the criteria is unclear.

“Climate change is sort of a pervasive issue that is going to affect communities all over the world — not equally — but definitely it will impact everyone, everywhere in some way,” Sebastian told ABC News.

Helene, which made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as a massive Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Big Bend on record. It traveled inland, hitting not just Florida, but also Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

Helene dumped more than 30 inches of rain on North Carolina, producing the biggest local flooding in recorded history. The path of the storm’s devastation has spanned more than 600 miles.

More than 30 people are dead and 600 people remain unaccounted for in hard-hit Buncombe County, according to county officials.

“When you get a really extreme rainfall in mountainous regions, you see flooding, you see the potential for landslides. You see a lot more road washouts than you might in a coastal area with the same kind of storm. That’s that elevation component. The topography component really adds to the severity of the flooding that that people experience,” Sebastian said.

“It’s really not only the volume of water that’s really out like astounding — we’re talking thousand-year-levels of rainfall by some measures — but it’s the ferocity with which that water is flowing, the speed and the real intensity of the flood that they had to experience out there,” she noted.

Across Helene’s path, more than 100 people have been killed.

Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argues that society needs to move away from viewing some groups as refugees of the climate crisis and instead acknowledge the need for everyone to invest in measures that will make communities and individuals more resilient to extreme weather.

“What folks have experienced over the last few days of Hurricane Helene is unprecedented and terrifying, they’re certainly not alone in experiencing it,” Dahl said in an interview.

The international think-tank Institute for Economics & Peace estimates that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050.

Despite Asheville’s status as a climate resilient city, Amber Weaver, its sustainability officer, announced earlier this year that it was in the process of developing a resilience assessment to adapt to the growing list of major climate-related dangers.

Reidmiller urged cities nationwide to invest in climate change mitigation and preparedness, adding that the cost of climate change — in both damages and human life — will continue to add up unless action is taken.

“You pay, frankly, pay for climate readiness now, or Mother Nature is going to charge you later with interest,” Reidmiller told ABC News. “As we rebuild, we kind of need to ask ourselves, do we need to rebuild higher, stronger, with different permitting and regulatory requirements to make sure that what we are building back is more capable of withstanding these stronger, more intense, more frequent, longer lasting, greater-in-spatial scale events?”

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