Will Indiana be home to climate migrants?

When hurricanes batter the nation's coastal states, thousands of people who suddenly become displaced must move — sometimes temporarily, but often permanently — to new homes in different communities.

But if catastrophic weather events such as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma become increasingly more common, as many climate change experts predict, will that mean a corresponding wave of new migrants to Indiana?

Probably not. Researchers say that those displaced move inland, but seldom make it as far north or west as Indiana.

More:It wouldn't take a Harvey-size storm to devastate Indianapolis

For example, a paper by Jonathon Eyer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California who has studied climate-induced migration, says that of the more than 180,000 people who relocated after Hurricane Katrina, just under half of them resettled in Texas or other parts of Louisiana.   

More Katrina migrants settled in Harris County (Texas) than any other place — putting them right in the path of Hurricane Harvey.

“If we’re looking at these kind of big natural disaster drivers of migration, people aren’t going to move that far, so I would suspect that Indiana would probably not get a lot of migration from coastal hurricanes or something like that,” said Eyer. He also said that proximity tends to be important, in part, because the people most affected by hurricane damage tend to be lower income and would therefore have limited resources for a long-distance move.

But maybe that should change. And maybe Indiana should play a role.

Vicki Bier, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in risk assessment and analysis, believes that the subject of climate-induced relocation within the U.S. needs more attention. 

“We in the U.S. are pretty good at getting people out of the way of immediate disaster,” she said. “We’re not very good at helping them get settled afterward.”

In a paper published in April, Bier cites a study that says the relocation of entire villages or towns, if it comes to that, could cost as much as $1 million per person.

That bill gets steep very quickly. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a nongovernmental international agency that tracks displacement within countries, at least 1.65 million people have been displaced in the U.S. because of weather or climate related events from 2013 through the middle of 2017.

Some relocation of this type is already happening. In 2016, the federal government awarded a first-of-its-kind grant to relocate the residents of a tribal community on Isle de Jean Charles, La., which has lost 98 percent of its land mass since 1955. The money will go toward the development of a variety of infrastructure and housing projects, including approximately 100 dwellings. The entire project is expected to cost around $100 million for the relocation of a community that is minuscule when compared to massive coastal communities such as Miami.

Bier thinks that being proactive could help lessen those costs.

“One of the things that I’ve been thinking about in my own research is, can you encourage it (relocation) to be earlier? ... to be accelerating the timeline and to have it more on people’s radar so they can make sensible plans instead of emergency plans,” said Bier.

Bier's research raises a provocative question: Should the government provide incentives for people to move out of coastal areas now, instead of waiting for future disasters that will force them to move?

Both Eyer and Bier believe such incentives could carry net positives.

Furthermore, could states such as Indiana benefit from such a scenario?

Bier imagines that Indiana could run campaigns targeted at coastal workers. The state estimates that there could be as many as a million job openings in Indiana over the next eight years, jobs that could be filled by coastal workers looking to relocate.

Bier also says that attracting folks from coastal communities could help Indiana towns in need of revitalization. Things such as low cost of living and a more bucolic lifestyle could attract urban coastal residents looking for a calmer venue to raise children or settle into retirement.

But without some kind of incentive, Eyer’s study suggests that there will be no significant migration away from natural disaster-prone areas, and therefore the costs of future (and more frequent) disasters will remain high.

For now, the role of states such as Indiana in the climate migrant debate is yet to be seen.

“These areas that may see themselves as immune from the more mainstream understanding of sea level rise risk are actually going to have to think of themselves as host communities, and how they will be better equipped to host those folks that are coming in from the coast line,” said Maxine Burkett, a law professor at University of Hawaii and author of a paper on finding land for communities displaced by climate change.

“There’s uncertainty not as to whether or not it’s happening," Burkett said, "but how it will play itself out."

There are other factors that might contribute to that uncertainty. 

Consider the unlikely destination for a growing population of people who have migrated from the Marshall Islands: Springdale, Ark.

They come to escape sea-level rise, but also to work in the poultry industry, for education, or to escape health effects of historic nuclear testing by the United States.

“No one," Burkett said, "would have thought of northwest Arkansas for a major location for that relocation.”

In Indiana, there is another source of uncertainty.

Thanks to a rule released by the IRS in 2014, for the next year, low-income housing units in Indiana will be available to anyone displaced by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma — regardless of income.

It's unclear how many people will seek relief in Indiana through this program. Matt Rayburn, the deputy executive director and chief real estate development officer of the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, said it's the first time IHCDA has needed to roll out the program since the IRS released the new rule.

"Right now, we're really in education mode,” Rayburn said. “(We’re) explaining the rules to the owners so they know what they can do and urging them to make any units they have in their portfolio available for this purpose.”

Only when the year has expired will the state know the full extent of the rule change.

As for the wider discussion of encouraging people to relocate from coastal areas due to climate change, Rayburn says that it’s not yet in their viewfinder. 

"That is a topic we've heard about through some industry publications and conferences and things," he said. "I can't say it's an area that we have really a plan in place right now, but I think ... it's going to be a growing discussion in the housing and community development world, and it's going to be something that we'll continue to pay attention to."

Contact Emily Hopkins at (317) 444-6409 or emily.hopkins@indystar.com. IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.