The Duty to Move People Out of Harm’s Way in the Context of Climate Change and Disasters

Reframing strategic, managed retreat for transformative climate adaptation

“…To date, managed retreat projects have been largely incremental, minor adjustments implemented using a handful of policy tools, guided by a limited set of social values, and small scale in their contributions to climate change adaptation (15,23,33). For example, in the United States, voluntary home buyouts have helped 45,000 families move out of flood-prone homes over the past 30 years; this represents a tiny fraction of the millions at risk and is fewer than the number of homes experiencing repeat flood damage and the number of new homes built in floodplains.…”

“…Retreat has figured into disaster risk management and adaptation portfolios largely as a deprioritized, politically perilous option (7,15,20,32,33), in part because the motivation in most cases has been to avoid transformation: to enable people to continue living where and how they have in the past. Yet as climate conditions shift outside the bounds of CLIMATE-INDUCED RELOCATION historical human experience, the need for transformational adaptation that fundamentally alters systems will likely increase (5,9,11,14,35,36).…”

“…Retreat to date has focused on reducing risks and economic losses, responding to disaster impacts, or creating habitat-values defined by a narrow set of stakeholders and often disconnected from other societal objectives such as cultural or community cohesion, livelihoods, ecosystem health, and housing security (21,29). In the future, strategic, managed retreat must attend to a more extensive set of goals and stakeholders, from localities where retreat occurs to regional, national, and international communities involved in funding and implementation (17,19,33). In practice, achieving strategic retreat has been very difficult.…”

“…The methods by which decisions to retreat are made, at individual or collective levels, are important. Having control over their destinies is essential in people's identities and relationships with place, yet further research is necessary to understand how retreat decisions are best made and how power dynamics affect how retreat conversations should be initiated-for example, with governments offering retreat or as grassroots efforts emerging from community requests (14,19,33,46,51). Voluntariness of retreat is often assumed to maximize benefits and minimize losses, but empirical work is needed to explore exactly what voluntariness entails.…”

Promoting Human Security: Planned Relocation as a Protection Tool in a Time of Climate Change

“…Other human rights bodies and documents also lend ample support to this argument. While such jurisprudence suggests that evacuations may be required in certain contexts, whether the duty to move people out of harm's way also extends to undertaking planned relocations is the subject of academic discussions (Burson et al 2018).…”