The Reliance School

1,500 Words / 6 min. Read

Anyone who’s been following the news will be aware of the devastation visited upon Asheville, NC by hurricane Helene. As the toll of the disaster rises, a secondary narrative has been emerging; that the events in Asheville prove that “climate havens” don’t exist. There are now a slew of articles with variations on this theme:

• Asheville Flooding Shows That 'Climate Havens' Don't Exist (Blavity)
• Asheville has been called a ‘climate haven.’ There’s no such thing (Fast Company)
• Asheville tragedy shows there are no climate change safe havens (ABC)
• Asheville was called a climate haven. Helene shows nowhere is safe (CNN)
• As North Carolina Flooded, My Home State Turned From Climate Haven to Calamity (Truthout)
• ‘Climate Havens’ Don’t Exist (The New York Times)
• Before the floods, Asheville was called a ‘climate haven.’ Is anywhere safe? (Washington Post)
• From ‘climate haven’ to disaster zone (Northeastern Global News)
• Helene Busts The Myth Of Climate Havens (Forbes)
• Hurricane Helene Proves There Are No Climate Havens (The New Republic)
• Hurricane Helene’s reach shows why no place is immune from impacts of climate change (PBS)
• Hurricane Helene Signals the End of the ‘Climate Haven’ (Scientific American)
• Hurricane Helene Turns City Touted as ‘Climate Haven’ Into ‘Apocalyptic’ Disaster Zone (The Daily Beast)
• Is Asheville No Longer a ‘Climate Haven?’ (The Journal)
• Is the idea of a ‘climate haven’ underwater? (Yale Climate Connections)
• I Thought I’d Moved to a Climate Haven. Helene Destroyed It. (The New Republic)
• No Community Is a Climate Refuge (Sierra Club)
• ‘Nowhere is safe’: shattered Asheville shows stunning reach of climate crisis (The Guardian)
• The Origins of the Climate Haven Myth (WIRED)
• There Is No Climate Haven. We All Live in Florida Now. (The New York Times)
• They came to Asheville looking for a 'climate haven.' Then came Hurricane Helene (NPR)
• Western North Carolina was hailed as a ‘climate haven.’ Hurricane Helene shows it’s not so simple. (The Hill)

But how did this narrative begin? And was Asheville ever a “climate haven” at all?

The Origin Story

The earliest mention of Asheville that we’ve found dates back to February 2018, in a Rolling Stone article on climate migration.¹ The article includes the story of a couple who left Florida to avoid the threat of hurricanes:

They started thinking about other places to live, and settled on Asheville, North Carolina. Set at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville is an old railroad town known for good hiking, craft beer, a lively music scene and a mild climate. “When we were looking for a place to move, the choice was obvious,” Kaplan says.

The next mention came from North Carolina Public Radio, in an article titled Come Hell Or High Water, Asheville Is Climate Winner.² The authors seem to have used the Rolling Stone article as their inspiration:

In a 2018 article about climate migration, Rolling Stone magazine identified Asheville as being among the “winners” in this movement because it would gain both population and gross economic production.

While the Kaplans were featured again:

Jeffrey Kaplan, director of the VentureAsheville initiative that seeks to attract high-tech start-ups to the region, said many of the recent inquiries he’s handled come from entrepreneurs from the west coast and Colorado, where apocalyptic wildfires have become an ever-present threat and long-range investments seem risky.

Asheville also came up in an article published by the Yale School of the Environment;³ similar to Rolling Stone, it mentioned a couple who chose to relocate to Asheville to escape the California wildfires:

For Roy Parvin and his wife, Janet Vail, several years of living with wildfires around their home in northern California’s Sonoma County finally drove them some 2,600 miles to Asheville, North Carolina, where they pursue their respective careers in writing and publishing in a place where they do not have to be worried about fires, heat, or smoke.

Several other publications ran similar headlines,^4,5,6 but like the previous articles, they relied entirely on interviews and anecdotal evidence for their claims.

Keenan’s City List

Then in April of 2022, CNBC released a segment titled Which U.S. Cities Are Safest From Climate Change?,^7,8 which featured a list of climate-safe cities created by Jesse Keenan (associate professor of real estate at Tulane University) and Anna Marandi (program manager at the National League of Cities).

Asheville topped the list, which also included Ann Arbor, Buffalo, Burlington, Charleston, Cincinnati, Detroit, Duluth, Knoxville, Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Toledo. That same list was then published by CNN,⁹ USA Today,¹⁰ EcoWatch,¹¹ and The Asheville Citizen Times,¹² among others.

While Keenan’s background in climate adaptation and resilience has positioned him as a foremost expert in the field,^13,14 we were unable to find any mention of Asheville (or other climate-safe cities) among his published papers.¹⁵ The articles from CNBC & USA Today gave little insight into the decision process, saying only that the cities had been selected as “best bets” by Keenan and his research team.¹⁰ In 2021, Marandi had published a paper titled Vulnerable City, recipient city, or climate destination?,¹⁶  which listed Duluth, Buffalo, and Cincinnati as climate-friendly cities, but not Asheville.

In short, the whole story of Asheville being a climate haven seems to have stemmed from a few anecdotal reports, and a single list of cities whose methodology was never made public.

Are “climate havens” a myth?

How does all this affect the narrative around climate havens? To start, it illustrates the importance of sourcing your information. All those pieces claiming that “there are no climate havens” are coming from the same publications that were (until recently) running headlines on climate-proof cities.^17,18,19,20 So rather than relying on op-eds and interviews, we should be looking for primary data sources; specifically studies and projections of climate risk. While climate models may not be perfect, they’re a much more reliable source than news articles.

Second, it pushes back against the idea that there are no climate havens, because Asheville was never a climate haven to begin with. The Southeast is facing a wide range of climate threats,²¹ from extreme heat and humidity²² to hurricanes, extreme rainfall, and flooding,²³ all of which are compounded by poor governance and infrastructure.²⁴ (In our article on avoiding natural disasters, we excluded the entire region from the running.) Asheville may have been a more resilient option from within the Southeast, but on a national scale it’s well below average.²⁵

Most importantly, the narrative that “nowhere is safe” is entirely unhelpful for those looking to build climate resilience. If you’ve been following the news around climate change, you’re already aware that no place will be completely isolated from its effects. But the average American isn’t looking to build a survival bunker in New Zealand;²⁶ we just want to know how to avoid the worst of it.

So which places are safe?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question; for most of us, family and career are the most important considerations,²⁷ and that greatly limits our options. Even for those of us with more financial and personal freedom, there are a wide range of factors that might impact our decision. A young couple looking to start a farm or homestead will have a much different set of priorities than retirees, for example.

That said, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at how climate risk is distributed throughout the country, and in Where to Live: America, we’ve created a list of 10 regions and 25 cities that are facing the least risk from major threats like extreme heat, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and drought. If you’d rather run the numbers yourself, we’ve compiled over 50 maps of climate risk for America, which cover physical threats like natural disasters, as well as social and economic factors. And in our series on climate havens, we’ve outlined 4 main principles for finding a more resilient home.

It’s also important to note that many climate threats (such as floods and wildfires) are unevenly distributed, even within counties and cities. Data aggregators like First Street and ClimateCheck can provide property-level risk assessments, and if your home is in a high-risk area, you may not need to look far to find safety. If you live near a river or on a floodplain, finding higher ground can greatly reduce your risk;²⁸ if you live in fire-prone foothills, moving to a more developed area could be a safer option.²⁹

Lastly, remember that location is just one piece of the puzzle; adapting to climate change means avoiding risk where we can, and also preparing for the risks we can’t avoid. While no place is perfect, don’t let that discourage you from building a more resilient future.

Footnotes & References

1. Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration (Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone)
2. Come Hell Or High Water, Asheville Is Climate 'Winner' (Tom Fiedler, WUNC)
3. As Climate Fears Mount, Some in U.S. Are Deciding to Relocate (Jon Hurdle, Yale Environment 360)
4. Climate haven: More people moving to Asheville to escape more severe climate change impact (Anjali Patel, ABC 13 News)
5. ‘Do You Really Want to Rebuild at 80?’ Rethinking Where to Retire. (Susan Garland, The New York Times)
6. When You’re Finally Ready to Retire, Consider Climate Change in Your Move (Debbie Carlson, Barron's)
7. Americans are fleeing climate change - here’s where they can go (Lindsey Jacobson, CNBC)
8. Which U.S. Cities Are Safest From Climate Change? (CNBC)
9. As people flee climate change on the coasts, this Midwest city is trying to become a safe haven (John Sutter, CNN)
10. Orlando a favorite among best cities to avoid worst climate change impacts. Here are others. (Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA Today)
11. 10 Cities That Could Be Climate Havens in the U.S. (Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch)
12. Asheville ranks on list of cities most likely to see impact of 'climate migration' (Iris Seaton, Asheville Citizen Times)
13. Biography (Jesse Keenan)
14. Want to Escape Global Warming? These Cities Promise Cool Relief (Kendra Pierre-Louis, The New York Times)
15. J. Keenan (ResearchGate)
16. Vulnerable City, recipient city, or climate destination? Towards a typology of domestic climate migration impacts in US cities (Anna Marandi, Kelly Leilani, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences)
17. Finding Climate Havens (German Lopez, The New York Times)
18. Some northern cities could be reborn as ‘climate havens’ (Marcello Rossi, Yale Climate Connections)
19. Where should you move to save yourself from climate change? (Oliver Milman, The Guardian)
20. Will Buffalo Become a Climate Change Haven? (Jeremy Deaton, Bloomberg)
21. As Climate Changes, Southern States Will Suffer More Than Others (Brad Plumer, Nadja Popovich, The New York Times)
22. Atlas of the 5th National Climate Assessment (5th National Climate Assessment)
23. Inequitable patterns of US flood risk in the Anthropocene (Oliver Wing, William Lehman, Paul Bates, Christopher Sampson, Niall Quinn, Andrew Smith, Jeffrey Neal, Jeremy Porter, Carolyn Kousky, Nature Climate Change)
24. Development of a Cumulative Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) for Natural Hazards (EPA)
25. Where To Live: America (The Reliance School)
26. Billionaires are building bunkers and buying islands. But are they prepping for the apocalypse – or pioneering a new feudalism? (Katherine Guinness, Grant Bollmer, Tom Doig, The Conversation)
27. Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home? (D’Vera Cohn, Rich Morin, Pew Research Center)
28. Flood Maps (FEMA)
29. What is the WUI? (US Fire Administration)