engage / strengthening the andlinger community
Gerhard R. Andlinger Visiting Fellows in Energy and the Environment Planning for Major Climate Displacements Current approaches for planning relocation for potentially millions of people affected by climate change and related risks are “woefully inadequate” and risk worsening societal inequities, experts wrote in a policy perspective in a special issue of Science on climate-induced relocation on June 18. One such expert was Richard Moss, a non-resident fellow at the Andlinger Center, a former Gerhard R. Andlinger Visiting Fellow, and a senior scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland.
Moss is chair of the Science for Climate Action Network and has participated in national and international assessment bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The other authors include Patrick Michael Reed, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Antonia Hadjimichael, a postdoctoral researcher, both at Cornell University. Co-author Julie Rozenberg is a senior economist at the World Bank.
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According to Moss, whose work during his fellowship focused on helping cities and states adapt to climate change, policymakers and scientists need to rethink how they work together to develop, communicate, and carry out relocation plans to effectively move people away from risk into entirely new settings. Moss said
facilitating relocation efforts requires new skill sets and requires that people working in science and governance increasingly manage trade-offs across interests, knowledge uncertainties, and institutional ambiguity created by overlapping jurisdictions. According to the research, past policy failures and deep structural inequalities in society have contributed to many of the displaced people being vulnerable in the first place and have frequently excluded them from planning processes, which makes successful relocation even more difficult. The authors laid out what it means to take a “pluralistic and integrated approach to action-oriented knowledge,” which they say would help make relocation more ethical and successful.
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