When Is It Time to Retreat from Climate Change?

Isle de Jean Charles, a stitch of land on the tattered southern fringe of Louisiana, is thin and getting thinner. Battered by storms and sea-level rise, and deprived of revitalizing sediment from the Mississippi River, its surface area has shrunk by ninety-eight per cent since 1955, and its remaining three hundred and twenty acres can flood in little more than a stiff breeze. Most island residents are members of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, and early last year, thanks to a forty-eight-million-dollar federal resettlement grant, they began the process of relocating their community to the nearby city of Houma. Though headlines routinely call the band’s members the first American climate refugees, the label applies only in the narrowest sense. They may be the first to receive federal funding for a collective retreat from the effects of climate change, but what disaster experts call managed retreat—abandoning areas vulnerable to floods, tsunamis, and rapid erosion—is already well under way, in the United States and worldwide.