Asheville tragedy shows there are no safe havens for climate change: experts

Asheville, North Carolina, has been hailed by real estate researchers as a potential haven for climate refugees, praising its temperate mountain weather, distance from the coast, less extreme heat and fewer wildfires.

The city of around 95,000 residents was believed to be a place where those seeking to escape the harsh effects of the climate crisis could come to safety.

According to Dave Reidmiller, director of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Climate Center, there are certainly locations that can withstand some of these impacts better than others.

However, the deadly floods and landslides after Helene hit Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, illustrate that “no place in the world is truly untouched by climate change,” Reidmiller said. Asheville is nearly 400 miles from where the storm made landfall in Florida last Thursday.

The term “climate moases” has been denounced by climate experts, who told ABC News that it is not a widely accepted or official term and that the criteria are unclear.

Experts say human-caused climate change has led to an increase in rainfall, resulting in an increase in the severity and frequency of rain events and even more so across the country. As extreme weather conditions worsen due to global warming, the crisis is causing displacement of people not only in the United States but around the world.

For this reason, Antonia Sebastian, a professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill’s Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences, doesn’t believe in climate paradises.

“Climate change is kind of a pervasive problem that will affect communities around the world – not equally – but definitely it will affect everyone, everywhere in some way,” Sebastian told ABC News.

Helene, which made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a massive Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the Big Bend region. It traveled inland, hitting not only Florida, but also Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

Helene dropped more than 30 inches of rain across North Carolina, causing the largest local flooding in history. The storm’s devastating path spanned more than 600 miles.

More than 30 people are dead and 600 people are missing in hard-hit Buncombe County, county officials said.

“When you get really extreme rainfall in mountainous areas, you see flooding and the risk of landslides. You see a lot more street flooding than you would in a coastal area with the same type of storm. That’s the elevation component.” “The topographic component really contributes to the severity of the flooding that people are exposed to,” Sebastian said.

“It’s really not just the amount of water that’s truly astonishing – we’re talking a thousand years’ worth of rainfall here – but also the ferocity with which the water flows, the speed and the actual intensity of the flood that they have there.” had to experience outside,” she noted.

According to the Associated Press, more than 120 people were killed along Helene’s path.

Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argues that society needs to move away from viewing some groups as refugees of the climate crisis and instead recognize the need for everyone to invest in actions that make communities and individuals more resilient extreme weather.

“What people experienced in the final days of Hurricane Helene is unprecedented and frightening. They are certainly not the only ones who have experienced it,” Dahl said in an interview.

The international think tank Institute for Economics & Peace estimates that 1.2 billion people worldwide could be displaced by 2050.

Although Asheville has climate resilient city status, Amber Weaver, its sustainability officer, announced earlier this year that she was in the process of developing a resilience assessment to adapt to the growing list of major climate-related threats.

Reidmiller called on cities across the country to invest in mitigating and preparing for climate change, adding that if no action is taken, the costs of climate change – in both damage and human life – will continue to increase .

“Frankly, pay for climate readiness now or Mother Nature will charge you interest later,” Reidmiller told ABC News. “As we rebuild, we need to ask ourselves whether we need to rebuild taller and stronger with different permitting and regulatory requirements to ensure that what we rebuild can better withstand these stronger, more intense, more frequent conditions.”, longer lasting, spatially major events?”

ABC News’ Julia Jacobo contributed to this report.