DESDE QUE EL MUNDO NEGOCIÓ UN TRATADO SOBRE EL CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO POR PRIMERA VEZ en 1992, pasaron tres valiosas décadas y dejamos que el desafío climático se convirtiera en una crisis. La última evaluación del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático (IPCC por su sigla en inglés), publicada esta primavera, dejó de lado el lenguaje moderado del cuerpo científico profesional para dejar en claro que la sociedad se enfrenta a una crisis urgente y que se debe pasar a la acción. Ese informe representa “una letanía de promesas climáticas que no se cumplieron”, dice el secretario general de la ONU, António Guterres. “Es un archivo de la vergüenza en el que se catalogan las promesas vacías que nos encaminaron a un mundo inhabitable”.

En la cumbre sobre el clima de la ONU del año pasado en Glasgow, los países del mundo duplicaron la reducción de emisiones que habían prometido para esta década, pero en realidad necesitamos quintuplicar esos objetivos. Tal como están las cosas en este momento, podemos emitir solo 300.000 millones de toneladas de dióxido de carbono (GtCO2) antes de que las temperaturas mundiales superen el 1,5 grado Celsius, identificado en el Acuerdo de París como el límite superior aceptable de calentamiento. Si los países no logran reducir las emisiones mucho más de lo que prometieron hasta el momento, el mundo superará esos 300.000 millones de toneladas durante esta década. Eso nos llevará a un caos muchísimo mayor que las tormentas, las sequías, los incendios y los desplazamientos sin precedentes que el mundo ya está viviendo.

Somos capaces de reducir significativamente las emisiones. Sabemos qué tecnologías de energía renovable y prácticas de eficiencia energética debemos implementar en forma generalizada, sabemos que proteger los ecosistemas y otras especies respalda nuestra propia capacidad para prosperar, y somos conscientes de las prácticas agrícolas insostenibles que consumen combustible fósil y de las dietas que hacen uso intensivo del suelo que debemos modificar.

El suelo es una figura prominente en muchas de las soluciones climáticas más prometedoras y, por lo tanto, es uno de los elementos centrales de muchas de las tensiones y concesiones que debemos hábilmente enfrentar. Se agota el tiempo y debemos encontrar una forma de evitar seguir avanzando a tientas, pisoteando las necesidades humanas y ecológicas fundamentales en un intento por llegar a las soluciones “ecológicas”. Administrar el suelo con sabiduría mientras nos enfrentamos a un clima cada vez más hostil será fundamental para garantizar un futuro en el que podamos vivir.

INCLUSO MIENTRAS SE VE CADA VEZ MÁS AFECTADO POR EL CLIMA CAMBIANTE, el suelo se enfrentará a exigencias crecientes y contrastantes de la sociedad, que busca soluciones climáticas y un santuario para protegerse de un clima cada vez más hostil. Analicemos los aspectos principales de este panorama lleno de conflictos. 

El suelo será necesario para conservar las especies y los ecosistemas que se ven cada vez más amenazados por el peligro de extinción o el colapso generados por el cambio climático. Actualmente, la Tierra está transitando su sexta extinción en masa desde la explosión cámbrica hace 500 millones de años. Mientras escribe sobre el árbol evolutivo de la vida, Elizabeth Kolbert, una académica especializada en dichas extinciones, explica: “Durante una extinción en masa, se cortan muchas partes del árbol, como si lo podaran locos con hachas” (Kolbert 2014). Incluso como metáfora, quizás esta explicación se queda corta, ya que ahora hay topadoras, represas gigantes y otras formas menos racionales de apropiarnos directamente del suelo en los ecosistemas naturales. A medida que el cambio climático producido por los seres humanos se acelera, superará a la apropiación del suelo como impulsor principal de la extinción continua (WGII del IPCC 2022). En un informe de la Plataforma Intergubernamental Científico-normativa sobre Diversidad Biológica y Servicios de los Ecosistemas, se descubrió que hay más de un millón de especies en peligro de extinción, muchas de ellas en las próximas décadas (IPBES 2019). 

Desde las montañas cubiertas de nieve donde nacen los ríos que fluyen todo el año, pasando por el suelo fértil en el que crecen nuestros alimentos, hasta los arrecifes de coral que permiten la pesca costera, conservar los ecosistemas naturales de los que depende la supervivencia humana dependerá, en definitiva, de nuestra habilidad para reducir y revertir la apropiación y la fragmentación del hábitat natural; todo esto mientras intentamos detener el cambio climático. Como un primer paso fundamental, casi 100 países que conforman la High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People propusieron un proyecto internacional 30×30 para proteger el 30 por ciento del suelo y los océanos del mundo para el 2030. Este esfuerzo ambicioso ayuda a detener la pérdida de biodiversidad y a preservar los ecosistemas. Además, fomenta la seguridad económica y la estabilidad climática. Al día de hoy, solo están protegidos el 15 por ciento del suelo y el siete por ciento de los océanos. 

El suelo deberá reacomodar a las personas desplazadas por inundaciones, clima extremo y cambios climáticos que hacen que áreas actualmente pobladas se vuelvan inhabitables. Sabemos que el clima extremo que impulsa los desplazamientos seguirá empeorando. El Banco Mundial estima que, en las próximas décadas, más de 200 millones de personas deberán abandonar sus hogares debido al cambio climático en Asia, África y América Latina, y millones más se verán afectados en otras regiones. El desplazamiento y la migración involuntaria debido al clima acentuarán factores de estrés actuales, como conflictos, inseguridad alimentaria e hídrica, pobreza, y pérdida de sustento por presiones económicas y medioambientales (WGII del IPCC 2022). 

En otras palabras, los hogares y las comunidades marginados y desamparados sufrirán las peores consecuencias, que, con el aumento de la frecuencia, escalarán hasta convertirse en crisis humanitarias y de derechos humanos. Cualquier intento de controlar estas situaciones de forma humana tendrá implicaciones para los asentamientos y el suelo habitable que necesitan. Las reubicaciones requerirán mucho menos suelo que otras exigencias. Una estimación sugiere que el 0,14 por ciento del planeta (un poco menos que el área del Reino Unido) podría abastecer a 250 millones de migrantes climáticos (Leckie 2013). Sin embargo, la migración climática actual representa un cambio significativo en cómo y dónde las personas ocupan y usan el suelo, y garantizar y preservar los derechos humanos de los migrantes y refugiados debería ser una prioridad de los esfuerzos que se llevan a cabo. 

El suelo deberá producir suficientes alimentos para la creciente población mundial, incluso a pesar de que muchas regiones se enfrentan a una disminución del agua, un aumento de las pestes y una reducción de la fertilidad del suelo. El cambio climático enlenteció la productividad alimentaria que hubo en la última década, y los hechos extremos vinculados al clima expusieron a millones de personas a una gran inseguridad alimentaria e hídrica. 

El empeoramiento del clima aumentará estas amenazas que, una vez más, tienen un mayor impacto sobre las personas marginadas y desamparadas. La agricultura constituye la mayor presión humana sobre el paisaje mundial. Se estima que es el motivo por el que se despejó o convirtió el 70 por ciento de los pastizales, el 50 por ciento de la sabana, el 45 por ciento del bosque templado caducifolio y el 27 por ciento de los bosques tropicales del mundo. La agricultura también afecta a los cuerpos de agua por el drenaje y el escurrimiento de productos químicos, y porque emite gases de efecto invernadero y contaminantes a la atmósfera.

Los enfoques agrícolas basados en principios de diversidad y regeneración de los ecosistemas se prueban y aplican a mayor escala, cada vez más, ya que tienen el potencial de ayudar a combatir el cambio climático, incluso con el crecimiento poblacional a nivel mundial. Del mismo modo, hacer cambios sustanciales en el sistema internacional de alimentos que prioricen los derechos humanos y reduzcan el consumo de carne y el desperdicio de alimentos puede aumentar y profundizar la seguridad alimentaria. El ganado, y no el hombre, es el encargado de consumir una abrumadora parte de los cultivos mundiales. Más de un tercio de todas las calorías y más de la mitad de las proteínas de los cultivos agrícolas se destinan a alimentar animales, por lo que solo un porcentaje muy pequeño se usa para alimentar a la población. El consumo de carne está asociado con ser el causante del aumento en la deforestación de la selva amazónica, un bioma que representa el 40 por ciento de la selva del planeta y que es el hábitat del 25 por ciento de las especies terrestres que siguen con vida. 

El suelo será la fuente de energía, en especial para la energía solar, eólica y de biomasa, necesaria para reemplazar los combustibles fósiles que actualmente satisfacen cinco sextos de la demanda energética mundial. Si bien el impacto de la energía solar y eólica en el paisaje no puede negarse, estas fuentes pueden ubicarse en áreas de usos múltiples. Por ejemplo, las turbinas eólicas y los paneles solares pueden instalarse en tierras agrícolas o en techos o estacionamientos en espacios urbanos. A diferencia de la energía solar y la eólica, la energía de biomasa, que se produce mediante materia prima agrícola en la forma de electricidad (bioenergía) o combustible (biocombustible), debe ubicarse en suelo productivo para la agricultura. A cualquier escala significativa, la energía de biomasa compite con la producción de alimentos. 

Consideremos lo siguiente: los cultivos de todo el mundo equivalen a menos de un cuarto de hectárea por persona; sin embargo, ejercen una presión considerable sobre el agua, el suelo y otros recursos ecológicos. Incluso si se estableciera un proceso lo suficientemente eficiente para producir y usar biocombustible (en comparación con el enfoque de los EE.UU. de quemar etanol a base de maíz en vehículos de combustión convencional), se necesitaría más de media hectárea para abastecer un vehículo de un solo pasajero. Una planta eficiente de biocombustible difícilmente tendría mejores resultados, ya que necesitaría un tercio de hectárea per cápita para cultivar el combustible necesario a fin de generar la electricidad que usa un estadounidense promedio. Por el contrario, la energía solar fotovoltaica requiere menos del cinco por ciento de media hectárea por persona o, en el caso de toda la población de los EE.UU., un poco menos de seis millones de hectáreas. Esta no es una huella pequeña, pero cabe destacar que, solo en 2017, el suelo federal destinado a la producción de petróleo y gas en los Estados Unidos equivalió a más de 4,5 millones de hectáreas.

En pocas palabras, la energía de biomasa funcionaría solo para la típica persona que consume mucha energía, así como la carne funciona para la típica persona que come mucha carne. Les permitiría consumir mucho más suelo del que consumirían si simplemente usaran lo que produce el suelo. Por lo tanto, también posibilitaría que los consumidores excesivos de todo el mundo compitan aún más agresivamente con las personas de bajos recursos por los recursos que determinan la supervivencia, como los alimentos, el sustento y las viviendas. 

El suelo deberá “neutralizar” los excesos de carbono mediante la remoción del dióxido de carbono acumulado en la atmósfera. El suelo del planeta funciona como un receptor gigante de carbono; las plantas y el suelo absorben un cuarto del dióxido de carbono excedente en la atmósfera. (Otro cuarto de las emisiones excedentes lo absorben los océanos y la otra mitad se acumula en la atmósfera y es la que causa el calentamiento del planeta.) El deterioro de un ecosistema, debido a pestes, inundaciones e incendios producidos por el clima y la modificación humana deliberada, disminuye su capacidad de absorber carbono e incluso puede llegar a convertirlo en una fuente de emisiones. El cambio climático no controlado podría modificar las condiciones climáticas lo suficiente para llevar una región como la selva amazónica a tal punto de quiebre que pasaría de ser un receptor de carbono a una fuente de carbono. De hecho, ya se observa un deterioro de la resiliencia en esa área (Boulton, Lenton y Boers, 2022). 

A pesar de que el cambio climático es una amenaza para la absorción natural del carbono, sigue siendo una alternativa para reducir las emisiones o, al menos, una solución temporal que permite ganar tiempo, aliviar un poco la carga de la mitigación y, de forma gradual, aumentar los esfuerzos de reducción de emisiones en un período más largo. De hecho, la fe en estas estrategias de “emisiones negativas” superaron las expectativas razonables. Algunos analistas de futuras opciones de mitigación suponen que eliminar el dióxido de carbono de la atmósfera y almacenarlo en el suelo (en materia vegetal y del suelo) o bajo tierra (como dióxido de carbono comprimido transportado en cañerías) exigirán los mismos requisitos de suelo que la agricultura mundial actual.

Si se coopera a nivel mundial y se trabaja arduamente a fin de mantener las emisiones dentro del rango de 1,5 grados Celsius, sería posible y conveniente pensar las emisiones negativas como una posible solución para las situaciones que son imposibles de abordar de otras maneras (como las emisiones de metano de los cultivos de arroz en suelo anegado). En cambio, la mayoría de los países diagramaron un camino lento de esfuerzos de reducción a corto plazo y objetivos de reducción inadecuados a medio plazo. A estos pasos les asignaron nombres coherentes con las metas del Acuerdo de París, bajo la suposición de que mágicamente se materializará una amplia extensión de suelo para lograr las emisiones negativas cuando sea necesario. Esta estrategia es peligrosa. Seguir tras ella implica suponer que el suelo estará disponible y esperar que las actividades de emisiones negativas no se superpongan con las necesidades sociales, como la seguridad alimentaria.

Dado que el mundo minimizó el esfuerzo para controlar el cambio climático a corto plazo al punto necesario para alcanzar límites aceptables, esta estrategia podría dejarnos (y también a futuras generaciones) con una economía energética poco transformada. Equipada con una infraestructura energética que depende del combustible fósil, la sociedad se enfrentaría a una transición mucho más abrupta y disruptiva que la que buscaba evitar. Una vez que superara la cantidad de carbono disponible, se enfrentaría a una deuda de carbono que no se puede pagar y, en definitiva, sufriría más calentamiento que el que estaría preparada para enfrentar. 

EL USO Y LA ADMINISTRACIÓN SABIOS DEL SUELO SERÁN FUNDAMENTALES para el futuro. Las tecnologías, las prácticas y las políticas específicas son muy variadas y dependen del contexto, por lo que sería poco prudente intentar un trato equitativo en este caso. Sí se pueden hacer algunas observaciones generales. 

En primer lugar, muchos de los casos mencionados antes demuestran cómo la sociedad se apoya cada vez más en los recursos territoriales para lidiar con el cambio climático, a pesar de que el suelo mismo está cada vez bajo mayor presión por ese mismo factor. Las tensiones y concesiones esperadas ya están poniendo a prueba la capacidad de la sociedad de administrar con sabiduría el suelo en un clima más hostil, y los resultados son variados.

A medida que se acelera la pérdida de biodiversidad, se hace más evidente que una gran parte de las áreas ricas en biodiversidad restantes, incluidos más de un tercio de los bosques conservados y el 80 por ciento de la biodiversidad terrestre mundial, está en manos de grupos indígenas. Ellos lograron proteger la biodiversidad y el carbono acumulado en los bosques con más éxito que otros grupos, incluso durante décadas de extracción indiscriminada de recursos forestales en todo el mundo (Fa et al., 2020; Banco Mundial, 2019). Esta información debe volcarse en políticas que reconozcan legalmente y exijan el cumplimiento de derechos de tenencia del suelo con base en la comunidad, que coincidan con la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los derechos de los pueblos indígenas, de los que la mayoría de las comunidades indígenas todavía no gozan. Una vez que esto suceda, las comunidades indígenas tendrán más capacidad para proteger los recursos comunes mediante acciones colectivas apropiadas a nivel local. También tendrán mayores posibilidades de imponerse frente a actores externos que quieran extraer y deteriorar los recursos forestales, o frente a modelos impuestos de “conservación colonial” que pasan por alto los derechos de los grupos indígenas y son menos efectivos en sus objetivos de conservación ostensivos.

Ocurre lo mismo con diversas estrategias “de apropiación ecológica” recientes. A medida que se intensifica la presión sobre el suelo por la creciente demanda de la producción de bioenergía y alimentos, la capacidad de emisiones negativas y las áreas habitables, los grupos que tienen capital, flexibilidad, capacidad política y redes influyentes elaboran las políticas relevantes y, en definitiva, se benefician de ellas, incluso mediante la especulación. En consecuencia, aumenta el costo de los esfuerzos públicos para satisfacer las necesidades colectivas, lo que evita que las personas con el menor poder político o económico satisfagan necesidades básicas como las de alimentación, sustento y vivienda.

Los nuevos medios para obtener estos componentes del suelo y los ecosistemas e integrarlos a los procesos de mercado legitima formas nuevas de apropiación. Algunos son similares a derivados financieros y, de hecho, pueden recordarnos a los derivados financieros respaldados por hipotecas, cuyo colapso produjo una recesión mundial y amenazas mucho peores. Un ejemplo muy obvio es el programa de compensación de carbono (el Mecanismo de desarrollo limpio) que los países desarrollados usaron para cumplir los objetivos a los que estaban obligados legalmente por el Protocolo de Kioto. Ahora se sabe que este mecanismo se centraba en reducciones ficticias de los gases de efecto invernadero.

Por lo tanto, deberíamos tener cuidado con los mecanismos del mercado que simplemente fomentan suposiciones cuestionables sobre la equivalencia (entre fragmentos distintos de capital natural) o bienes fungibles (entre recursos naturales y alternativas técnicas), y sobre políticas que privilegian la idea del bienestar económico neto para justificar posibles damnificados por la distribución o daños causados a los derechos humanos y la justicia. 

A MEDIDA QUE LAS CARACTERÍSTICAS ESPECÍFICAS DEL SUELO y los ecosistemas, como la posibilidad de que sean un receptor de carbono o una alternativa para la producción de energía, se vuelven más preciadas y se integran cada vez más a la economía global, hay una pregunta fundamental que se vuelve más urgente: ¿quién controla el suelo y quién se beneficia de él? 

El presidente del Instituto Lincoln, George McCarthy, lo resumió esta primavera en el Foro de Periodistas de la organización sobre el cambio climático: “El conflicto por el suelo redunda en poder. Y en las disputas, el poder gana”. Si las estructuras de poder en la raíz del cambio climático siguen intactas, los mecanismos de mercado resultantes y las intervenciones mediante políticas no tendrán éxito en salvar el clima y empeorarán la pobreza y la marginalización mundial. Esto podría contribuir a lo que se está convirtiendo en la tercera injusticia del cambio climático: los más vulnerables no solo son los menos responsables y los más afectados, sino que también son las primeras víctimas de las políticas climáticas mal planificadas.

La sociedad mundial se enfrenta a riesgos existenciales. Estos riesgos, todos generados por nosotros mismos, son tanto ecológicos como sociales. En cuanto a lo ecológico, insistimos en cargar al planeta de una forma insostenible. Desde lo social, seguimos divididos por disparidades obscenas en aspectos de economía y poder que nos han hecho disfuncionales frente a una amenaza para toda la civilización.

Existen soluciones. Ahora queda en claro la importancia de reducir el consumo de carne a nivel mundial tanto por motivos de sostenibilidad medioambiental como de salud personal. Aprendimos a tener cuidado con los mecanismos de objetivos reducidos, como los mercados de bonos de carbono para proteger los bosques, dado que estos ecosistemas son muy complejos y proveen a distintas sociedades muchos servicios no monetizables o que no se comprenden o aprecian del todo. La experiencia nos demostró que las comunidades indígenas, en especial cuando se exige el cumplimiento legal de los derechos de tenencia, son muy eficientes en la administración de los bosques y la protección de la biodiversidad.

En cuanto al suelo muy alterado o deteriorado, las innovaciones en agricultura regenerativa y restauración de los ecosistemas brindan los medios para mantener o mejorar el carbono con base en el suelo. Además, los avances tecnológicos en el sector energético posibilitaron que rehabilitemos la economía mundial adicta al combustible fósil.

Lo más importante es que el mundo por fin logró un bienestar mundial general que, si se compartiera de forma más equitativa, permitiría que todos gozaran de una vida digna, libre de privaciones y subdesarrollo.

Contamos con las herramientas para salvarnos, pero depende de nosotros hacerlo.

Sivan Kartha es un científico sénior en el Instituto Medioambiental de Estocolmo y es codirector del Programa de Transiciones Equitativas. Fue parte del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático durante la elaboración del quinto y el sexto informe de evaluación, y es asesor en el programa climático del Instituto Lincoln.  

Imagen principal: Selva amazónica, Brasil. Crédito: Gustavo Frazao vía iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Referencias 

Boulton, Chris A., Timothy M. Lenton y Niklas Boers. 2022. “Pronounced Loss of Amazon Rainforest Resilience Since the Early 2000s”. Nature Climate Change 12 (271–278). 7 de marzo. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01287-8.

Fa, Julia E. y James EM Watson, Ian Leiper, Peter Potapov, Tom D. Evans, Neil D. Burgess, Zsolt Molnár, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Tom Duncan, Stephanie Wang, Beau J. Austin, Harry Jonas, Cathy J. Robinson, Pernilla Malmer, Kerstin K. Zander, Micha V. Jackson, Erle Ellis, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Stephen T. Garnett. 2020. “Importance of Indigenous Peoples’ Lands for the Conservation of Intact Forest Landscapes”. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 18(3): 135–140. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2148.

IPBES. 2019. “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services”. E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz y H. T. Ngo (eds.). Bonn, Alemania: IPBES Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673.

WGII del IPCC. 2022. “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.). Cambridge, Reino Unido, y Nueva York, NY: Cambridge University Press. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Nueva York, NY: Macmillan.

Leckie, Scott. 2013. “Finding Land Solutions to Climate Displacement: A Challenge Like Few Others”. Ginebra, Suiza: Displacement Solutions. https://unfccc.int/files/adaptation/groups_committees/loss_and_damage_executive_committee/application/pdf/ds-report-finding-land-solutions-to-climate-displacement.pdf.

Banco Mundial. 2019. “Securing Forest Tenure Rights for Rural Development: An Analytical Framework”. Program on Forests (PROFOR). Washington, DC: Banco Mundial. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/34183.

Zoning is often considered a timeless element of land policy and planning. And it is. Zoning originated in Asia more than three millennia ago. In those days, it was used to designate land uses behind city walls or to separate people by caste. The practice was adopted more recently in the United States to pursue similar ends. It is now one of the biggest impediments to sustainability in U.S. cities in the 21st century.

I’ve made my feelings about hyperlocal land control known for many years. A decade ago, on a panel with Nic Retsinas, then director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, I opined that home rule and local land use controls were “dinosaurs” that made it almost impossible to coordinate regional transportation planning and affordable housing efforts. Nic reminded me and the audience that powerful political and economic forces stood firmly in the way of land policy reform. And he noted that dinosaurs lasted for millions of years before becoming extinct—because of a random asteroid colliding with Earth, not natural selection.

But now, something almost as rare as a planet-changing asteroid is afoot in the world of land policy—bipartisan agreement. Numerous blue, red, and purple states have passed or are contemplating efforts to preempt local zoning so they can advance critical policy objectives. Why the sudden shift? Because many policy makers now understand that the national affordable housing crisis cannot be addressed without structural changes to the rules of the game. Other policy makers know that we cannot address one of the ugliest manifestations of zoning—spatial segregation by race and class—without aggressive affirmative action.

Although we are seeing bipartisan agreement on the need for reform, the motivations of policy makers are quite different. Advocates from the right argue that the housing crisis is an artifact of overregulation that stifles housing production. These critics believe zoning reform will unleash market forces that will confront the housing crisis by accelerating new production. Advocates from the left argue that we cannot build affordable housing in places we need it most because of land policies that have effectively excluded people based on race and income for generations, such as minimum lot sizes and bans on multifamily housing. Zoning reform will make it possible, they say, to build affordable housing in “high opportunity” places with good schools and decent jobs.

State preemption of local zoning is not new. In 1969, Massachusetts passed Chapter 40B, a measure that allows the state to override local zoning and approve mixed-income, multifamily developments in jurisdictions with little affordable housing. Although it has helped to promote some affordable housing development in some affluent suburbs, it was not a game changer, and few other states considered following suit, until very recently.

Now, some 10 states are ready to preempt local zoning to permit development of multiple housing units on lots that are currently zoned for single-family homes. These include the right to add accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to single-family lots in Connecticut, Nebraska, Utah, Oregon, Maryland, California, and Washington; approving “middle housing,” two- to four-family townhomes, on lots zoned for single families in Virginia, Utah, Nebraska, Washington, and Maryland; or complete preemption of local government efforts to prohibit multifamily housing development on single-family lots in Oregon, California, Virginia, Maine, and Washington. Massachusetts and California also recently mandated upzoning in “transit-rich” communities. Clearly, local control over land use is no longer sacrosanct.

Although zoning practice is thousands of years old, in the United States it is less than a century old, with a few exceptions. States began granting municipalities the power to dictate land uses in the 1920s, based on the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act drafted by the Department of Commerce in 1923. But what states giveth, states can taketh away. It is sometimes necessary for higher levels of government to supersede the decisions of lower levels of government to promote general welfare or address negative externalities that are artifacts of uncoordinated actions at lower levels. Too often, state efforts to override local governments are misguided; for example, when state policy makers curry favor from voters by imposing property tax limits. In the case of zoning, the need for state action is clearly defensible.

We should celebrate the fact that we are moving in the right direction—mustering the political will to take on a challenge that was, until very recently, considered impossible. But we still know less about zoning than we should. Each state, and often individual jurisdictions in a state, developed its own zoning conventions, which makes it extremely difficult to compare zoning practices among them. It also makes it almost impossible to understand the implications of zoning decisions on land values, development patterns, or how zoning reform might address big challenges like the housing crisis, spatial inequality, or urban sprawl. This too is changing.

Last year, a small team of visionaries at Cornell Law School, led by Professor Sara Bronin, produced the first Zoning Atlas for the State of Connecticut. Using spreadsheets, maps, and geographic information systems, the team documented, with impressive granularity, residential zoning practices in 180 jurisdictions with 2,622 zoning districts. Incredibly, this required reviewing more than 30,000 pages of text describing zoning practices—in one state!

This herculean task apparently was not a big enough challenge for this plucky band of researchers. The Cornell team recently launched an effort to build a National Zoning Atlas. Now, with a field-tested methodology for creating the Zoning Atlas in Connecticut, they have set out to crowdsource zoning data from the rest of the country using the same methods. So far, self-organized teams in 12 states are participating. When they succeed at building the national atlas—and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will do all it can to make sure that happens—a new era of land policy scholarship will arrive. Debates about the costs, benefits, and consequences of zoning reform will be informed by real data.

Zoning reform alone is not sufficient to solve the national housing crisis. But it is necessary. And we need to know a lot more about current zoning practices, and the potential benefits of improved zoning practice, to address the ills generated by decades of bad practice. A century of decentralized and isolated local control of land produced unacceptable levels of racial and economic segregation, urban sprawl that contributed to the climate crisis, and an almost unassailable affordable housing crisis. With the unprecedented alignment of political will with new tools and knowledge, possible solutions to this triple threat are closer than they have ever been.

George W. McCarthy is president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: The interactive Connecticut Zoning Atlas is the first stage of a national effort to document zoning across the United States. Credit: National Zoning Atlas.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation is available as a Land Matters podcast. 

Jesse Arreguín was elected mayor of Berkeley, California, in 2016, becoming the first Latino to hold the office and, at 32, the youngest mayor in a century. The son and grandson of farmworkers, Arreguín grew up in San Francisco. At nine, he helped lead efforts to name a city street after activist Cesar Chavez, beginning a lifelong commitment to social justice.  

After Arreguín graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, he stayed in the city, serving on boards including the Housing Advisory Commission, Rent Stabilization Board, Zoning Adjustments Board, Planning Commission, and City Council. As mayor, Arreguín—who is also president of the Association of Bay Area Governments—has prioritized affordable housing, infrastructure, and education. He recently met with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint at City Hall to talk about this city of 125,000, with a focus on housing and the task of building more of it. Fittingly, the sounds of construction could be heard outside the fifth-floor office suite. 

ANTHONY FLINT: It seems like Berkeley has become a national symbol of the YIMBY/NIMBY [Yes in My Back Yard/Not in My Back Yard] divide. What should developers be contributing to increase supply, provide different housing options, and increase density at appropriate locations? 

JESSE ARREGUÍN: I think a lot needs to be done by government, and we’re seeing a lot of leadership being demonstrated by our governor, by the state legislature, by our attorney general, who established a housing strike force to enforce state housing laws, and by regional and local government. In Berkeley, over the past several years, we have taken significant steps to pass laws to streamline production and encourage a variety of different housing options in our community. 

We’ve also made a commitment that we are going to end exclusionary zoning. I think part of the reason why Berkeley is a symbol of the debate happening in cities throughout the country is because Berkeley is the birthplace of exclusionary zoning. In 1916, the city adopted its first zoning ordinance to zone the neighborhoods in the Elm-wood District as single-family to prevent the construction of a dance hall. Not surprisingly, many people who would frequent that dance hall would predominantly be people of color. Sadly, single-family zoning was founded on the foundation of racial exclusion. 

My perspective on zoning, on housing issues, has evolved over the years, because the crisis in Berkeley and in California has worsened significantly in the past five years. We have increasing numbers of people who are experiencing homelessness, tent encampments on our streets, working families who can’t afford to live in the community they work in, students who can’t afford to live in the community they go to school in. The status quo is not working, and we need to take bold action. 

I think developers are eager to see leadership on the part of government. We need to meet them at the middle and we have to do what we can to make it easier for them to build. At the same time, we have to make sure that they are providing community benefits while we are seeing market-rate construction, particularly in communities where we’ve seen significant amounts of displacement and gentrification. We have historically Black neighborhoods where we’re seeing homes sell at $2 million. Our Black population has declined from 20 percent in 1970 to seven percent now. I think that is a direct result of the decisions that government made to not build housing, and of the astronomical cost of housing in Berkeley. 

AF: Let’s talk about gentrification and real estate speculation, a problem in many cities. Los Angeles recently started a program of land banking parcels near transit stations. Is that the kind of thing that is going to be necessary when you’re obviously in white-hot market conditions here? 

JA: I think so, and we are prioritizing public land for affordable housing. We’ve converted parking lots to affordable housing projects. We have one being constructed right up the street, 140 units of affordable housing and permanent supportive housing—the largest project we’ve ever built for housing the homeless. We need to prioritize public land for public good. There’s no question about that. 

I do agree we need to look at land banking. We need to provide money so nonprofit developers can buy parcels to keep them permanently affordable. We need to look at how we can support land trusts, not just buying properties but buying buildings to keep them permanently affordable. That is part of Berkeley’s housing strategy. It’s not just building new construction, but also the preservation of existing naturally occurring affordable housing. I think we need to focus on the three P’s, and I say this often: production of new housing, preservation of existing naturally occurring affordable housing, and protection of existing residents from displacement. 

AF: How might a vacancy tax, similar to what we see in San Francisco and Oakland, address this issue of the burgeoning value of land? 

JA: We actually recently placed on the ballot a residential vacancy tax, which is a little bit different from Oakland’s; it doesn’t focus on vacant parcels, but it’s focused on vacant homes and vacant residential units. There are some who have said, “Well, we have thousands of vacant units, and therefore, we don’t need to build more housing.” That’s absurd. We need to build housing, and we also need to put housing that is off the market back on the market. 

The more that we can address actions by speculators and by scofflaws—I would characterize people who keep properties blighted and vacant for many years as scofflaws—it will address the artificial constraining of the market and will put more units back on the market. We spent a lot of time crafting this vacancy tax and really thought through the situations in which units could be vacant legitimately. The focus is not on small property owners but on owners of large rental properties, because part of what we are seeing is, frankly, speculation of the market. 

We hope, at some point, we don’t have to charge a tax because all the housing is being rented or is being used. That’s the goal of the vacancy tax, not to penalize but to incentivize owners of multifamily properties to use the properties for their intended purpose. I just have to say once again that this is not a panacea, this is not the solution to the housing crisis, and that we need to build new housing. What we have is a crisis that is decades in the making through deliberate actions on the part of government, through racial segregation or redlining, through fierce resistance to building housing, and through policies that have constrained the production of housing. 

AF: As a hub of innovation, Berkeley has a thriving economy. Do you believe it’s going to be possible for more workers in Berkeley to be able to live in Berkeley, or is there a built-in imbalance that you just have to manage and come to terms with? 

JA: I think it’s possible . . . but that’s going to require that we build thousands and thousands of units of housing, that we prioritize building housing around our transit stations, that we look at upzoning low-density commercial neighborhoods, that we look at building multifamily housing in residential neighborhoods. Every part of our city needs to meet its responsibility to create more housing. No part of our community can be walled off to new people living here. 

I really do think that that gets to the core of who we are, who we say we are as a city. Are we a city of equity and inclusivity? If we are, then we need to welcome new people living in our community. We create those opportunities for people to live here. People who previously lived here and were displaced, people who work here but can’t afford to live here, and obviously, there’s a climate benefit we can give people to not have to drive an hour, two hours to get to Berkeley. 

That reduces those cars on the road, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and helps us mitigate the impacts of climate change, and building dense, transit-oriented development is a critical part of taking bold climate action. Our land use policies and our actions to encourage more dense housing are really critical climate action strategies. 

AF: Could you talk about the importance of bicycle and pedestrian safety in your view of how the city functions and how Berkeley is doing in that regard? 

JA: Because we have such high numbers of people who bike to work and walk and use alternative modes of transportation, we need to make it safer and easier for people to get around town. Sadly, we’ve seen an increasing number of collisions between cars and bicyclists, and pedestrians. Like many communities, we’ve adopted a vision zero policy that’s focused on reducing traffic injuries and fatalities. We are looking at how we can redesign and reconstruct our streets to make them safer for people who walk and bike. . . . Then, obviously, being the home of the University of California, we have a lot of young people who are constantly walking, biking around, and we need to make it safer for students and for our residents to get out of their cars and to choose non–carbon intensive modes of mobility. 

AF: On climate, what else can Berkeley do? How is this region addressing the climate crisis? 

JA: I think the best way for Berkeley to address the climate crisis is through recognizing, one, it’s not a crisis, it’s an emergency—and we see the real material effects of it here in California. We’ve had some of the most devastating wildfires in California history over the last five years, [and] Berkeley is not immune to the threat of wildfire. That’s a pretty telltale sign that the climate emergency is here, it’s not going away, and we have to recognize that we need to take bold action. 

I’m proud that Berkeley has really been a leader in combating climate change. We were one of the first cities to adopt a climate action plan. Obviously, building dense infill housing is a critical part of that. We do need to promote more electric mobility, whether it’s through micro-mobility or through converting heavy-duty and light-duty vehicles to electric, and California’s really been a leader at that. While there are very ambitious targets that the state has set to transition our vehicle fleet to electric, we don’t have the infrastructure to support that yet. We hope with the new federal bipartisan infrastructure law and the climate law that was just passed that there’ll be significantly more resources available that we can leverage to expand that infrastructure in California. 

Electrifying our buildings is important too, and Berkeley was the first city in California to adopt the ban on natural gas and require that newly constructed buildings be all electric. We’re also looking at how we can get existing buildings to be electric, which is much tougher. . . . All those things are important, but we also have to adapt to climate change . . . whether it’s how we address wildfire risk or sea-level rise. Berkeley’s along the San Francisco Bay. We know that parts of our city, unless we do something, are going to see significant flooding and inundation. 

That’s where I think the regional approach comes in. These [issues] can’t be solved by one city. A lot of work’s been done at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments—our regional planning agency and council of governments—to bring government agencies together to explore strategies. I think that’s an area where regionalism and regional government’s going to make a difference. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, contributing editor to Land Lines, and host of the Land Matters podcast. 

SINCE THE WORLD FIRST NEGOTIATED A CLIMATE TREATY in 1992, three precious decades have ticked by while we’ve allowed a climate challenge to evolve into a climate crisis. The latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released this spring, eschewed the moderate language of the staid scientific body, making it clear that society faces an urgent crisis and must take action. That report represents “a litany of broken climate promises,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. “It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.” 

At last year’s UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, the nations of the world doubled the emissions reductions they had previously promised for this decade, but we actually need a fivefold enhancement of those goals. As things stand now, we can emit only about 300 billion tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) before global temperatures are expected to exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius identified in the Paris Agreement as the upper limit of acceptable warming. If countries fail to cut emissions far beyond what they’ve promised so far, the world will exceed that 300 billion tons within this decade. That will lead us toward chaos far greater than the unparalleled storms, droughts, wildfires, and displacements the globe is already experiencing. 

It’s well within our capabilities to dramatically cut emissions. We know which renewable energy technologies and energy-efficient practices we need to deploy widely, we know that protecting ecosystems and other species supports our own ability to thrive, and we’re equally aware of the exceedingly wasteful and fossil fuel–intensive agricultural practices and land-intensive diets that we need to alter. 

As it turns out, land figures prominently in many of our most promising climate solutions, and is thus central to many of the tensions and trade-offs we must now deftly navigate. Having pushed the clock to the limit, we must find a way to avoid moving forward haphazardly, running roughshod over fundamental ecological and human needs in a mad dash for “climate-friendly” solutions. Stewarding land wisely while we face an increasingly hostile climate will prove critical to securing a livable future. 

EVEN WHILE LAND IS INCREASINGLY STRESSED BY A CHANGING CLIMATE, it will face rising and conflicting demands from human society in our pursuit of both climate solutions and sanctuary from a more hostile climate. Let’s lay out the main aspects of this contested landscape. 

Land will be required to sustain species and ecosystems that are increasingly threatened by climate change to the point of extinction or collapse. Earth is currently undergoing its sixth mass extinction since the Cambrian explosion half a billion years ago. Writing of the evolutionary tree of life, Elizabeth Kolbert, a scholar of such extinctions, explains: “During a mass extinction, vast swathes of the tree are cut short, as if attacked by crazed, axe-wielding madmen” (Kolbert 2014). Even as a metaphor, this may be an understatement, as we now also have bulldozers, big dams, and other even less judicious means of directly appropriating land from natural ecosystems. 

As human-caused climate change accelerates, it will overtake our appropriation of land as the top driver of the ongoing extinction (IPCC WGII 2022). A report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found that more than a million species are threatened with extinction, many in the next few decades (IPBES 2019). Sustaining the natural ecosystems on which human survival depends—from the mountainous snowpack from which rivers run year-round to the rich soils in which our food grows to the coral reefs that sustain coastal fisheries—ultimately will rest on our ability to reduce and reverse our appropriation and fragmentation of natural habitat, all while we stop fueling climate change. 

As a critical first step, nearly 100 countries comprising the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People have called for a global 30×30 deal to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. This ambitious effort aims to halt biodiversity loss and preserve ecosystems, with the added benefits of supporting economic security and a stable climate. Today, only about 15 percent of our land and 7 percent of our oceans is protected. 

Land will be required to resettle people displaced by flooding, extreme weather, and climatic shifts that render currently inhabited areas no longer hospitable. We know the climate and weather extremes that are already driving displacement will escalate. The World Bank estimates that more than 200 million people will be forced from their homes by climate change in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the next few decades, and millions more will be affected in other regions. This climate-induced dislocation and involuntary migration will amplify existing stressors such as conflict, food and water insecurity, poverty, and loss of livelihoods from economic or environmental pressures (IPCC WGII 2022). 

In other words, marginalized and disempowered households and communities will invariably suffer the worst consequences, which will with rising frequency rise to the level of humanitarian and human rights crises. Any effort to manage these situations humanely will have implications for human settlements and the habitable land that they require. Resettlement will require far less land than other demands—one estimate suggests 0.14 percent of the planet (somewhat less than the area of the United Kingdom) could absorb 250 million climate migrants (Leckie 2013). Yet the mass climate migration already underway represents a significant shift in how and where people occupy and use land, and should be a priority for efforts to secure and preserve human rights for migrants and refugees. 

Land will be required to feed our expanding global population, even as some regions face declines in water, increases in pests, and diminishing soil fertility. Climate change has slowed the growth in food productivity that was seen over the last decade, and climate-related extreme events have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and undermined water security. 

A worsening climate will heighten these threats—which are, once again, cruelly directed at those who are marginalized and disempowered. Agriculture constitutes the primary human pressure on the global landscape; estimates suggest that it has already led to the clearing or conversion of 70 percent of global grassland, 50 percent of savanna, 45 percent of the temperate deciduous forest, and 27 percent of tropical forests. Agriculture also affects water bodies through drainage and chemical runoff, and emits greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere. 

Agricultural approaches founded on principles of biodiversity and ecosystem regeneration are being increasingly proven and scaled, and have the potential to help combat climate change, even with a growing global population. Likewise, major changes to our global food system that prioritize human rights, and that reduce meat consumption and food waste, can dramatically expand and deepen food security. A staggering share of global plant crops is eaten by livestock rather than people. More than one-third of all calories and more than one-half of all protein from agricultural crops goes to feed animals, with only a small share ultimately becoming nourishment for people. The consumption of meat is specifically charged with causing the continuing spike in deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, a biome that comprises 40 percent of the world’s rainforest and serves as home to 25 percent of its remaining terrestrial species. 

Land will be called on as a site for the energy sources—primarily solar power, wind power, and biopower—needed to replace the fossil fuels that now meet five-sixths of global energy demand. Solar and wind power, while they have undeniable impacts on the landscape, can be situated in areas suited for multiple uses; for example, wind turbines and solar panels can be sited on farmland or in urban spaces like rooftops and parking lots. Unlike solar and wind power, bioenergy—which is produced using agricultural feedstocks, in the form of either electricity (biopower) or fuels (biofuels)—must be sited on agriculturally productive land. At any significant scale, bioenergy competes with food production. 

Consider the following: total cropland globally amounts to less than half an acre per person, yet it already puts considerable pressure on water, soil, and other ecological resources. Even if we posit a quite efficient process for producing and using biofuel (in contrast to the U.S. approach of burning corn-based ethanol in conventional combustion vehicles), more than 1.2 acres would be needed to keep a single passenger vehicle fueled. An efficient biopower plant would fare hardly any better, claiming roughly 0.8 acre per capita to grow the fuel needed to generate the electricity used by the average United States resident. By contrast, solar photovoltaics require less than 5 percent of one acre per person or, for the whole U.S. population, a bit less than 15 million acres. This is not a trivial footprint, but it’s worth noting that in 2017 alone, federal land leases offered for oil and gas production in the United States amounted to more than 12 million acres. 

To put it plainly, bioenergy would function for the typical high-energy consumer just as meat functions for the typical high-meat consumer—it would allow them to consume vastly more land than they would if they simply used that land’s output directly. By extension, it would also enable the world’s over-consumers to compete even more ruthlessly with the world’s poor for the resources that underpin survival, like food, livelihoods, and homes. 

Land will be called upon to “negate” our carbon excesses by removing accumulated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The world’s lands serve as an enormous carbon sink, with plants and soil absorbing about a quarter of our excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (Another quarter of our excess carbon emissions is absorbed by the oceans; the remaining one-half accumulates in the atmosphere and is responsible for warming the planet.) Deterioration of an ecosystem—such as by climate-induced pests, drought, fire, and deliberate human modification—diminishes its capacity to absorb carbon, and may even convert it into a source of carbon dioxide emissions. Unchecked climate change could disrupt climatic conditions enough to send a region like the Amazon rainforest across such a tipping point—converting it from a carbon sink to a carbon source—and in fact, just such a weakening of resilience is already being observed there (Boulton, Lenton, and Boers 2022). 

Despite the threats that climate change poses to natural carbon absorption, it is increasingly held out as an alternative to reducing our own emissions, or at least as a crafty expedient whereby we can buy some time, relax the mitigation burden a bit, and more gradually ramp up our emissions reduction efforts over a longer timeframe. Indeed, the hopes for these “negative emissions” strategies have grown beyond reasonable expectations. 

Some analysts of future mitigation options assume the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storage of it on the land (in the form of plant or soil matter) or underground (as compressed carbon dioxide transported in pipelines) will grow to a scale comparable in land requirements to current global agriculture. 

If we cooperated globally and worked strenuously to keep emissions within the 1.5-degree Celsius budget, viewing negative emissions as a possible solution for situations that were virtually impossible to address any other way (such as methane emissions from wetland rice cultivation) would be feasible and sensible. But instead, most countries have charted a slow pace of reduction efforts for the near term and inadequate reduction targets for the medium term; they have labeled these steps consistent with the Paris goals, presupposing a vast reserve of land will wondrously materialize for negative emissions duty when we need it. This is a reckless strategy. Pursuing it further means banking on land being available and hoping that negative emissions activities won’t conflict with social needs such as food security.  

Because the world has willfully downplayed the near-term effort needed to keep climate change within manageable bounds, such a strategy could leave us—and future generations—stranded with an insufficiently transformed energy economy. Saddled with a fossil fuel–dependent energy infrastructure, society would face a much more abrupt and disruptive transition than the one it had sought to avoid. Having exceeded its available carbon budget, it would face a carbon debt that cannot be repaid, and ultimately see much greater warming than it had prepared for. 

WISE LAND USE AND STEWARDSHIP WILL PROVE CRITICAL to navigating our future. The specific technologies, practices, and policies are enormously varied and context specific, so it would be foolish to attempt a fair treatment here. But a few broad observations are warranted. 

First, several cases touched on above illustrate how society is increasingly relying on land resources to help deal with climate change, even while land is itself under rising stresses from climate change. The expected tensions and trade-offs are already testing society’s capacity for wise land stewardship in a more hostile climate, with mixed results. 

As biodiversity loss accelerates, there is increasing recognition that a large share of remaining biodiversity-rich areas—including more than one-third of intact forests and 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity—is in the hands of indigenous groups. These stewards have protected both biodiversity and forest carbon more successfully than others, even during decades of rapacious extraction of global forest resources (Fa et al. 2020; World Bank 2019). This understanding must now be translated into policies that legally recognize and actively enforce community-based land tenure rights consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which most indigenous communities do not yet enjoy. Where that is done, indigenous communities will be better able to protect common resources through locally appropriate collective action. They will also be better able to resist outside actors who are intent on either extracting and degrading forest resources or on imposing “fortress conservation” models that disregard indigenous rights and are less effective in their ostensible conservation aims. 

Much the same lesson applies to a range of emerging “green grab” strategies. As pressure on land is intensified by growing demand for bioenergy and food production, negative emissions capacity, and habitable areas, those who have capital, flexibility, political savvy, and powerful networks are crafting the relevant policies and ultimately benefiting from them, including through speculation. Consequently, the cost of public efforts to meet collective needs escalates, preventing people with the least political or economic power from meeting basic needs like food, livelihood, and home. New ways of abstracting these components of land and ecosystems and integrating them into distantly removed market processes are legitimizing new forms of appropriation. Some of them are akin to financial derivatives, and indeed can be disconcertingly reminiscent of the mortgage-backed financial derivatives, the collapse of which brought on a global recession and threatened much worse. One particularly glaring example is the carbon offset program (the Clean Development Mechanism) that developed countries have used to meet their legally binding targets under the Kyoto Protocol. This mechanism is now understood to have been based overwhelmingly on fictitious greenhouse gas reductions. 

We should thus be wary about market mechanisms that simply carry forward questionable assumptions of equivalence (among distinct bits of natural capital) or of fungibility (between natural resources and technical alternatives), and about policy regimes that privilege the idea of net economic welfare to rationalize probable casualties of distribution or outright injuries to human rights and justice. 

AS SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS OF LAND and ecosystems—such as their promise as a carbon sink or suitability for energy production—become more highly valued and more tightly integrated into the global economy, a fundamental question becomes only more pressing: who controls land and who benefits from it? 

Lincoln Institute President George McCarthy put it succinctly at the organization’s Journalists Forum on climate change this spring: “Land contention redounds to power. And in disputes, power wins.” If the very power structures at the root of climate change are left intact, then the resulting market mechanisms and policy interventions will fail to save the climate while worsening the global scourge of poverty and marginalization. In doing so, they can contribute to what is becoming the third injustice of climate change: the most vulnerable are not only the least responsible for and most affected by climate change, but also the frontline victims of ill-conceived climate policies. 

Our global society is confronting risks of an existential magnitude. These risks—all of our own making—are equal parts ecological and social. Ecologically, we persist in placing insupportable burdens on our planet. Socially, we remain riven by obscene disparities in wealth and power that have rendered us dysfunctional in the face of a civilizational threat. Solutions do exist. The importance of shifting to a less meat-intensive global diet for reasons of environmental sustainability—as well as personal health—is now clear. We have learned to be wary of narrowly focused mechanisms like carbon markets for protecting forests, given how complex these ecosystems are and how they provide multiple services to diverse human societies, not all of which are monetizable or even fully understood and appreciated. 

Experience has shown us that indigenous communities, especially once they have legally enforced tenure rights, do a highly effective job managing forests and protecting biodiversity. On already significantly altered or degraded land, innovations in regenerative agriculture and ecosystem restoration are providing a means to maintain or enhance land-based carbon. And technological advances in the energy sector have made it possible for us to rehabilitate our fossil fuel–addicted global economy. 

Perhaps most important, the world has finally reached a level of aggregate global welfare that—if it were shared more equitably—would make possible a dignified life for all, free from the privations of underdevelopment. We have the tools to save ourselves, but it remains up to us to actually do so. 

Sivan Kartha is a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and codirector of its Equitable Transitions Program. He served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change during the preparation of its Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports, and serves as an advisor to the Lincoln Institute climate program.  

Lead image: Amazon rainforest, Brazil. Credit: Gustavo Frazao via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

REFERENCES 

Boulton, Chris A., Timothy M. Lenton, and Niklas Boers. 2022. “Pronounced Loss of Amazon Rainforest Resilience Since the Early 2000s.” Nature Climate Change 12 (271–278). March 7. 

Fa, Julia E., and James EM Watson, Ian Leiper, Peter Potapov, Tom D. Evans, Neil D. Burgess, Zsolt Molnár, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Tom Duncan, Stephanie Wang, Beau J. Austin, Harry Jonas, Cathy J. Robinson, Pernilla Malmer, Kerstin K. Zander, Micha V. Jackson, Erle Ellis, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Stephen T. Garnett. 2020. “Importance of Indigenous Peoples’ Lands for the Conservation of Intact Forest Landscapes.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 18(3): 135–140. 

IPBES. 2019. “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H. T. Ngo (eds.). Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat. 

IPCC WGII. 2022. “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.). Cambridge, UK, and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 

Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York, NY: Macmillan.  

Leckie, Scott. 2013. “Finding Land Solutions to Climate Displacement: A Challenge Like Few Others.” Geneva, Switzerland: Displacement Solutions. 

World Bank. 2019. “Securing Forest Tenure Rights for Rural Development: An Analytical Framework.” Program on Forests (PROFOR). Washington, DC: World Bank. 

Even though she’s expecting it, Frances Acuña screens my call. “I’ve been getting a lot of people trying to buy my house,” she explains, after calling me right back. “Sometimes I get five letters in the mail. Five, six, seven, ten calls.”  

The Dove Springs neighborhood in southeast Austin, Texas, where Acuña has lived for 25 years, is just 15 minutes from downtown and right on the edge of the latest wave of gentrification. A decade ago, she says, outsiders wanted no part of the working-class community of modest ranch homes: “To them it was a ghetto area.”  

Then in 2013, the waters of nearby Onion Creek—burdened by nearly 10 inches of rain in a single day—poured into the streets. Five residents died, and more than 500 homes were flooded. Two years later, another historic flood swept in. The City of Austin, which had already begun to buy out and remove homes from this low-lying area with the help of federal grants, accelerated its efforts, eventually acquiring and demolishing more than 800 homes. 

Property acquired through FEMA-funded home buyout programs is legally required to remain “open in perpetuity,” allowing it to safely flood in the future. In this case, the city transformed hundreds of acres of land left behind near Dove Springs into a park. The area now boasts attractive amenities—a playground, a dog park, walking trails, and shady places to rest. These urban improvements, explicitly driven by climate adaptation policy, have made the area even more appealing to the city’s recent influx of newcomers. (With an estimated 180 new arrivals per day in 2020, Austin ranks among the country’s fastest-growing metro areas.) 

But for Acuña, the park is a painful reminder of neighbors who suffered losses—and of the fact that even well-intentioned efforts to move people out of harm’s way can themselves cause harm. “To me, it’s not a happy place to go to,” Acuña says. “Maybe [new residents] don’t even know, because all they see is green space.”  

As floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters escalate under the influence of climate change, experts from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to the U.S. Government Accountability Office now widely recommend that municipalities move homes and infrastructure out of hazard-prone areas to save lives and money. But how can that kind of relocation occur in a way that avoids gentrification and displacement, honors the culture and history of the original residents, encourages a shift from reactive to proactive planning, and ensures that those who relocate can find safe, affordable places to live? 

These are the kinds of questions Acuña and a growing web of other community leaders, planners, researchers, agency officials, and policy makers are coming together to address as part of the national Climigration Network. 

Established in 2016 by the Consensus Building Institute, the Climigration Network aims to be a central source of information and support for U.S. communities experiencing or considering relocation due to climate risks. More than 40 percent of U.S. residents, some 132 million people, live in a county that was struck by climate-related extreme weather in 2021 (Kaplan and Tran 2022). Population growth in wildfire-prone areas doubled between 1990 and 2010, and continues to rise. And FEMA counts 13 million Americans living in the 100-year flood zone, while at least one prominent study says the figure is closer to 41 million (Wing et al. 2018). 

The United Nations, the World Bank, and scholars alike recognize that most climate-driven migration occurs within national borders, not across them. But in the United States, conversations about the systems needed to support climate migration have been slow to coalesce, even as climate change bears down on riverine, coastal, and other vulnerable regions. A White House report on the issue released last year marked, by its own estimation, “the first time the U.S. government is officially reporting on the link between climate change and migration” (White House 2021). 

Currently, most climate-related relocation in the United States happens the way it unfolded around Dove Springs. After a disaster strikes, federal recovery money, usually through FEMA or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is funneled to states and municipalities to buy out damaged homes. Individual homeowners sell their homes at prestorm market value to the government and move elsewhere. According to the NRDC, FEMA has funded more than 40,000 buyouts in 49 states since the 1980s.  

Yet, despite federal buyout programs dating back decades, no official set of best practices or standards exists. Wait times for buyouts take five years on average. Costs for fixes and temporary housing stack up in the interim. Guidance for homeowners on navigating the buyout process is confusing or nonexistent, and relocation policies and funding focus on the individual, not on neighborhoods or communities that want to stay together. 

At the local level, communities considering relocation face a range of social and financial barriers. Municipalities don’t tend to encourage relocation, because they don’t want to lose population or tax revenue. And residents—especially those reeling from a crisis—often lack the capacity and resources to find a new, safe place to live, even if they are willing to leave. 

Despite those obstacles, some small towns have designed new neighborhoods and even entire new towns to relocate to. In the 1970s, a couple of Midwestern villages experiencing chronic flooding—Niobrara, Nebraska, and Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin—initiated some of the earliest community relocation projects. In the 1990s, Pattonsburg, Missouri, and Valmeyer, Illinois, among others, relocated to higher ground following the Great Flood of 1993 along the Mississippi River. As climate impacts escalate, towns and neighborhoods from the Carolinas to Alaska are developing similar plans. But knowledge sharing is rare, as is coordination that could help other communities to refine or even reimagine the process. 

The Climigration Network, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute and others, is connecting climate-affected communities with one another and with professionals poised to help. One of its early concerns was how to introduce the concept of “managed retreat” as an adaptation option for communities facing substantial risk. Meant to convey strategic moves away from disaster-prone areas, the term had become common in the policy discussions that had followed hurricanes and major floods over the previous decade. Should New York City consider managed retreat from its coastline, instead of costly and potentially ineffective seawalls, after Superstorm Sandy? Should Houston, after Hurricane Harvey? Policy makers, planners, and researchers discussed these questions at length, often without input from the affected communities, which found the term and the concept alienating. 

As the Climigration Network began its work, it was immediately obvious that a different kind of conversation was needed, says its director, Kristin Marcell. With funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the network commissioned a Black and Indigenous–led creative team whose members hailed from or had worked with communities affected by the climate crisis. The team, helmed by Scott Shigeoka and Mychal Estrada, proposed reframing the discussion around the actual issues facing towns and neighborhoods that might relocate. Project leaders invited more than 40 frontline leaders to share their post-disaster experiences, and the network compensated them for that work. The result was a set of real-world insights now compiled in a guidebook for discussing climate relocation. 

One clear takeaway: “managed retreat” suffers from more than bad branding. The word “managed,” community leaders made clear to the researchers, calls to mind paternalistic, top-down government programs. In Black and brown communities, it conjures not-so-distant memories of forced removal—the slave trade, the Trail of Tears, internment camps, redlining. And the concept of “retreat” left a lot of questions unanswered. 

“It creates a negative narrative that people are fleeing from something, instead of working toward something else,” the researchers wrote in the guidebook. “The word communicates what we should do, but doesn’t communicate where to go or how to do it” (Climigration Network 2021). 

The Climigration Network is now drawing on those insights in conversations with three community-based organizations in the Midwest, Gulf Coast, and Caribbean that are supporting locals actively weighing adaptation strategies including relocation. Partners in these conversations include the Anthropocene Alliance, a coalition of flood and other disaster survivors across the United States, and Buy-In Community Planning, a nonprofit working to improve home buyout processes. 

Network members have started using more empowering alternatives to “managed retreat,” including “community-led relocation” and “supported relocation.” But the goal isn’t to come up with a single new term or a rigid plan that can be universally adopted. As Marcell notes, it can be “very offensive” when outsiders approach communities with nothing but models and templates. 

“You can’t expect to build trust in a community if you don’t start with an open-ended conversation about how to approach the issue, because [each] context is so unique,” she says. Instead, the network aims to co-create, with each of the three community-based organizations, a method for identifying the specific needs and goals of each place. That includes identifying and interviewing community “influencers” and, with the help of Buy-In Community Planning, developing questions for a door-to-door survey. 

“There’s a lot more individual interaction and coaching that needs to be done with people who are at the hard edge of climate change,” says Osamu Kumasaka of Buy-In Community Planning. He first came to this conclusion while working as a Consensus Building Institute mediator in Piermont, New York, in 2017. The Hudson River town was experiencing the beginnings of chronic flooding: water in basements, swamped backyard gardens, denizens wading through streets on their way to work. A wealthy small town with its own flood resilience committee and access to world-class flood risk data, Piermont nonetheless found itself uncertain about how to move forward. 

“We really struggled to figure out how to squeeze all the work that needed to be done with all these homeowners into public meetings,” Kumasaka says. Each household had very specific factors influencing decisions to stay or leave: elderly parents with special needs, kids about to graduate from high school, plans to retire. Organizing surveys, small discussions, and individualized risk assessments was a more effective approach, Kumasaka says, in helping the community get a better picture of where it stands and where it wants to go. 

In the end, the hope is that this type of legwork can help inform a community strategy, from identifying risk tolerance to submitting an application to a buyout program. The network and its partners hope this highly customizable approach will help communities navigate around barriers others can’t see. 

Just as the Climigration Network did when gathering input from frontline leaders for its guidebook, Buy-In Community Planning compensates members of the three community organizations for their time and insights. It’s a key element of the process—helping to flip the dynamic from one in which outsiders dole out generic research and expertise into a true collaboration in which locals and professionals alike are paid to work toward a shared goal. 

Relocation is an especially thorny subject in low-income, largely Black and brown communities, because residents haven’t historically been extended the same flood protections provided to those in wealthier areas. In discussions about home buyouts, as Kumasaka puts it, there tends to be a “feeling that it’s not fair to jump right to relocation.” 

It’s a fair point, and represents a vicious cycle. In 2020, the FEMA National Advisory Council endorsed research findings that “the more Federal Emergency Management Agency money a county receives, the more whites’ wealth tends to grow, and the more Blacks’ wealth tends to decline, all else equal.” Because funding tends to go to larger communities better positioned to match and accept those resources, “less resource-rich, less-affluent communities cannot access funding to appropriately prepare for a disaster, leading to inadequate response and recovery, and little opportunity for mitigation. Through the entire disaster cycle, communities that have been underserved stay underserved, and thereby suffer needlessly and unjustly” (FEMA NAC 2020). 

The concept of voluntary relocation remains fraught, and the Climigration Network’s three community partners preferred not to be interviewed or identified in this article. The stakes are high as this global crisis makes itself felt locally, and careful engagement can mean the difference between quite literally keeping a community together, or not. 

With its focus on community voices, a project like this could signal a seismic shift in how the United States approaches climate migration, says Harriet Festing, executive director of the Anthropocene Alliance. Festing, who helped the Climigration Network build relationships with the three community organizations, which are all part of the Anthropocene Alliance network, underscores the emerging theme of this work: “Really the only people who can change that conversation [are] the victims of climate change themselves.” 

Back in Austin, Frances Acuña works as an organizer with Go Austin/Vamos Austin, or GAVA, a coalition of residents and community leaders working to support healthy living and neighborhood stability in Austin’s Eastern Crescent, which includes Dove Springs. One of her roles is helping her neighbors better prepare for disaster by taking steps like getting flood insurance, dealing with insurance agents, and learning evacuation routes. She’s bagged up the mud-drenched belongings of flooded-out homeowners, brought city officials to meet with locals in her living room, and triaged emergency situations—like when an elderly couple that had been evacuated following a flood found themselves with three dogs, two cats, and nowhere to stay. 

“I used to love thunder and lightning and pouring rain. It was like seeing God himself in the flesh,” Acuña says. Now, she adds, she can’t go long in a rainstorm before nervously checking out the window. 

Austin’s buyout program in her area provided relocation assistance for homeowners, who had the option to reject or counter the buyout offers they received. But many did not want to leave at all, lobbying unsuccessfully for the city to implement solutions such as a flood wall or channel clearing. 

Despite nearby flooding and the calls and mail from realtors and developers, Acuña has no immediate plans to leave her home. Taking part in Climigration Network conversations with other local leaders guiding their communities through floods, fires, and droughts, she says, has provided a major release: “It was a very therapeutic process, at least for me.” 

In addition to the guidebook, the input from those frontline leaders—who hailed from 10 low-income, Black, and Latinx communities from Mississippi to Nebraska to Washington—powered a strong statement acknowledging the “Great American Climate Migration” and calling for the creation of a federal Climate Migration Agency “to help plan, facilitate, and support U.S. migration.” 

Many of the group’s suggestions—most of which are aimed squarely at government officials—are practical, if not straightforward to execute: provide information free from jargon. Streamline the FEMA home buyout process so money no longer takes five years to land in pockets. Reduce federal grants’ local matching requirements for small, under-resourced communities. 

Other recommendations tackle the larger context of racial inequity, acknowledging the findings that FEMA programs benefit wealthy homeowners more. “People here are living in tents,” says one testimonial included in the statement. “Thousands still don’t have homes after the storms. It frustrates me because I know the government has the funding and the ability to help us. The reason we can’t get the services we need is because of our zip codes.” 

The statement also urges authorities to back plans that allow tight-knit communities the option to relocate together instead of sending each homeowner off individually. 

It’s an option that Terri Straka of South Carolina would appreciate. Like Acuña, she’s an active leader in her community who has participated in Climigration Network conversations and joined the call for a new climate migration office. She’s lived in Rosewood Estates, a blue-collar neighborhood in Socastee, South Carolina, on the Intracoastal Waterway outside of Myrtle Beach, for nearly 30 years. For a long time, flooding wasn’t an issue, but in recent years, that changed: since 2016, Straka’s county has weathered at least 10 hurricanes and tropical storms. Average national flood insurance payouts there have increased fivefold in less than a decade, from a little less than $14,000 to just under $70,000. In the most recent flood, Straka’s 1,300-square-foot ranch took on four feet of water, which didn’t drain for two weeks. 

“It’s nothing fabulous, but it’s home,” Straka says. “I raised all my children in it. I know everyone.” Her parents live in the neighborhood. Local high schoolers use the streets for driving school practice. “I’ve watched so many kids grow up.” 

These days, she says, “they call me Terri Jean the Rosewood Queen.” It’s a name she’s earned following the neighborhood floods, as she advocated for her neighbors in visits to local FEMA and county housing offices, made phone calls to state recovery officials, and staged protests at county council meetings. Many of her neighbors would have moved after the first couple of floods if they’d been able to, Straka says. She and others pushed for a buyout program, but the federally funded offers were less than adequate by the time they came through in 2021; community members continue to push for better offers. A lot of her neighbors are service industry workers in Myrtle Beach’s robust tourism trade. Others have retired on a fixed income. Many had already sunk money into repairing their homes. For others, buyouts would only pay off their current mortgages, falling far short of the amount needed to purchase comparable new homes, to say nothing of flood insurance.  

“You live on the outskirts of Myrtle Beach itself because, number one, you can’t afford to live in Myrtle Beach,” Straka says. “Even if you have the option, if the buyout would be financially beneficial, where do you go? And how do you do that?” 

The Climigration Network and its partners are coming at these questions from several directions. The three community organizations now working with the network are on track to conduct their surveys and use the results to begin developing local strategies this summer. The network hopes to create a small grant program that could fund similar work in other communities. Meanwhile, members have formed six workgroups of technical experts and community leaders, with focus areas ranging from policy and research to narrative building and communications, that meet regularly to discuss how to identify and help dismantle the many roadblocks communities face. Taken together, these efforts are an attempt to lay the foundation for a whole new field of climate adaptation. 

“Not everyone is trying to go out in the field and build a system for helping 13 million people move in the next 50 years,” says Kelly Leilani Main, executive director of Buy-In Community Planning, chair of the Climigration Network’s Ecosystems and People workgroup, and a member of its Interim Council. “We’re building the bridge as we’re walking across it.” 

Doing so, Main and other network members agree, will require continuing to build trust and deep working relationships with residents on the ground. Like Acuña, Straka says that sharing the story of her own experiences with others in the Climigration Network has been a critical first step. “When we would have meetings, I was completely honest,” Straka says. “And they gave you that capability to be vulnerable, because you are vulnerable.” 

The whole process was far removed from her experiences hitting walls with state and federal officials, she adds. The officials she’s dealt with “don’t get it. It’s a job to them, they go to work, they’ve got these projects to do,” she says. “The involvement on a personal level is what’s going to bring big change. That’s what’s needed.”  

Alexandra Tempus is writing a book on America’s Great Climate Migration for St. Martin’s Press. 

Lead image: Frances Acuña walks through a detention pond area designed to help protect her Austin, Texas, neighborhood from flooding. Credit: Austin American-Statesman/USA TODAY Network.

REFERENCES 

Climigration Network. 2021. Lead with Listening: A Guidebook for Community Conversations on Climate Migration. https://www.climigration.org/guidebook. 

FEMA NAC. 2020. “National Advisory Council Report to the Administrator.” November. Washington, DC: Federal Emergency Management Agency.  

Kaplan, Sarah, and Andrew Ba Tran. 2022. “More Than 40 Percent of Americans Live in Counties Hit by Climate Disasters in 2021.” The Washington Post. January 5. 

White House. 2021. “Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration.” October. Washington, DC: The White House. 

Wing, Oliver E.J., and Paul D. Bates, Andrew M. Smith, Christopher C. Sampson, Kris A. Johnson, Joseph Fargione, and Philip Morefield. 2018. “Estimates of Current and Future Flood Risk in the Conterminous United States.” Environmental Research Letters 13(3). February.