As more and more Americans awake to the rising risks of a changing climate, some will opt to leave their homes. Others will be forced to. Where will they go? Which places will lose population, and which places will see sizable gains? Which groups will be the first to flee, and which will struggle to find safety?
Two recent books by leading climate reporters delve into these difficult and complicated questions. *The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration*, by Jake Bittle, and *On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America*, by Abrahm Lustgarten, each tackle the vast and often overwhelming implications of climate migration across the United States. Such migration is not a matter of speculation. Rather, it is a certainty, a phenomenon that will without question redraw the demographic map of the country.
How individual readers respond to these books will likely depend on where they live, on their sense of ambient danger and, perhaps, on the grief they feel about our climate future.
Both *The Great Displacement* and *On the Move* are unsparing in their assessment of current public planning and policy — all those insidious incentives and flawed policies that trap people in high-risk places. And yet current federal programs are insufficient to respond to the scale and nature of many communities’ needs.
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As more and more Americans awake to the rising risks of a changing climate, some will opt to leave their homes. Others will be forced to. Where will they go? Which places will lose population, and which places will see sizable gains? Which groups will be the first to flee, and which will struggle to find safety?
Two recent books by leading climate reporters delve into these difficult and complicated questions. *The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration*, by Jake Bittle, and *On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America*, by Abrahm Lustgarten, each tackle the vast and often overwhelming implications of climate migration across the United States. Such migration is not a matter of speculation. Rather, it is a certainty, a phenomenon that will without question redraw the demographic map of the country.
How individual readers respond to these books will likely depend on where they live, on their sense of ambient danger and, perhaps, on the grief they feel about our climate future.
Both *The Great Displacement* and *On the Move* are unsparing in their assessment of current public planning and policy — all those insidious incentives and flawed policies that trap people in high-risk places. And yet current federal programs are insufficient to respond to the scale and nature of many communities’ needs.
Read the full article: [https://placesjournal.org/article/climate-migration-boomtowns-and-receiver-cities/](https://placesjournal.org/article/climate-migration-boomtowns-and-receiver-cities/)