Retreat, or relocating people and unbuilding land in places vulnerable to flooding and sea level rise, remains on the fringes of conversations about climate change adaptation. Yet already people throughout the world are moving away from the water en masse. Many more want to move but lack the resources to do so. Residents working to organize their own retreat are engaged in a struggle for recognition and support from, paradoxically, the very governments and institutions responsible for planning, implementing, and managing retreat once it becomes necessary. In this article, I contrast dominant official representations of retreat as marginal, unpopular, and infeasible with existing cases of collective movement away from rising waters that demonstrate just the opposite. I argue that the word retreat is a valuable and necessary addition to the language of climate change adaptation, serving to distinguish community-organized relocation from forced relocation and climate-induced displacement. Understanding community-organized relocation efforts as forms of retreat unifies this emerging practice with other social movements and political projects that seek more sustainable ways of settling on earth.
What would it mean for sociology to make climate change a core disciplinary concern? This article reviews research on a selection of trends brought on by the climate crisis: ( a) compounding and cumulative disasters, infrastructure breakdown, and adaptation; ( b) intensifying migration and shifting patterns of settlement; and ( c) transformations in consumption, labor, and energy. While climate change's far-reaching implications remain peripheral to the discipline at large, sociologists studying these trends increasingly understand the crisis as a central problem for the study of social life. We show how sociologists can shed light on core problems emerging from and contributing to the crisis, and also reveal the conditions that make necessary social and cultural transformations more likely. Throughout, we illuminate how sociology can help chart a path out of the climate crisis by identifying alternatives to the high-carbon, low-equity social structures that organize the modern world. Finally, we identify possibilities for scholars who do not see themselves as “environmental sociologists” to contribute meaningful research on the climate crisis, and we encourage them to do so while we can make a difference. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 46 is July 30, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
After a disaster, it is common to equate repopulation and rebuilding with recovery. Numerous studies link post-disaster relocation to adverse social, economic, and health outcomes. However, there is a need to reconsider these relationships in light of accelerating climate change and associated social and policy shifts in the USA, including the rising cost of flood insurance, the challenge of obtaining aid to rebuild, and growing interest in “managed retreat” from places at greatest risk. This article presents data from a survey of individuals who opted either to rebuild in place or relocate with the help of a voluntary home buyout after Hurricane Sandy. Findings show those who lived in buyout-eligible areas and relocated were significantly less likely to report worsened stress than those who rebuilt in place. This suggests access to a government-supported voluntary relocation option may, under certain circumstances, lessen the negative mental health consequences associated with disaster-related housing damage.
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