In the past 30 years, 1.3 million people have vacated their homes through managed retreat. Most of the time, individual houses are bought out by government agencies, like FEMA, in areas hit by repeated climate disasters. But sea levels are continuing to rise, and could even be accelerating, according to a recent NASA study. By 2100, 72 to 187 million more people could be displaced, forcing us to rethink our piecemeal strategies.The question isn't whether we will retreat, it's how we will retreat.
The coastline can be imagined as a thickly planted public space for recreation. Credit: The No-Image Retreat Studio, Rosetta S. Elkin Graduate School of Design, funded by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Even if a wall works for a specific area, it shifts erosion and flooding to either side of the wall, Siders said. If New York City erects a wall around itself, it doesn’t stop flooding, it just pushes it somewhere else. “And we can't put a wall around the entire United States,” she said. “So everywhere we build a wall and choose to protect one place, we're putting another place at risk.”
"At this point in the United States, in this moment of climate emergency, unless we take action, we are pushing towards a world of eco-apartheid,” Cohen said. "It's strengthening already-existing forms of exclusion and inequality and violence.” To have managed retreat create a better future, Cohen said, we need to plan outside of the scope of the government buyout.Though FEMA, one federal agency that facilitates housing buyouts, has spent more than $2 billion on threatened houses from 1993 to 2011, we know very little about how these decisions affect people or communities—the exact demographics of whom was bought out, and where they went.You could end up with these walled city-states and then everyone else is just left to fend for themselves.
The concept of the National Seashore could unify the coastline as a public and freely available resource. Image credit: Rosetta S. Elkin. Graphic by Mariel Collard.
At the same time, poorer communities can sometimes have less access to relief funds. In places like New Orleans or Houston, white neighborhoods recovered faster than Black ones after hurricanes. We won't know what these conflicts are and how to resolve them until we include these considerations in all our retreat conversations, Siders said, but we should be aware that any version of managed retreat will be happening in the context of the injustices that already exist in our country.Managed retreat also needs to deal with the fact that often, the communities most burdened by climate change are the ones that have been historically displaced or disenfranchised, Koslov said. Because of that history, trust levels in sweeping federal policies are understandably low.The conversation on retreat has been much too focused on the question of leaving and not enough on the question of arriving.
Detail of a public shoreline. Credit: The No-Image Retreat Studio, Rosetta S. Elkin Graduate School of Design, funded by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Credit: The No-Image Retreat Studio, Rosetta S. Elkin Graduate School of Design, funded by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
