Boston Globe: Here today. Gone tomorrow. Back someday because of climate change

“As the Sun Belt suffers from increasing vulnerability, the question is can New England benefit from that?” I asked The Boston Globe’s Cameron Sperance in his story exploring whether its climate resilience might spark a reversal of the region’s long-term outflow of residents.

Not so fast, said the other experts quoted. A much bigger factor than climate is the region’s dramatic shortfall of affordable housing — a problem made worse by the NIMBYism of local residents. What good does it do New England to be a climate haven if no one can move there? But that’s all the reason to start planning — and building — for tomorrow’s arrivals now, said my friend and colleague Parag Khanna, the CEO of our startup, Climate Alpha.

“You don’t want this kind of reckless climate gentrification overrunning places where you get crowding out and pricing ordinary people out of the market,” he said. “If you just think with a rigorous scientific lens, you should be thinking about the places that would be more resilient [and] pre-designing in the sense of sustainable technology and enlarging the capacity of those geographies to absorb greater populations.”

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