Asheville has been called a ‘climate haven.’ There’s no such thing

Asheville, North Carolina, often shows up on lists of “climate havens”—cities that can supposedly avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The city, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is elevated enough that extreme heat is still relatively rare. It’s nowhere near the coast, so sea level rise isn’t an issue. Asheville’s population is quickly growing, and one of the reasons is that people see it as a “safe” city. One retired couple told the New York Times in 2022 that they’d chosen to move to Asheville after living in Florida—where they had to evacuate from hurricanes eight times—and California, where they faced drought and wildfires. In a 2022 survey, nearly a third of Americans said that if they moved in the next year, climate change would be a factor. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t possible to move away from climate impacts.   In Asheville, torrential rain from Tropical Storm Helene on September 27 flooded the city and took out the electric grid and cell service. Dozens of people in the county have died. The city’s water system was severely damaged, and may not be repaired for weeks. Some smaller towns in the region, like Swannanoa and Chimney Rock, were even harder hit. As of Monday, hundreds of roads in Western North Carolina were impassable. Food and other basic supplies were being airlifted into the area. [Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images] The region faces other climate risks. As it gets hotter, and as heavy rain alternates with drought, there’s a growing risk of wildfire. (As in California and other fire-prone areas, forests in North Carolina have been mismanaged, with decades of fire suppression making new fires more destructive.) Other so-called climate havens have similar challenges. Vermont was devastated by flooding both last year and earlier this year. 2023’s floods devastated Lamoille County, an area that a 2020 ProPublica report identified as the place least at risk from climate change in the whole country. In the Midwest, heat and drought are making wildfire more likely in places such as northern Michigan and northern Wisconsin. Record-breaking fires in Canada have blanketed such climate “refuges” as Buffalo and Duluth in smoke. In Portland, Oregon, nearby wildfires led to off-the-charts air pollution in 2020 and extreme heat-damaged infrastructure in 2021. Climate change is unavoidable. Still, it’s true that some places are relatively safer than others. In the areas that just flooded in Asheville, there was only a one-in-500 probability of a flood, according to models from First Street, an organization that makes tools to understand climate risk. “That means that there’s a 0.2% annual likelihood to see something like that happen, which is not impossible, but it’s very small,” says Matthew Eby, First Street’s founder and CEO. “Where, if you’re living in Florida, you can see properties that we would forecast that have a 50% probability of flooding, meaning they would flood every other year.” Despite what just happened, that means it’s still safer to live in Asheville than on parts of the Florida coast. An interactive map from the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University, called the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, lets you explore the risks across the country. The 10 highest-risk counties are in the South; half are in Louisiana. Each property is also different. First Street’s data, which is also available on real estate websites including Zillow and Realtor.com, lets homebuyers look at the risk of flooding, wildfires, extreme heat, wind from storms, and air pollution at a specific address. In Asheville, some homes were unscathed, including one that belongs to First Street’s chief science officer. “He selected one that he knew [wouldn’t risk flooding] because of the elevation,” Eby says. If you’re buying a home now, it makes sense to use the tools to make an informed decision. Of course, many people didn’t have climate data in hand when they bought or rented the home they currently live in. Since homes in flood zones can often be less expensive, others might not be able to afford a lower-risk house (or afford flood insurance, even when they know the danger). And while some people might be able to easily move to another part of the country, many can’t. Communities need to figure out how to make every neighborhood as resilient as possible. As a Grist article puts it, climate havens “might not be something that nature hands us, but something that we have to build ourselves.”