The early impacts of a warming planet are upon us.

---

October 8, 2018, isn’t a day most people would remember. 

But it’s the day I began obsessively searching the Internet for an answer to a seemingly simple question, a question it appears is almost completely absent from conversations about digital nomadism, remote work, quiet quitting, and the like.

The question I had suddenly become obsessed with is this: where could I buy property that would escape the worst impacts of climate change?

The search started out simple, but I quickly realized the question was more complicated than I’d thought. Soon, I was formulating theories of community resilience, doing deep dives on the national flood insurance program, devouring books about sea level rise, hypothesizing second-order effects, and oh yea, emailing my family summary explanations of David Wallace-Wells New York Magazine articles.

One thing I recognized early is that buying an off-grid cabin in the woods would not be good enough. That would disconnect me from the social qualities which make humanity resilient in the first place. No man is an island, and besides, the deeper you dig into off-grid cabin dwellers, the more you understand how much food and fuel they are routinely driving in from somewhere far away.

At times I admit I became a little apocalyptic, especially once I began to think through climate change’s second-order effects: mass migrations, destabilized governments, economic depression, war. Yet I was motivated by a desire for something, not just security for me and my family, but a kind of connectedness, a place where I might know my neighbors, where I might begin to focus on the things most important to me. Climbing came to mind. So did family.

In truth, I had been searching for a place like this for years, only my search had been anchored primarily by climbing or kitesurfing locations.

So, what happened on October 8, 2018, that altered my thinking? That was the day the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released its report about what would happen if global temperature was allowed to rise just 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The IPCC Report

The 2018 IPCC report was big. Or at least, it should have been.

It was the first time scientists actually got real about their warnings. Past reports had strained to remain optimistic. Also, when you’re trying to deliver a consensus opinion about how bad it is, the tendency is to water down the most serious claims.

This time the language was different. Headlines around the world repeated the IPCC report's central claim: we had 12 years to avert climate catastrophe. 

Catastrophe.

The moderation which had so characterized the global scientific consensus was gone. In its place, they were sounding the alarm as clearly and as loudly as they knew how. It was hair on fire time.

From activism to investment

I wrote about my disillusion with climate advocacy back in April (Why I hate Earth day), still months before Congress got its act together at the 11th hour and passed the biggest climate bill in history.

In any case, I’d already been an idealistic young person trying to save the world from global catastrophe. When the IPCC report came out, I was in no mood to get all idealistic again.

I was, however, in the mood to do something concrete. Not fluffy activist stuff, but a real-world investment in the future for me and my family. In essence, I needed to properly take my head out of the sand, and go north.

You probably need to move

That’s what all of us need to do, actually: go north.

It’s fair to say that help is coming for the environment—but it’s also fair to say that we’ve got unprecedented disruption, drought, wildfires, hurricanes, and the like already baked into the system. Those will be here for generations to come.

What you need to do is the thing no politician is willing to tell you to do: move. Or at least, buy property now, while you can, before literally everyone in the world recognizes how valuable property that is insulated from climate change is and will be. 

So, what is a climate haven and how does one start to look for one?

Definition of a climate haven

This definition is my own. I came to it after years of searching and researching, and especially after being frustrated about a certain over-emphasis on large regions, or conversely an over-simplified focus on certain cities. In my opinion, a climate haven has to be more specific.

So, here is my definition. A climate haven is a sustaining property, in a resilient community, in a region insulated from the worst effects of climate change.

Without all three of those criteria, you don’t have a climate haven. You could have just bought your dream off-grid cabin in the middle of the woods, complete with a well, solar panels, and enough timber to produce firewood for a century. But if that cabin is in the Sierra Nevada in California, well then you don’t have a climate haven. You’ve got an off-grid cabin likely to be destroyed by a forest fire in the very near future.

A climate haven requires all three elements: a sustaining property in a resilient community in a region insulated from climate change. So how do you find a place like that?

1. A region insulated from climate change

No place on earth is completely insulated from climate change, but many places are broadly insulated from the worst effects of climate change. In the United States, that’s the Great Lakes region, the Upper Midwest, and New England.

Why so few places? Because it’s not just forest fires and rising sea levels you’re trying to avoid. It’s heat waves, stronger and more frequent hurricanes, droughts, increased prevalence of tropical diseases (soon to be formerly tropical), and the impact of additional pests and weather changes on plant life and crops. The Great Lakes, the Upper Midwest, and New England all fit the bill.

There may be individual communities, cities, or smaller parts of the country outside those regions that are seemingly insulated from climate change, but I would still shy away. The reason is second-order effects.

Take Florida, for example. It’s not that every square foot of The Sunshine State is going to be underwater in the future. But enough of Florida will be impacted by flooding, hurricanes, and rising sea levels that the state’s shrinking tax base and deteriorating infrastructure are likely to lead to negative economic effects for the entire state, even in the in-between areas. This is already being born out in the state’s attempt to reform its flood insurance program.

In other words, rich people in Miami may think they can get away with living in a tall, posh building away from the ocean—but how will Miami itself fare when the property tax base has been generally laid to waste by rising flood waters? (Jeff Goodell has a good book on the second-order effects of rising flood waters.)

Then there are the non-U.S. destinations to consider. There are some clear “winner” regions in a climate change future: Russia, Canada, New Zealand, and Scandinavia. These are all places where growing seasons will actually increase, land formerly covered by, say, tundra, will become more livable, and where extreme climates generally will become more temperate. Yet, a climate change future is also likely to be more unstable politically, as governments around the world cope with wars, droughts, hurricanes, and the climate migrants those upheavals will cause. The U.S. alone is predicted to average more than 230,000 people displaced by climate disasters every year. So, you can't just look at a changing climate—you have to consider what impact that changing climate will have on jobs, economies, and governments.

This is all to say that a climate haven should and must take into account the stability of the national and local governments and the capacity of its institutions. Canada and Scandinavia score well on those factors but are also not exactly easy to move to.

Realistically, if you are looking for a climate haven, you’ll most likely be looking in the U.S. That means Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and parts of Maine. 

After you’ve chosen a region, the next thing is to start looking for a resilient community.

2. Community resiliency

A resilient community is the most overlooked, under-appreciated element of a climate haven. Wherever you are, no matter who you are, I submit that you need people around you to rely upon.

Notice I didn’t say a resilient city. Cities are fine, but they are highly complex systems, which is why they’re often the first to stop working right when a major disaster strikes. If the power in New York City goes off due to a hurricane making its way up the coast, there’s only so much time before things start to go really wrong. We’ve seen that story before, and we’ll see it again, time after time. There’s a good reason why the first thing every character in a disaster movie does is try to get out of the city.

This isn’t to say a city can’t also contain within them resilient communities. Great Lakes cities like Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Deluth are all trying to bill themselves as climate havens because of their region, and it’s true these cities are less likely to experience the kinds of disasters which will routinely disable cities elsewhere in the country.

But just naming Buffalo doesn’t get you to what you really want: which is a place where you can rely on your neighbors, and where your neighbors are actually useful, not just because they can lend you sugar in a pinch. In a climate-changed future, actual useful neighbors are ones who will be growing food, keeping animals, building things, repairing plumbing, installing and upgrading electrical panels, insulating buildings, and redoing HVAC systems. Sadly, these days you’re not likely to find too many neighborhoods like that in big cities.

However, there are hundreds, if not thousands of small towns across the Great Lakes, Upper Midwest and New England where you will find neighbors like that—places where community resilience means that the community could, in theory, provide for most of its essential needs for at least a few months, if not years or decades.

It’s not just the ability to produce and make things people actually need to sustain themselves, though, which makes a community resilient. There’s also the fabric of a community. This is hard to measure, if not impossible. Yet you know it when you experience it. There are indicators: neighbors who know each other; community meetings just to inform and collaborate; unifying industries or activities; centers of social life; grandmas sitting on front porches (no joke — they know everything); and involvement in or awareness of local politics, to name a few.

This is the kind of community you are looking for. And after you’ve found one? That’s when we finally get to the exciting part.

3. A sustaining property

Once you’ve found a resilient community (or a few options for one) in a region insulated from climate change, you’re ready to start property hunting. 

But what kind of property will complete the trifecta? Ideally, one that can begin to provide some of its own resources. A well is good, but you should also be looking at what can be done for food and energy.

Food is straightforward. You want a property with at least a little bit of land. What you don’t need are 25 acres of farm pasture. Depending on what size family you have and just how much gardening you plan to do, anywhere from ¼ acre to 1 acre will actually do fine.

Energy is a bit more complicated. Most people are aware that you want good south-facing exposure for solar power—and that’s true. You can usually get a good, free evaluation for rooftop solar potential before you make an offer on a property, or otherwise, you will need to devote some open space to panels. Actually, you’d be crazy not to: the IEA confirmed back in 2020 that solar power was now the “cheapest electricity in history."

Yet few properties, especially those in the North, can heat themselves entirely off of solar power, even well-designed passive solar. Most of the homes in the regions mentioned above rely on propane, gas, or wood for heat. Hopefully, the incentives for heat pumps in the new climate change bill will begin to change this. Really, everyone needs to go in that direction, though I recommend always having a wood stove in the living room, because hey, life is good around a wood stove. And of course, there are few activities in life as satisfying as chopping and stacking wood to heat your home. 

Plus, sitting around the fire in your living room is the very best possible way to spend a cold winter evening.

_________________________________________________________________