Reframing the Language of Retreat

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https://eos.org/opinions/reframing-the-language-of-retreat

Source:  By Julie Maldonado, Elizabeth Marino, and Lesley Iaukea. 

Excerpt: With so many communities facing relocation from a changing climate, reframing “managed retreat” is needed to respect people’s self-determination. When faced with the looming effects of climate change along coasts—larger storms, rising seas, flooding, and eroding shorelines—arguing to promote linguistic framing of climate change–driven migration may seem like a fool’s errand. Does anyone care what it’s called if hundreds of millions of people globally—up to 13.1 million people in the United States alone [Hauer et al., 2016]—relocate from coastlines en masse before 2100? ...Implicit in terms like managed retreat, forced migration, community relocation, and others are assumptions about who is deciding what is appropriate adaptation and how those decisions influence, suggest, or require compliance. How and, especially, by whom these plans are developed will have substantial impacts on affected or relocated people’s lives. ...Shifting from “managed retreat” to language that is more inclusive of who and what is included in “community” and that upholds the varying voices, opinions, knowledges, and lived experiences of those physically moving is more than a semantics issue; it also involves logistic and policy elements that can incite changes in practices related to people moving from coastal regions. The term community-led relocation, for example, includes consideration of the complex tapestry of people who leave a place they have inhabited to settle in another, as well as the fact that these community tapestries are bound not by geography but by relationships and practice. “Community led” also highlights the importance of community engagement, input, and leadership in decision-making, visioning, planning, and implementation [Marino et al., 2019]....  

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