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How Will Climate Change Effect The Rust Belt?
New research suggests the region will withstand coming changes in better shape than most.
“Climate is redefining every aspect of society, already — and we’re only at the beginning.” So said the climate futurist Alex Steffen recently in a lengthy thread on his twitter account. “The question is no longer whether we’re going to act, but when? And to who’s advantage?”
There is new research that suggests the Rust Belt is one of the places that may actually benefit from climate change action in the United States. No one really wins with climate change, of course, but the region could be poised to withstand it better than others.
Coastal cities and the Sun Belt could suffer
A large-scale data analysis and forecasting undertaken by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania has produced a series of maps depicting the potential consequences of climate change across the United States over the coming years and decades. Called The 2100 Project: An Atlas for a Green New Deal, the project is meant to catalyze action before mitigation of climate change effects becomes too little, too late.
One major takeaway from the project is that rising sea levels will put coastal cities under threat of increased flooding and increasingly severe storms and seismic activity. While warming causing an average annual temperature increase approaching 10℉ may also cause large swaths of the Sun Belt to become tortuously hot, experiencing droughts and catastrophic storms of their own.
Where does the Rust Belt stand?
The economic strain of all this could eventually expand into astronomical territory, perhaps leaving entire existing cities in ruins and forcing tens of millions of people to relocate.
Sarah Holder, writing about the 2100 Project for CityLab, states that “[A]ccording to GDP projections through 2099, more than three-quarters of U.S. counties will be suffering economically because of the…
