14 hours ago
Sacramento could be headed for 'mass abandonment' for disturbing new reason
California's capital Sacramento could experience 'mass abandonment' in the coming years due to the rising threat of flooding, a new report has found.
Sacramento, which sits at the confluence of the Sacramento River and American River, is a high flood risk.
In the coming decades conditions could continue to deteriorate, driving home insurance premiums so high that home owners will be forced to move elsewhere, researchers from First Street concluded.
Sacramento County is the state's fourth largest metro, home to around 2.4 million residents.
But First Street predicts that 28 percent of its population will have left by 2055, a number it considers to meet the threshold for 'mass abandonment.'
The report argues that flooding will be the biggest factor in pushing residents out, combined with rising insurance costs, increasingly bad air quality and changing demographics.
The National Risk Assessment report also argued that Fresno could lose half its population in the same period.
Increasingly hot temperatures as a result of climate heating are melting mountain snow, increasing river flows and heavy rain events.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta lowlands will become less and less able to absorb such deluges and dangerous flooding will become more likely, researchers predict.
In December a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named Sacramento as at highly exception flood risk in need of mitigation.
'The Army Corps of Engineers and the [Sacramento River] levees have historically done quite a good job of providing protection,' UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain told the San Francisco Chronicle.
'That's probably thanks to good luck and probably thanks to good engineering, but that good luck probably won't hold forever.'
Swain warned that mass development of low-lying areas around the city have spread the risk of flooding further.
Developing the area has made California's Central Valley, but Sacramento in particular, one of the largest populations in the US highly vulnerable to flood risk.
First Street found that risk of flooding was the biggest driver of migration in the US compared to other perils such as poor air quality, wildfires and hurricanes.
One of the biggest economic risks of living in an area prone to flooding is that most home insurance providers will not cover flooding.
Many insurance providers will not cover flooding in their policies
Mass development of low-lying areas around the city have spread the risk of flooding further
Instead the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides a flood insurance program.
First Street analysis found that it will cost 137 percent more to insure homes in Sacramento by 2055.
Such costs will drive businesses and residents away to more climate-resilient areas.
'Some people will no doubt be displaced by climate events,' Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, told the Chronicle.
'But many more will be displaced, or at least steered by, the hand of the market,' he explained.
Other areas of California are also facing an insurance crisis, with major providers such as State Farm hiking prices after threatening to pull out of the state entirely.
Many Los Angeles residents that lost their homes in the devastating wildfires earlier this year found that their insurance policies will only cover a fraction of their rebuilding costs.
