Berkeley Professor Asserts Miami Should Prepare for Evacuations Due to Climate Change

UC Berkeley sociology professor, Daniel Aldana Cohen said it is “urgent” to begin preparing to mass evacuations. “Prepping Miami’s evacuation is a perfect starting point. Its residents are a multiracial, multinational, and multigenerational assemblage that spans the class spectrum,” he said. Cohen claimed that many of Miami’s residents are already familiar with climate change crises, like hurricanes. “If cities around the country were forced to plan how they’d integrate arriving Miamians into communities flush with public green investment, they’d get a head start on planning for climate migration generally. This would also trigger conversations about zoning for density, enshrining tenant rights, upgrading infrastructure, taxing the rich, building green banks, and battling racism and police violence,” he continued.

From Fox News:

"And yet, right now, the U.S. doesn’t have a just—or even functional—policy for immigrants and refugees. It’s still struggling to support Indigenous communities facing displacement from environmental calamities caused by colonial settlers. And the US has handled domestic movements for freedom terribly. In the last century, the emancipatory promise of the Great Migration was savagely curtailed by segregation and mass incarceration. Leading sociologists and scholars of environmental injustice called this racial violence a form of apartheid. Today, a surge in climate displacement threatens to deepen this eco-apartheid," Cohen wrote.

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