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This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The only land route that connects Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, to the rest of the continental United States is Island Road, a thin, four-mile stretch of pavement that lies inches above sea level and immediately drops off into open water on either side. Even on a calm day, salt water laps over the road’s tenuous boundaries and splashes the concrete.

The road wasn’t so exposed when it was built in 1956. Residents could walk through the thick marsh that surrounded the road to hunt and trap. But over the coming decades, the landscape transformed.

Levees stopped the natural flow of fresh water and sediment that reinforced the fragile marshes. Oil and gas companies dredged through the mud to lay pipelines and build canals, carving paths for saltwater to intrude and kill the freshwater vegetation that held the land together. The unstoppable, glacial momentum of sea-level rise has only made things worse. Today, almost nothing remains of what was very recently a vast expanse of bountiful marshes and swampland.

Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw band of Native Americans, has lost 98 percent of its land since 1955. Its 99 remaining residents have been dubbed “America’s first climate refugees.”

“There’s just a little strip of it left,” said resident Rita Falgout. “There used to be a lot of trees; we didn’t have so much salt water.”

“There’s just a little strip of it left. There used to be a lot of trees; we didn’t have so much salt water.”

Like many of the houses on Isle de Jean Charles, her home is raised on 15-foot stilts to evade the increasingly omnipresent floodwaters. But the stilts can’t protect her from the island’s isolation. Strong winds alone can flood the road, cutting the island off from vital resources like hospitals. Soon the road will be impassable year-round.

“My husband is sick, and if we’re back here when the road floods, what are we going to do?” Falgout asked.

The only long-term solution is to leave.

Preparing for Tomorrow’s Climate Refugees

The residents of Isle de Jean Charles won’t be alone in their exodus. There will be up to 13 million climate refugees in the United States by the end of this century. Even if humanity were to stop all carbon emissions today, at least 414 towns, villages, and cities across the country would face relocation, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, researchers predict that the number will exceed 1,000.

And this isn’t a distant threat. At least 17 communities, most of which are Native American or Native Alaskan, are already in the process of climate-related relocations. Yet despite its inevitability, there is no official framework to handle this displacement. There is no U.S. government agency, process, or funding dedicated to confronting this impending humanitarian crisis.

Only one climate-related relocation is currently funded and administered by the government: the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project.

This is a test run of sorts, a first-of-its-kind program that aims to create guiding principles for future resettlements. What makes the project unique is that it doesn’t just aim to resettle individuals. Its goal is to resettle the entire community together, as a whole, by constructing a brand-new town and filling it with the displaced occupants and culture of Isle de Jean Charles.

The project diverges from prior resettlements, which have largely followed a model of individual buyouts—offering lump-sum payments to residents and leaving them to their own devices to restart their lives. That model was used in Diamond, Louisiana, in the early 2000s.

Diamond, a historically black community situated in the heart of Cancer Alley, sat in the shadow of Shell petrochemical plants and for decades suffered through chemical leaks and explosions. Years of grassroots campaigning finally led to a buyout deal. One by one, the residents of Diamond took the money and left.

But even as the individual households found relief, the community shriveled away. Residents scattered, churches folded, and people fell out of touch. “The residents say they see each other at funerals and weddings, and that’s about it,” said Robert Verchick, the Board President of the Center for Progressive Reform, an environmental research nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

The death of Diamond highlights an important distinction. There is a difference between saving a community and saving its individual members.

But for all its benefits, building an entirely new town for Isle de Jean Charles has high logistical hurdles, and with a price tag of over $48 million to move 99 people, it remains unclear whether this can serve as a replicable model. The pace of resettlement has been sluggish, unable to match the urgency of the dilemma Isle de Jean Charles faces. Nearly two years after the project began, nothing’s been built. There is still no blueprint for the new town; the project’s administrators are just now narrowing down possible locations and entering contract negotiations with the engineering and architectural firm, CSRS, they hope will design it. The problem, Verchick said, is that historically, the government is simply not good at resettling communities. Whether this deficiency is a product of inexperience or the sclerotic nature of bureaucracy is one of the things policy makers are trying to figure out. But the central question is whether government-backed community resettlements will be feasible for the hundreds of communities that are approaching similar dissolutions. “I think that’s a question that remains open,” said Mathew Sanders, who is running the project through the Louisiana Office of Community Development.

Isle de Jean Charles began contemplating relocation about 15 years ago, but with the lack of government guidance or structure, it was unclear where even to start. Then, during the summer of 2014, the Obama administration announced the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC). The competition, administered by HUD, had an ambitious purpose: to shift the way the U.S. manages natural disasters, from simply responding to and recovering from them, to planning and preparing for their inevitability. The competition would award $1 billion in funding to resilience projects across the nation. The Louisiana Office of Community Development, Disaster Recovery Unit (OCD-DRU) worked with Isle de Jean Charles community leaders, NGOs, and development companies to draft an application for four resiliency projects, one of which was the Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project. The application didn’t blunt the truth about the difficulty of the task at hand. It called the resettlement process “excessively complex.” It noted that failing to adhere to the preset timeline “could lead to potentially catastrophic outcomes.” It warned that a lack of prior examples to work from made the whole project uncertain. And it recalled that every government-backed relocation effort in the U.S. so far has been at least a partial failure. Rather than balking at the hurdles, the OCD-DRU decided that Louisiana had an obligation to “improve upon our nation’s track record.” They would do this, the application said, by focusing not only on environmental resiliency, but “cultural resiliency” as well. It was exactly what the competition was looking for, and the project was awarded the full $48.3 million it requested. Taking the Time to Build Trust That was more than two years ago. Since then, there’s not much to show for it: no land acquisition, no buildings, no precise plan. They are admittedly behind schedule. But the OCD-DRU has been far from idle. While it hasn’t constructed homes, it has built something that will determine the success of the entire process: trust. This has meant overcoming decades of distrust between the island’s indigenous residents and the government. “Everyone thinks giving away money is easy,” said Pat Forbes, the executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development. “But they’ve had experiences before that have led them to be wary.” Isle de Jean Charles was, in fact, created as a result of a government-mandated relocation, albeit of a very different nature. It was during the violent Indian Removal Act era, when Native Americans were being murdered and driven off any land that could be used for agriculture. Native people were forced to flee deep into the southern marshes of Louisiana to avoid the colonial persecution, into what was then designated as “uninhabitable swampland.” Now they are being asked to ignore decades of learned apprehension and trust the U.S. government to move them once again. The fact that the confidence-building has taken years isn’t seen as a failure by those at OCD-DRU, but rather as an important lesson for future relocations of indigenous communities: It’s going to take time and patience. “There’s no shortcut to building trust,” said Sanders. “It really comes with time and effort and our ability to articulate progress.” Unfortunately, this lesson will be applicable for many future relocations. According to a recent study by the Center for Progressive Reform, a startling proportion of communities attempting relocation are Native American or Native Alaskan. “We were surprised that all of the communities we identified were tribal. It’s not a coincidence. Native people have rarely been able to choose the location in which they’re currently living.”