No sector will be affected more than agriculture. In 2015 alone, the California drought cost the economy $2.7 billion and eliminated some 21,000 jobs, according to the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. In Economic Risks of Climate Change, Hsiang and his colleagues found that parts of the U.S. Midwest, Southeast, and Great Plains—some of the most fertile farmland in the country—could see annual crop yields fall 10 to 50 percent by midcentury. “When you look at regions that we consider heavily impacted by the Dust Bowl, we saw agricultural declines of 15 percent,” says Hsiang. “What we’re saying is that according to our projections, there’s a 50 percent chance that we’ll see what looks like a perpetual Dust Bowl situation.” The number of agricultural workers in the U.S. is expected to drop 6 percent from 2014 to 2024 even without accounting for climate change. Its effects could easily increase that to more than 10 percent.

There are going to be far fewer people building and selling coastal property in North Carolina, growing cotton in Arizona, and working drilling rigs in North Dakota in the coming decades. How will we help them find other livelihoods?

Moving on

As part of its 2017 budget plan, the Obama administration proposed a program to help the distressed communities of Appalachia and other coal-dependent regions make the transition from mining to more sustainable economies. Obama’s Power Plus Plan includes $75 million for job retraining and economic diversification, most of that in competitive grants to communities and nonprofits. It would shore up pension and health-care funds for retired coalfield workers whose employers have shed their pension obligations, and it would free up $1 billion from the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund to reclaim old mine sites, clean them up, and redevelop them as industrial parks and economic development zones. ­Hillary Clinton, who was harshly criticized in March for her remarks on shutting down coal mines, has produced a $30 billion plan to revitalize communities threatened by coal’s decline. It includes many of the same features as Obama’s, at wider scope.

Unfortunately, even $30 billion may not be equal to the challenge. Both of these schemes are based on ideas that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed previous federal efforts to bring prosperity to Appalachia. Central to all of them is job retraining. Many coal miners, the thinking goes, have mechanical skills that can easily be transferred to deployment of new energy systems—installing solar panels, for instance. “There’s going to be way more jobs in the renewable distributed energy system,” says Jennie ­Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University. “We should be focused on helping people embrace the new opportunities these transitions will bring.”

Research on job retraining, though, shows that the results are mixed, at best. A 2008 Department of Labor study that looked at retraining programs involving 160,000 laid-off workers in 12 states concluded, “It appears possible that ultimate gains from participation are small or nonexistent.” A more recent study from the Hamilton Project found that to be successful, retraining programs must be highly targeted at the workers most likely to benefit. In general, that means younger workers with some postsecondary education who are motivated to follow through, and who are able and willing to relocate to places with more job opportunities. Many of the unemployed coal miners of Appalachia do not fit those criteria.

The idea that many people should just get out of Appalachia has been around for decades. “Economic betterment for the great majority of the people of the Southern Appalachians is not to be found in development of the meager resources of the local area,” wrote economists B. H. Luebke and John Fraser Hart in 1958, “but in migration to other areas more richly endowed by nature and by man.” In economic theory, human mobility should benefit both the downtrodden areas people are leaving, by tightening the job market, and the more prosperous ones that need new workers. Subsidizing migration, though, has moral and political implications that many find unsettling. “There’s a psychic cost to relocating—if there weren’t, we’d see a lot more mobility in the U.S. than we do,” says Reed Walker, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Ultimately, though, it will be necessary to address the costs of rejuvenating communities affected by climate change. Some workers can be retrained, but some can’t. Some towns can recast themselves with music festivals and art fairs, but not all. Crafting solutions requires a level of forethought, planning, and clear-eyed decision-making that our institutions and elected officials have not shown themselves to be particularly good at. Few officials have even acknowledged the scale of the challenges ahead.

“These answers have to be carefully thought out, and serious strategic work needs to be done, before you start handing out money,” says Amy Glasmeier, a professor of economic geography and regional planning at MIT who worked for many years at the Appalachian Regional Commission. “We have to figure out the problem first, and understand the demographics and the politics and the return on investment, and then launch programs—instead of saying ‘We’ve got to spend money now, because next year we’ll have to ask for more.’”

Given that such questions could soon be relevant far beyond coal communities, we will need to shift away from piecemeal, short-term, narrowly focused retraining efforts that attempt to quickly plug workers into new jobs. Instead, we need a comprehensive effort to reshape regional economies. President Obama’s proposal to devote $60 billion to making community colleges free for all qualified students, and to expand vocational training and apprenticeships for jobs in expanding fields, could be one way to start.

For the coal miners of Appalachia, such efforts could offer a chance to move beyond an extractive industry that for decades brought jobs, but not prosperity, to the region. “There is too much focus right now on ‘How do we replace these 10,000 good-paying jobs for people with only a high school diploma?’” says Peter Hille, the president of the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development in Berea, Kentucky. “That’s not the right question. The real question is ‘What can we do to create a new, diverse, and sustainable economy in a region that’s been economically distressed for more than a half-century?’”