In fact, people have often retreated after catastrophic weather events. New Orleans, for example, lost roughly half of its population after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the city’s population is still only 85 percent of what it was before the storm. But those retreats have generally been ad hoc, not managed, and not necessarily done with broader social interests in mind.

“After major storms, a lot of communities want to relocate,” Dr. Siders said. She noted that in New York after Sandy, a number of communities applied for buyout programs to relocate but that only two of them actually got funding.

That left people in those other communities with limited options, most of them bad.

If they were wealthy, they could walk away from their homes and take the financial loss. But if they had lower income , they often couldn’t make that decision and faced the prospect of remaining in houses they knew were at high risk of flooding. And even if they did manage to sell their homes, they wouldn’t be lessening the risks so much as transferring them to others.

The new paper lays out ways communities could practice managed retreats that would address their broader needs. Lack of access to reliable climate-hazard maps, for example, makes it difficult to make informed choices about risk. Such maps must be improved and updated regularly, the paper said.

“I’m so glad that these kinds of pieces are getting written and that they’re laying out this sort of agenda for research and practice and thinking around these like very inevitably thorny and conflictual questions of retreat,” said Liz Koslov an assistant professor in the department of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.