Refugees in your
own Country?

The struggles of people leaving the Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana are eerily mirrored in a number of UK coastal towns. Sitting in the shadow of Wales’ iconic Snowdonia National Park, the idyllic village of Fairbourne has been home to a tight-knit community since 1850 and currently has a settled population of roughly 1000 people. But future flood risks and opaque policy plans threaten their way of life, leaving residents in a state of constant uncertainty.

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Until 2025 the village is in the ‘Hold the Line’ phase of the Shoreline Management Plan 2, which involves keeping the line of defence in approximately the same location as it is now, maintaining existing defences and replacing or upgrading them along their current alignment. After 2025 National Resources Wales is set to maintain the sea wall until 2054 ‘if funds permit’. This deliberately vague wording shows Fairbourne could be decommissioned at the drop of a hat.

After a BBC Wales reporter erroneously labeled it ‘The Village of the Damned’ and falsely claimed it had a life span of 10 years left, residents saw houses that were sold subject to contract fall through. House prices plummeted by 40% overnight and home insurance became impossible to obtain for some.

At present, people in the UK who lose their homes to climate related issues either get zero compensation or a paltry fee that doesn’t begin to cover the amount necessary to buy an equivalent replacement home. As at-risk land and properties are devalued by insurance companies, the sense of loss is compounded as residents are forced to sell their land back to the councils at a massively reduced price and downsize. Some are even forced to pay to deconstruct their own properties, tearing apart their memories and destroying homes that they have poured their lives into.

The emotional stress of this precarious existence is taking its toll on some Fairbourne residents who are worn down and unwilling to talk about the future. The act of leaving behind not just a home but a community, knowing that all the things you hold dear will be washed away and erased by the ocean, becomes a form of climate change trauma that we must do everything we can to avoid.

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“A large percentage of residents now, will not engage in any discussion about theirs and the village’s future.”
— Angela Thomas, Fairbourne

In reality this means that the flood defences, which were destroyed by the storm in 1991, have not been replaced due to lack of funding. In 2015, a rock wall was put in place to absorb wave energy. Part of the wall was funded by the residents who were told they had to pay £100 per rock to protect their own homes.

When the burden of tackling climate change is being unjustly placed upon individuals, it is clear that there are larger systemic and funding issues that need to be addressed to protect people and land.

Despite the opaque and unfair system that currently exists, there are some key solutions to remove the burden of responsibility from individuals and push local and national governments to put in place clear, fair policy on relocation. Specific financial actions include providing adequate funding for sea wall defences, instituting a climate relocation fund for displaced people and freezing house values in at-risk areas at a pre-climate change influenced figure to prevent disastrous personal losses.

Policy must be clear to local councillors so that they can communicate it to residents as early as possible, giving them as much preparation time as they need for the relocation process. On an emotional level, it is clear that the impact of leaving a disappearing place weighs heavily on people like Chris and the lowland kids.

Policy makers around the world must take extra care to account for the needs of departing residents, allowing them some control over where they will be relocated to and how they can keep their communities together.

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UK Relocation Policy

We urgently need better policy to ensure that residents in these at-risk towns and villages are guaranteed fair financial compensation which doesn’t punish individuals for climate events.

The devaluation of properties by the market logic of insurance companies and housing valuations must be offset by a new ‘climate relocation fund’ which is able to adequately remunerate people who are forced to leave their homes.

This could be established through government action or legal initiatives that institute precedents for compensating homeowners in climate-threatened areas. These people cannot just be written off as individual casualties of our collective mismanagement of the climate.

There must be policy to implement a just relocation process that takes into account the emotional impact of climate displacement by making an effort to keep the long-established communities built up in these places together.

Those with attachments to the specific geography and climate of an at-risk region should be relocated to places with similar human and biological ecosystems where possible. Those who are relocating need to be consulted on this process to ensure their needs are taken into account.