In a major shift, federal officials are pushing to relocate entire communities due to the mounting threat of repeated climate-fueled disasters, the New York Times reported. The 2018 National Climate Assessment described the need for relocation away from some coastal areas as “unavoidable.” For decades, however, Americans’ cultural opposition to a strategy sometimes described as ‘managed retreat’ made such a policy unthinkable. As the cost of repeated disasters mounts, however, government analyses have found it is becoming more cost-effective to simply pay people to move from vulnerable areas — including requiring localities to use eminent domain to force people from their homes at the threat of losing other federal funding — than it is to build new infrastructure to protect them. “That’s family land,” Joann Bourg told the Times, of the property she will be leaving behind on Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles, home of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe. “But I don’t miss all the water. I don’t miss having to evacuate.” (New York Times $)