Photograph by Getty Images
If you lived in Atlanta in the months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, you probably remember the sudden ubiquity of Louisiana license plates across the city. As many as 100,000 people evacuated to metro Atlanta to escape the storm and its aftermath; many settled here for good.
As a lifelong Atlantan, our city’s role in welcoming evacuees made me feel proud, maybe even a little smug. I figured what had happened in New Orleans—both the natural disaster and the cascade of man-made disasters that followed—could never happen here. Maybe this was when I started to fancy my hometown as a “climate haven.”
Atlanta has always imagined itself as geographically blessed: comfortably situated on high ground, with a mild climate and abundant natural resources. An 1871 pamphlet promoting the city as an ideal summer retreat claimed our “health-crowned hills” were “too high up for malarious diseases, such as fevers of various kinds, and too low down for mountainous diseases, such as consumptions, rheumatisms, etc.”
This pseudoscientific branding seems silly today. But the city’s postwar rebuild did result in substantial investment in a modern sanitary sewer system and waterworks, which translated into a healthier city. Marketing Atlanta as a health retreat was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the 20 years since Katrina, I have heard dozens of climate stories from folks who’ve relocated here from cities such as Tampa, Los Angeles, and New Orleans—people who bought into our reputation as a climate haven while simultaneously creating it.
Photograph by Brianga/Wiki Commons
It’s true that Atlanta does not face the brunt of hurricanes and sea level rise—the kind of catastrophes we’ve come to associate with climate change—the way our coastal neighbors do. Never mind that, in 2008, I sheltered in the Ponce de Leon Avenue Publix as a tornado ripped across downtown. Or that, a year later, the busted windows of the Westin Peachtree Plaza were still boarded up when a storm swamped the city with catastrophic rainfall.
Despite the apocalyptic scenes of the Six Flags amusement park underwater, I continued to think of these events as freak storms, not climate change. How quickly I forgot each event, because I was lucky to dodge the worst outcomes. The city’s famed ability to recover and rebrand lends itself to a useful kind of amnesia. Resurgens is our motto, after all.
But climate change is immune to such self-mythology. The past decade has battered my belief that Atlanta is a safe haven from the disastrous effects of a warming planet. Each summer we seem to shatter the previous year’s record-high temperatures. Tornado season now overlaps with hurricane season, with so many named storms I can’t keep them straight. After last year’s devastating Hurricane Helene, which missed metro Atlanta by mere chance, it became clear that in an era of evermore disruptive natural disasters, there’s no longer such a thing as a climate haven.
As we attract and absorb folks from frontline communities, Atlanta is being transformed by newcomers who take climate change seriously. While this doesn’t magically make us a climate haven, we do have the opportunity to become a large-scale resilience hub for the region. By investing in nature-based solutions, green infrastructure, and community adaptation strategies, we have an opportunity to remake our city for real.
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In 2017, geographer Mathew Hauer projected that, over the next century, sea level rise alone would cause up to 320,000 climate refugees from coastal cities to flee to Atlanta. Heather Bird Harris was one of them.
When Hurricane Ida struck New Orleans in 2021, Harris’s family spent weeks waiting to return home. But there was no electricity or trash pickup in her neighborhood, and schools were closed. And those were just the short-term disruptions. In the long run, Harris worried about the psychological impact of this stress on her young children, not to mention how they would endure the same “cone of uncertainty”—a term for the projected path of a hurricane or tropical storm—bracing for tempests year after year.
After 14 years in New Orleans, Harris and her partner reluctantly started their search for a new home. “At the time, I was also reading about birds,” she tells me through tears. “These birds that live in the wetlands, their survival strategy with the increasing tidal fluctuations and sea level change, they’re just moving their nests further inland. And it really felt like that’s what we needed to do.”
Photograph by Ap photo/John Bazemore
Harris made a “crazy, data-centric spreadsheet,” in part informed by a mind-boggling online quiz from the New York Times called “Where Should You Live?” She scoured cities from western Washington to northern Vermont. A week before the 2022 hurricane season arrived, her family relocated to Decatur, choosing to remain in the South for its diversity and affordability. She often shares her spreadsheet with friends and family in coastal areas who are considering whether it may be time to leave for good.
After three years in Georgia—during which the state has been battered by climate disruptions, from drought to tropical storms, with school-shuttering water-main breaks in between—I ask Harris if she still thinks of Atlanta as “a stable nest” for her family.
“Relative to New Orleans, it is cooler, and the infrastructure is better,” she says. “By light years, it is much more livable.” But, she adds, “I’m not deluded that we are safe now. I don’t think that there’s anywhere in the world that is.”
For Harris, Atlanta’s appeal isn’t perfect weather. It’s that when intense storms or heat waves hit, she can get her life back on track within a week, instead of a month. This ability to bounce back is a pretty good definition of resilience. And that’s something Atlanta has always been good at.
Thinking about this adaptability from a regional perspective is Jon Philipsborn, climate and resilience manager at the Atlanta Regional Commission.
“Climate change isn’t just a singular punch in the gut,” he tells me. “It affects us in a multitude of ways, directly and indirectly. It creates new challenges and exacerbates existing conditions.”
Resilience means being clear-eyed about the threats, accepting that extreme weather events are going to happen, and trying to reduce impact. When such disasters inevitably arrive, Philipsborn adds, resilience requires a focus on bouncing back better.
“Is the recovery time shorter than it was before?” he explains. “Is there a lower level of impact than the previous event? Are you recovering to a better place?”
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Photograph by Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Doomscrolling images of Asheville in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I recognized the superstitious form of storytelling I indulged in during Katrina. A major American city, underwater and suffering. This could never happen in Atlanta, right?
But in reality we just got lucky. Helene was forecast to blaze straight through metro Atlanta, but it veered east; communities between Valdosta and Augusta were devastated before the storm unleashed its full force in Western North Carolina. The further from the coast, the more incomprehensible was the death and damage: Helene obliterated the collective story we have been telling ourselves about safety.
“There is no safe haven,” says Dr. Tish Yager, director of the Georgia Climate Project. “You can’t say it’s just the coast or it’s just people that live on the beach anymore. All of us are in this.”
Photograph by Sean Rayford/Getty Images
We can’t tell ourselves stories to escape this crisis. But we can be better prepared. Last December, Kim Greene, the CEO of Georgia Power, wrote in the Augusta Chronicle about the effort to rebuild Georgia’s power grid after Helene. The hurricane was the most destructive event in the company’s history, she wrote, “exceeding the damage caused by hurricanes Michael, Matthew, and Irma combined.” And it didn’t even hit the most populated part of the state.
Hearing this scared the hell out of me. But Georgia Power’s reconstruction of whole swaths of the power grid within a month—that’s hundreds of transmission structures—was astonishing and reassuring. This is the kind of rapid statewide coordinated response we’ll need in the future.
Photograph by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
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It may be too late to be a climate haven. But what if we could position Atlanta as a climate resilience hub?
“I think cities and chambers of commerce could really start to get behind this idea that there’s a competitive advantage to championing their location as a more resilient place,” said Philipsborn of the Atlanta Regional Commission, “and therefore you should come live here, build here, and invest in this place.”
This will take more than marketing. If we really want to be a climate resiliency haven, we have to keep investing in what protects our city from the ravages of natural disasters, like our urban tree canopy and our stormwater infrastructure. We must find ways to mitigate the changes that are already here: “[In] the same way Californians are having to think about landscaping their yard for fire,” says Yager of the Georgia Climate Project, “Atlantans are going to need to think about landscaping for coolness.”
Perhaps most importantly, we must invest in ourselves—in strengthening connections in our own communities. “Study after study shows that a more socially connected neighborhood or community is a more resilient community,” says Philipsborn.
Yager tells her students that “the most important climate change adaptation is to help your neighbor.” She advises them to work not only on their own carbon footprint but also on creating shared resources for their neighborhood. This could mean cultivating a community garden, raising money for a neighbor’s higher-efficiency heating, or installing a solar microgrid for emergencies, all core components of a local resilience hub.
When I think of Atlanta as a climate haven, I am telling myself a story. But if boosting our climate resiliency makes us more welcoming to neighbors, businesses, and visitors, then maybe it’s more than a story. It’s a reputation that attracts families like Harris’s: people with roots in New Orleans or coastal capitals who find themselves here as a plan B.
At a time when climate action is on the chopping block at the federal level, local climate resiliency efforts might boost what we can do to protect our interconnected communities. These efforts won’t save us from the weather, but they may help us bounce back from storms faster, with infrastructures and systems that are greener and more just than what we had before.
This article appears in our June 2025 issue.
