Read the original article from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
Scholars from around the world will be in Rochester, in-person and virtually, to discuss climate havens and the impact of people displaced by the impact of climate change.
The Climate Havens Symposium, a joint endeavor by University of Rochester and RIT, will examine the topic through the lens of the humanities on April 16 and April 17. Climate havens are regions expected to experience relatively fewer impacts from climate change like extreme heat, water scarcity and sea-level rise. The Great Lakes region is considered to be one.
The symposium was organized by Tanya Bakhmetyeva, associate director of the Humanities Center at UR and Christine Keiner, chair of the Department of Science, Technology and Society at RIT.
The presentations at the symposium, which will be at the UR Humanities Center on April 16 and RIT’s Center for Student Development on April 17, highlight those human-level impacts. It includes welcome remarks by Mayor Malik Evans, a keynote address on “The ‘Climate Haven’ Myth: Why History, Place and Race Matter,” and a two-part look at the Great Lakes connection to climate migration. There are also talks on artists’ interventions, indigenous knowledge and practices, and global perspectives on climate featuring scholars from India, Nigeria and Bangladesh.
Discussion of climate havens has become more familiar in the media, public policy and urban planning —though without much agreement on what it means, Keiner said. There has been less adoption in the humanities so the idea of a symposium could have seen little reaction. Instead, there were 60 applications from which the pool of 35 scholars was selected.
Bakhmetyeva said she’s heard from people who’ve moved to the Rochester area because it is viewed as a climate haven. The symposium focus isn’t the scientific evidence for climate change — the reality of climate migration is already here.
“I’m just going to work with the people that I encounter who tell me, ‘We were tired of our insurance going up and insurance pricing us out of our house because, you know, we’ve encountered multiple hurricanes’ or other people say, ‘There’s no water where I used to live in Arizona and I had to move,’” Bakhmetyeva said.
With the Great Lakes region — including Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse — in the discussion of those havens, Bakhmetyeva and Keiner wanted to explore what it means for those living there or looking to move there.
“It’s not all about policy and geography and temperature,” Bakhmetyeva said. “It’s about people and communities.”
The large-scale internal migration based on climate conditions is akin to the Great Migration in the early 20thcentury, when many African Americans moved from the South to northern cities, escaping racial terrorism to still encounter extreme racism, Keiner said. “How can we take all of that historical knowledge and try to not replicate these same kinds of suspicions and prejudices against outsiders?” Keiner said.
The symposium, when originally conceived in 2024, sought a National Endowment of the Humanities grant but it was not granted before the Trump administration policies that pulled or denied funding for climate-related projects.
“Whether we like or not, and whether the administration likes it or not, climate migration is happening and people are moving, actively, to places where they feel they will be at least partially isolated from lack of water, hurricanes intensifying, violent eruptions of nature,” Bakhmetyeva said.
With no federal funding, the symposium was instead made possible by contributions from sponsors including the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Central New York Humanities Corridor, the Humanities Center at UR, the Institute for Human Health and the Environment at UR, and the RIT College of Liberal Arts Office of the Dean, Department of Science, Technology and Society and History Department.
Other faculty involved in the symposium included Richard Newman and Kristoffer Whitney at RIT and Stewart Weaver and Karen Berger at UR.
Steve Howe reports on suburban growth, development and environment for the Democrat and Chronicle. An RIT graduate, he has covered myriad topics over the years, including public safety, local government, national politics and economic development in New York and Utah.