Across the Northern Hemisphere, species are shifting their ranges: flora and fauna are moving north, and marine life is moving toward cooler waters as ecosystems track a warming world. But what about humans?

In North: The Future of Post-Climate America (Oxford University Press), urban planner and climate adaptation scholar Jesse M. Keenan argues that climate change is already influencing how and where Americans live—not through a single dramatic exodus, but through the less obvious but nonetheless potent mechanisms of housing markets, insurance pricing, infrastructure investments, and institutional constraints. (Read an excerpt from North here.)

Rather than offering a speculative vision of the future, Keenan examines the forces already in motion and the difficult tradeoffs they demand. Bioneers spoke with him about adaptation, governance, inequality, and why climate change may be less a moral story than a structural one.

Bioneers: What made you write North now?

Jesse M. Keenan: For me, this book is the culmination of almost 20 years of work. A number of years ago, I became deeply curious about the idea that climate change would alter how and where we live through the mechanisms of the built environment—housing, real estate, infrastructure—the systems that shape the material dimensions of our lives.

At the time, there was exactly one scientific paper on the topic of how a warming climate alters how you pour concrete. As I ventured into researching the relationships between climate change and real estate, people said I was crazy. But from my prior work in post-disaster reconstruction and housing markets, it seemed intuitive: If we stay on the course we’re on, this isn’t going to end well.

North isn’t a distant projection of the future. It’s about the mechanisms already in motion—economic signals, institutional constraints, physical risks—that are accelerating difficult decisions about where and how we live. The book is really a treatise on adaptation. Human mobility is simply the lens through which we can see it unfolding.

Bioneers: Why “North”? And what does ecological range shifting teach you?[1] 

Jesse: The title North isn’t meant to be taken literally in terms of cardinal direction. Rather, the title is rooted—at least in terms of my inspiration—in ecological range shifting. Across the northern hemisphere, we’re observing flora and fauna moving north for more suitable environments—so why wouldn’t humans, as part of complex socioecological systems, also move north?

Of course, humans are different. Technology and institutions act as differentiators. We can build air conditioning. We can harden infrastructure. We can subsidize public investments and extend insurance. We can adapt our environment in ways other species cannot. At the same time, there are limits to our ability to adapt.

So “North” becomes less about a simple directional shift and more about the broader mechanisms through which environmental change interacts with economic systems, governance structures, and human decision-making. It’s a metaphor for movement—not just geographic shifts, but institutional, financial, and social transformations already underway.

Bioneers: How do we measure climate-driven mobility, and can we actually quantify the climate signal?

Jesse: It’s important to start by saying that climate is very rarely a unilateral driver. It’s one of many factors shaping how and where people live. That said, climate is on the table, and in many cases, it’s a significant component, especially as it interacts with chronic economic stresses, such as housing affordability and the cost of living.

There are several ways researchers try to measure how climate change influences human mobility and immobility. We can observe long-term out-migration patterns after floods, fires, or storms. We can utilize interviews and survey-based research in receiving communities—asking people what factors shaped how and why they ended up where they did. Some social scientists are even using agent-based models to attempt to simulate mobility patterns based on people’s emerging behaviors and preferences.

But the research still has a long way to go to understand the role that climate plays in shaping our mobility patterns. Human mobility is remarkably predictable in some ways. We follow fairly consistent demographic patterns. Yet, climate motivations are much more nuanced. They vary by geography, by culture, by local belief systems, and by things like the emotional attachment to place. The power of affective reasoning that shapes why people remain in high-risk areas, even under dangerous circumstances, is extraordinary.

Today, much of the movement we’re seeing is also fairly localized, insofar as people often are simply moving from one part of town to another. They are not necessarily moving across the country. At the same time, it’s not just displacement. There are multiple cohorts on the move: yes, some are involuntarily being pushed out of high-risk areas, but others are voluntarily on the move because of the opportunities—as they perceive it—to lower their risk exposure.

For instance, we can say more confidently that those with increased measures of wealth and labor mobility fall into this category of preemptive movers. Simply put—the capability to move is shaped by money and labor skills, and many rich people are deeply engaged in building transgenerational wealth outside of the ravages of high-risk areas. That introduces a dimension of economic inequality into the story, particularly in the context of the growing inequalities that may arise in high-risk sending zones as wealth and jobs move elsewhere. At the same time, many people remain deeply tied, emotionally and culturally, to place. That tension between mobility and immobility is central to understanding what’s unfolding.

Bioneers: Why do people stay in risky places even when it seems irrational? What’s driving that push and pull?

Jesse: A central argument in the book is that the market economy is shaping our future pathways more than we recognize. We tend to think democratic institutions decide who gets protected and who doesn’t—that we collectively choose the winners and losers. But in many cases, market economies are already making those decisions for us.

At the same time, those signals are often clouded. Public institutions are frequently disincentivized from fully acknowledging climate risk. Local governments want to preserve their tax base. They want to maintain stability and economic output. State insurance regulators have historically faced pressure not to incorporate forward-looking climate risk into pricing because of what that would mean for consumers and the subsequent political backlash.

So, you have this tension: Markets are beginning to send signals about risk, but public institutions often resist passing this information on. That resistance isn’t always malicious. It’s often about institutional self-interest and survival. But the result is that information gets blurred. People rebuild. Risk persists. And, in some high-risk places, the status quo is maintained longer than it probably should be.

Bioneers: You’ve argued that public institutions are falling behind. What does that look like in practice?

Jesse: Adaptation is difficult politics because it inevitably produces winners and losers. Mitigation—decarbonization—has a clearer moral arc, a precise empirical measure, and a broader political appeal. Adaptation, by contrast, forces hard choices about where to invest, where not to invest, and who bears the costs and burdens of resource allocation. That makes it less politically advantageous, especially for leaders who are beholden to the status quo.

At the federal level, adaptation policy has often been relegated to a marginal issue despite the vast macroeconomic and social welfare implications. It’s sometimes folded into other frameworks, such as environmental justice, rather than advanced directly and explicitly. No politician wants to stand up and tell people that their community is in a location where no amount of money or engineering could possibly ensure their ability to stay in place in the long term. At the state level, there are similar constraints in terms of the political headwinds. As a consequence, the most acute pressure is on local governments.

In the United States, we have more than 90,000 governmental entities. Many are small, fragmented jurisdictions operating under strong home rule traditions. They are often the least equipped—lacking technical expertise, fiscal capacity, or institutional bandwidth—to confront complex multisector climate risks. Yet, they are the ones left holding the bag.

There’s also a disclosure trap wherein once a municipality formally acknowledges certain physical climate risks, it can trigger regulatory and economic obligations to do something about the problem. But many local governments simply don’t have the fiscal capacity or political support to do much of anything. Transparency can create liabilities they cannot afford to meet.

The result is a governance system that is fragmented, under-resourced, and structurally outdated for the scale of the challenge. It’s not always about ideology. It’s often about institutional capacity, and the gaps there are significant, particularly when the municipal bond market is racing ahead to price climate risk.

Bioneers: If public institutions are lagging, what role is the private sector playing in shaping adaptation?

Jesse: Markets economies are certainly shaping the flow of capital in ways that shape what public institutions can and cannot do.

When a local government goes to borrow money, credit rating agencies and investors are asking questions: Have you considered the physical risks to this infrastructure? What happens to your revenue if flooding disrupts operations? How will climate impacts affect your long-term debt obligations? Those pressures influence where public investment flows and how projects are structured.

There are positive aspects to this accelerated market adaptation. Risk is being priced and analyzed more rigorously. But there’s also a more troubling trend: what I call the ‘climate intelligence arms race.’ Increasingly, proprietary climate risk analytics are creating asymmetries of information. Firms develop highly sophisticated models, but the insights are often well out of view of the general public.

As I document in the book, there are cases where a local government used proprietary climate analytics for planning purposes, realized a particular area faced significant risk, and then discovered it could not publicly disclose that information because of licensing constraints of the proprietary information. That creates a profound tension. The public is left without full transparency about risks that directly affect them.

At a basic level, markets operate on information. But when that information is unevenly distributed or intentionally limited, people cannot make informed decisions about where and how they live. That asymmetry shapes outcomes just as powerfully as policy does. In this sense, there are real limits to the idea that consumers can adapt by listening out for market signals about climate risk.

Bioneers: What would “getting it right” look like? Are there places doing this well?

Jesse: Progress is happening, but unevenly. Jurisdictions with resources, political will, and institutional capacity are moving forward. Larger cities tend to have the expertise and fiscal tools to invest in adaptation. They’ll continue to make strategic investments.

The deeper challenge lies in smaller cities and rural counties that lack capacity. They often don’t have climate specialists, resilience planners, or the administrative bandwidth to pursue funding effectively. Even when federal programs exist, they can be complex and expensive to navigate.

What we need are stronger regional governance models that build capacity across jurisdictions. In Massachusetts, for example, the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program supports local governments in assessing risk and collaborating regionally. This is critical because some states like Massachusetts have tiny townships that are a relic of colonial era governance and are not up to the task with managing infrastructure and climate change problems that extend well beyond their limited jurisdictions. Out of necessity, the commonwealth plays a constructive role in filling institutional gaps while preserving local engagement.

But there’s a tension. States are increasingly centralizing authority. In some cases, that can result in strengthened coordination in the hands of state administrators who use state funding to incentivize local adaptation investments. In other cases, state legislators can suppress local innovation and climate action, such as what we see in Florida, where cities like Miami and Tampa have lost many regulatory tools that are critical for moving people and a tax base out of harm’s way. So “getting it right” isn’t just about funding. It’s about institutional design and whether governance structures are modernized to meet the scale of the challenge.

Bioneers: In the book’s closing argument, you suggest we need to stop moralizing climate change. What do you mean by that?

Jesse: For too long, climate change has been framed primarily as a moral imperative—as a question of what we ought to do, grounded in what we perceive to be the morally righteous outcome. That framing has a certain power for political mobilization, but it can also obscure the realities of adaptation.

Adaptation is messy. It involves tradeoffs. It creates winners and losers. Sometimes that means protecting people over protecting the environment. It forces tough decisions about who is protected, who relocates, where capital flows, and how institutions respond. Those outcomes are contested. They’re not grounded or guided by a moral consensus.

If we’re going to be successful in advancing environmental quality and social welfare, we need more robust public conversations about that messiness and who is really making the decisions that shape what comes next. Step one is acknowledging that markets are moving faster than democracy can keep up. This means we need to fundamentally rethink the nature of what it means for the public sector to invest in our future.  

Constantly projecting adaptation as some kind of universally positive outcome that will manifest in the future if we truly believe in the righteousness of our cause fundamentally overlooks the fact that the processes of adaptation (and maladaptation) are already well underway all across America. We need to be more attentive to how climate impacts people’s everyday lives—their cost of living, job prospects, health, and family relationships. When we communicate in a way that acknowledges those lived realities in blue and red states alike, we can build a broader and more diverse coalition for the stewardship of our future. I don’t make the argument that we should empower markets to shape the future of post-climate America. I make the argument that this is already happening.