The Hill: “Western North Carolina Was Hailed as a ‘Climate Haven.’ Hurricane Helene Shows It’s Not So Simple.”
RFF Senior Fellow Margaret Walls shares her thoughts on extreme weather trends in this article about damage from Hurricane Helene.
“Some of these places, especially at higher elevation, it’s not too hot, you’re far from the coast … places like Asheville have a lot of appeal” as climate refuges, said Margaret Walls, an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future.
However, she said, in the mountains “the terrain makes it such that flooding is a problem,” and particularly in poverty-stricken areas, “there are a limited number of places people can live so they tend to live in flood prone places.”
