Buffalo Tests its Status as a Climate Refuge

BUFFALO, N.Y.—At a Puerto Rican cultural center on Buffalo’s West Side, young dancers in bright skirts swayed to the sound of drums in an Afro-Carribean tradition carried across generations. 

Eighteen-year-old Darnel Davila maintained a steady beat, striking his drum in time with each snap of the skirts. 

Davila and his family came to Buffalo in 2017 after Hurricane Maria, one of the deadliest disasters in Puerto Rico’s history. It ripped through his hometown of Loiza, tearing the roofs off of buildings, and caused the longest blackout in U.S. history.

When it was finally safe to leave his house, Davila opened his door to a neighborhood he no longer recognized.

The streets were flooded, trees uprooted. The gym where he spent much of his childhood shooting hoops with friends was reduced to rubble. The roof had caved in during the storm, leaving the basketball hoop exposed above piles of debris.

Maria left his family without power for months and their struggles grew. His mother lost her job, and his father struggled to support the family of four earning just $7 per hour. They weighed a difficult choice: Stay in Loiza and risk falling further into hardship, or leave everything they knew behind.

They chose to move to Buffalo, where an aunt had already settled. When he first arrived, Davila, then 10 years old, spoke no English, and the harsh, snowy winters were unlike anything he’d seen before.

Little did the family know, Buffalo’s leaders would soon start branding the city as a climate refuge after a Harvard study revealed that Buffalo and Duluth, Minnesota, were the most suitable cities in the U.S. for people looking to resettle away from the risks of the warming globe, such as sea level rise, hotter temperatures, fiercer storms and wildfires.

Some have pushed back against this idea, including Davila.

“I don’t think Buffalo is somewhere you could call a climate refuge because the snow here is not a joke,” he said.

He remembered his mother trudging through six inches of snow on her way to work with his baby brother on her hip. “I’d always wanted to see snow, but I didn’t think it was this bad,” Davila said. 

Still, his family hoped this city would offer the stability the island no longer could. And it did. Eight years after Maria, Davila is now fluent in English and a lead bomba drummer at El Batey, a local Puerto Rican cultural center. Davila credits his success to the support he received from Buffalo’s Puerto Rican community.

Since Maria, a greater number of Puerto Ricans migrated to Buffalo than in previous years. While some eventually returned to the island, many stayed in New York. Puerto Ricans now make up roughly 74 percent of Buffalo’s Latino and Hispanic population. According to census data, Buffalo saw an increase of roughly 6,000 Puerto Ricans between 2015 and 2019.

Over the years, Buffalo’s leaders advertised the city as a place where people could be spared the worst outcomes of climate change, pointing to its fresh water supply from the Great Lakes and relative insulation from heat waves and wildfires. 

The label gained widespread traction in 2019, when Buffalo mayor Byron Brown declared Buffalo to be a “climate refuge city for centuries to come,” in his State of the City address. 

Six years later, the claim remains contested, with critics questioning whether Buffalo has the climate and infrastructure to still call itself a refuge.

What Is a Climate Refuge?

Climate refuge cities in the U.S. are those expected to face less extreme shifts than other parts of the country as weather patterns change as a result of global warming. 

While these cities can still experience harsh weather, like Buffalo’s blizzards, those conditions have not grown markedly worse in severity or frequency.

Buffalo sits on the deepest part of Lake Erie, where the water stays cooler longer and keeps the city’s summer temperatures mild.

“Because of our position on Lake Erie, we have become a climate refuge,” said Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.). “As we see increased temperatures as a regular part of life, more people are looking to Buffalo to find their homes, recognizing that Lake Erie is a natural air conditioner.”

Buffalo is the last major city in the continental United States to not reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit. While Buffalo will reach 100 degrees eventually, experts believe it will be one of the last places to do so. 

But being a climate refuge does not necessarily make the city a haven.

“A climate refuge is not an oasis. It’s not a place that’s not going to have extreme weather or be immune to climate change,” said Stephen Vermette, a geography professor at Buffalo State University who researches climate trends within Western New York. “What makes a place possibly a climate change refuge is that the changes are not as extreme as in other parts of the country.”

Vermette studied Buffalo’s climate data over 50 years, expecting to find examples of extreme weather such as a greater number of warm days or greater precipitation amounts. 

While he did note that the temperatures were rising by a rate of 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, he was surprised to find that conditions in Buffalo responded to climate change far slower than in other parts of the country.

“If we look at snowfall and lake effect events over the years, they’re still occurring, but they don’t seem to be increasing or decreasing,” said Vermette.

Buffalo is one of several climate zones within Western New York that appear to be resilient to climate change. Vermette said the overall region is responding well to climate change.

On the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s national risk index, which assesses natural hazard risk in counties across the United States, Erie County, which includes Buffalo, is identified as an area of relatively moderate risk. The surrounding counties in Western New York are all designated as relatively or very low risk areas. 

“There is variation,” Vermette said, “but overall the whole region is responding together.” 

However, because of the unpredictability of global warming, the relative resilience to climate change in Buffalo and Western New York up to this point does not guarantee the same climate patterns will continue in the future. 

“With our climate system changing so drastically, I don’t think our historical trends are necessarily going to continue in a linear fashion in the future,” said Susan Clark, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo who studies climate policy and the impacts of power outages from natural disasters. “We need to think about future changes and not just base all our decisions on what’s happened in the past.”

Buffalo currently has a stable, hospitable climate, but migration decisions are rarely about climate alone. By 2022, a study found that New York as a whole saw a net decline of nearly 2,000 Puerto Ricans.

“Employment, family, and social issues are more of a driving factor to determine where people are actually living,” Clark said.

The label soon became a marketing tool for officials and groups supporting migration to Buffalo. Economic development organizations like Invest Buffalo Niagara embraced Buffalo’s “climate refuge” label as a feature in their Be in Buffalo talent attraction program. This strategy sought to reshape the perception of Buffalo’s harsh and snowy winters by positioning its climate as an asset rather than a drawback.

“Even if climate isn’t the first reason someone moves to Buffalo, if it’s part of their calculus and changes their view on the weather from a negative to neutral, that’s a huge win for us,” said Greg Pokriki, communications manager at Invest Buffalo Niagara.

Henry Louis Taylor, an urban planning professor at the University at Buffalo, cautioned that while politicians have pushed the climate refuge idea, welcoming new people could increase housing costs and disadvantage current residents.

“People are acquiring properties and are thinking about ways in which they will utilize this climate haven city as a way to maximize their profits and they are not thinking about ways to create greater access of the population to inexpensive housing,” Taylor said.

For Davila, climate was a driving factor for leaving Puerto Rico, but certainly not the reason his family chose Buffalo. 

“We moved because we had somebody who would give us some place to stay,” Davila said. “There was a very strong community in Buffalo. Puerto Rican people helped us out.” 

While Buffalo may attract more climate migrants in the immediate future, the unpredictability of climate change still leaves observers uneasy. 

“I don’t love the term climate haven,” Clark said. “I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world you can escape climate change, including Buffalo.”

This story has been updated to correct the origins of the term “climate refuge.”