Environment, Place, Risk, and Migration: Investigating the Intersection of Environmental Perceptions & Movement Intentions Within the US Gulf Coast

In the United States, some 94 million people (29% of the US population) live in areas immediately adjacent to a coast. The global phenomenon of climate-induced environmental change is largely framed as a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, where individuals, communities, and populations inhabiting at-risk locations are either forced to relocate or do so of their own accord. Yet residents of such at-risk areas are increasingly actively choosing to remain, even as risk intensifies. Using a mixed-methods approach, this dissertation examines environmental perceptions, the internalization of risk, the influence of information sources, and how individuals residing in coastal locations process their migration decisions. Established migration and hazard frameworks and theory are poorly positioned to understand the environments’ role in migration decisions. From these perspectives, environmental factors are near exclusively framed as negative affective biophysical push factors. Migration frameworks also fail to adequately incorporate reasons for non-migration. This dissertation directly addresses both these gaps in understanding. This research utilizes data from across the Gulf Coast, with a focus on fieldwork from Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, and a dataset of 123 surveys and 63 interviews across a diverse group of coastal residents. Residents perceive of their environment in much more robust terms than just the biophysical. A majority of terms incorporated social and cultural aspects of environment, and environmental meaning was expressed across a continuum of proximal (most important/close) to more distal (less important/distant) scales. Little support is found for the traditional idea that economic or natural-environmental factors are more influential in decisions to migrate away from ones’ home. In predicting migration intention, socially and environmentally derived variables improved migration model performance. This dissertation demonstrates that internalization of risk by coastal residents is not a straightforward relationship, but rather one mediated by; social-environmental factors, personal experience, sense of place, and trust, which in turn influences intention to migrate, move locally, or remain in place. Residents perceive of their environment far more broadly than current risk-management planning allows. Results provide coastal residents, as well as community leaders and emergency managers who perceive environment differently, new tools for productive engagement and future policy development within coastal landscapes.