ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Clim.
Sec. Climate Mobility
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fclim.2025.1514456
This article is part of the Research TopicManaged Retreat in Response to Climate HazardsView all 9 articles
Evaluating Pre-Disaster Subsidized Relocations in Coastal Louisiana via a Game-Theoretic Approach
Provisionally accepted
- Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States
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Coastal communities face increasing flood risks due to sea level rise and climate change, necessitating more proactive risk reduction strategies. Pre-disaster relocations, supported by government subsidies, offer a potentially cost-effective solution, enabling at-risk homeowners to relocate before catastrophic losses occur. This study estimates the potential effectiveness and equity implications of two pre-disaster relocation strategies using an optimization framework and highresolution flood risk and structural data from Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan. Our findings indicate that a total investment of about $8 billion US in pre-disaster relocations could achieve approximately $0.5 billion in flood risk reduction annually over the next fifty years, with greater benefits in later years corresponding to increasing hazard as sea levels rise. Subsidies are allocated proportionally to flood risk, ensuring procedural fairness, though potential distributional inequities remain. While predisaster relocation strategies improve cost-effectiveness and risk mitigation, they do not fully resolve barriers to relocation, including housing affordability, community attachment, and structural inequities in flood exposure. This study provides quantitative insights into relocation feasibility and trade-offs, informing future research on adaptive relocation strategies and equity-focused flood mitigation policies.
Keywords: pre-disaster relocation, Buyouts, coastal flooding, Risk Management, Game theory
Received: 20 Oct 2024; Accepted: 04 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Jha and Johnson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: David Richard Johnson, Purdue University, West Lafayette, United States
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