A new paper generated a fair amount of consternation and eye-rolling when the authors claimed that New Orleans, the largest city in Louisiana, is at risk of being surrounded by open water by the end of the century. As human-caused global warming continues to drive sea-level rise, coastal Louisiana, the paper states, has likely ‘already crossed the point of no return.’ Under the current warming trajectory, the projected loss of the remaining coastal wetlands in southern Louisiana puts over 1 million residents ‘in harm’s way,’ according to the authors. Though that may sound shocking, it wasn’t the controversial part of the paper, which was published in Nature Sustainability this month — at least not to some outspoken critics. Instead, the authors were criticized for arguing that New Orleans should consider managed retreat, or relocating further inland to higher ground to avoid the worst climate impacts. ‘[P]lease stop saying ‘relocate New Orleans.’ That’s not going to happen,’ wrote Christopher Ard, an 11th-generation New Orleanian, in an opinion column in The Lens, a local non-profit newsroom. Ard added, ‘If people want to move, they will,’ and that researchers should instead use ‘words like ‘abandon’ or ‘give up on’ or maybe even ‘find somewhere new,’’ to describe this out-migration. ‘Relocate just sounds silly,’ he wrote. In their paper, the authors estimate coastal Louisiana could face 3 to 7 meters of sea-level rise and further predict that parts of the state’s shoreline will move inwards by 100 kilometers, closer to Baton Rouge. And while they acknowledge that the timeline for these processes is unclear, they insist that the region has a matter of decades to plan for migration away from these dangers, not centuries. The paper does not propose how and when those living in the Mississippi River Delta should move, but rather urges that preparing for projected sea-level rise ‘is a long process that cannot be put off.’ Left out of the paper’s scope is what happens to people whose jobs and livelihoods are tied to the coastline — like fisherpeople — in a managed retreat scenario. Louisiana is the second-largest producer of seafood in the United States, after Alaska, and New Orleans is a central hub for fisheries that catch shrimp, crabs, and fin fish from the wild, as well as harvest oysters, catfish, crawfish, and alligators. ‘For the fishermen in the state of Louisiana, the loss of, or not being able to use New Orleans as a hub, as a source of infrastructure, as a place to sell seafood — New Orleans consumes a lot of seafood as a market — would be devastating,’ said Jeffrey Plumlee, an assistant professor at the School of Renewable Natural Resources at Louisiana State University. An abandoned boat sits in coastal waters and marsh in Venice, Louisiana. Drew Angerer / Getty Images It’s important to note that while the paper advocates for managed retreat from the coast, the authors caution against overstating the impacts of sea-level rise. ‘Eventually, yes, this is not going to be a livable place anymore,’ said Torbjörn Törnqvist, one of the paper’s co-authors. But ‘New Orleans is still going to be around by the end of the century,’ he said — it just may look a lot more like Venice, Italy, a city completely surrounded by open water. Such a process would undoubtedly impact the seafood industry in Louisiana, which has already been hit hard by worsening hurricanes — among other factors that have turned the fishing profession into precarious work. Severe storms have badly damaged critical infrastructure for fisheries, like ice houses and fuel docks. When those facilities are destroyed — or if they’re never repaired or replaced — the work becomes harder, and people start looking for opportunities elsewhere. Additionally, young people see the challenges of the industry and start considering other lines of work. ‘It’s called the graying of the fleet,’ a term that describes how the fishing workforce is aging, said Plumlee. This process is not dissimilar from what is happening in southern Louisiana more broadly, where the population has fallen four times in the last five years according to census data. That population decline is not only or specifically tied to extreme weather or environmental conditions. ‘What you notice in coastal Louisiana is the aging of the population. ‘Young people are leaving to go find jobs and places where they have more opportunities,’ said Beth Fussell, a sociologist and demographer at Brown University, who peer-reviewed the managed-retreat paper. This out-migration, she says, has ‘most likely has nothing to do with their perception of environmental risk.’ It’s true that it is difficult to say with certainty who qualifies as a climate migrant or climate refugee — and in the case of coastal Louisiana, Törnqvist and his co-authors acknowledge movement out of this area is ‘multi-causal.’ But it’s undeniable that environmental factors also shape what jobs and economic opportunities are available — for example, insurance companies have been raising prices or even pulling out of Louisiana entirely. According to Lawrence Huang, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, the challenge of moving to a new place and finding new ways to make a living is exactly why people in low-lying communities like New Orleans should make plans sooner rather than later. ‘This is why starting early and planning now matters, because it takes such a long time to help people find new skills and new occupations,’ said Huang. In a situation where a major U.S. city becomes unlivable due to sea-level rise and decides to relocate, he added, ‘we’re going to have to reskill people so that they can find jobs in their new location. That is the unfortunate reality.’ Read Next The world is getting too hot to feed itself Ayurella Horn-Muller If the notion of picking up a whole community and moving it sounds far-fetched, one only needs to look at recent history — and particularly, the experiences of Indigenous peoples — to see that Huang is right. In southern Louisiana, the Isle de Jean Charles, a state-recognized Native American tribe, received nearly $50 million from the federal government in 2016 to relocate to higher ground, after the island on which the tribe lived lost 98 percent of its landmass due to severe coastal erosion and subsidence. The tribal nation is considered the nation’s first climate migrants. In a 2022 interview with StoryCorps, Albert Naquin, the chief of the Isle de Jean Charles, noted that members’ ways of sustaining themselves shifted along with the geography of the island. ‘Where we used to walk at, now we use boat to travel in,’ said Naquin. ‘And where we used to trap and raise cattle, now we shrimp.’ Nevertheless, according to many tribal members, the relocation was a bust. ‘It’s not worth it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody,’ one tribal member who relocated told the New York Times. The issues with relocating are myriad, and go beyond what job one will have after migrating. Huang emphasized that, ‘Planned relocation and managed retreat are not popular terms and it’s because people don’t want to move.’ Any conversation around climate-driven human migration, therefore, should ‘start from that point,’ he argued. Still, he admitted, ‘It’s a good conversation to be having.’ This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As seas rise, where will Louisiana’s fishers go? on May 21, 2026.