Before the disaster in Los Angeles, the fires pushed others from California

Christina Welch still remembers what the sky looked like the day the wild fire came within 2 miles (3.2 km) from her home, Santa Rosa, California.

It was the Tubbs fire of 2017, the most destructive in the history of California at the time. G -jj's neighbor woke her up in the morning and told her to catch her belongings and leave. When G -ju Welch opened the door, the ash fell from the sky and the smoke filled the air.

Then, in 2019, Kincade Wildfire forced his parents to evacuate for five days.

It was the last impetus for d -jj Welch. After advice from a friend, she packs her belongings and climbed throughout the country to her new hometown: Dulut, Minnesota.

“It was just the culmination of all this,” said the 42-year-old. “There are only so many times that I would have experienced every fall of anxiety about what I would set fire to if I was going to lose a house.”

D -Ja Welch is one of several people who have left California in recent years due to the incidence of extreme weather, even before the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, 28 people this month.

This week alone in Los Angeles County, northwest of the city, a new, fast -moving fire broke out, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate a region that is already trying to destroy. Trump plans to visit Southern California on Friday to witness the devastation of the flames.

Climate experts say that so far they have not observed mass migration from the state due to climate -related events – and it is difficult to evaluate the number of people who have left for this reason. However, the growth rate of the country's population continues to decrease since 2000, according to the US census.

But scientists and demographic experts say that as climate change leads to the meteorological events becoming increasingly extinct and unpredictable, the number of people who have left the state can rise, leaving some unprepared cities with the task of welcoming new residents S

“It is possible for this wave of new people to say, 'Do you know what? California just won't work for me, because this is the third time in five years that I had to close my doors because of the extreme soot and Smoke, “said Michigan Derek Van Berkel University Professor.

“We have to start preparing for these potentials, because they will become more frequent and more extreme.”

A number of climate -related factors can encourage Californians to leave their home over the next decade. Scientists say climate change has led to more frequent fires. From 2020 to 2023, fires destroyed over 15,000 structures in California, according to Calfire. At least 12,000 structures were lost in wild fires in Los Angeles, which erupted earlier this year.

The state is facing other impacts from climate change, including floods. An increase in sea level can put half a million inhabitants of California in areas prone to floods by 2100, according to the State Prosecutor's Office.

The state also deals with at least two earthquakes every year with a magnitude of 5.5 or more, according to the California Department of Conservation.

As the extreme time has become more frequent, the rates of insurance insurance in the country also continue to grow. More than 100,000 California residents have lost their home insurance since 2019, according to a San Francisco chronicle.

Data show that so far climate migration is more than a local phenomenon, with some moving inside their home country or even looking for a higher place in their own city to avoid floods, said Jeremy Porter, a climate leader of the climate effects with the first street that conducts climate risk modeling.

But he said that in recent years a smaller number of people has begun to flow to cities outside California, which are advertised as potential “climate havens.”

The term appeared in the media after climate -like researcher Jesse Keyan publishes studies of a handful of cities to which people are moving because of their lower risk of extreme climatic events, puts on Cyan “receiving zones.”

One of them was Dulut, Minnesota, a former industrial city, a home of about 90,000 people, a population that has been growing slowly since 2020 after years of stagnation.

One of the withdrawals of the city is its proximity to the Great Lakes, the series of lakes, which consists of the largest freshwater body in the world. About 10% of the United States and 30% of Canada rely on drinking water lakes.

“In a scenario where the resources have become sparse, this is a huge asset,” said G -n Van Berkel.

The water supply of the Great Lakes lures Jamie Beck Alexander and her family of Dulut. Alarmed by three consecutive, destructive seasons of fire in California, Da -Alexander, her husband and two young children accumulated in a camper and boarded all over the country until Minnesota in 2020.

D -Ja Alexander has found similarities between the small, progressive city and their old city of San Francisco.

“There is a real depth of connection between people and deep rooting, things that I think are important to climate resilience,” she said.

Ms. Welch ignores her friends, who thought she was crazy to move to a city known for her record snow and ice conditions, with an average of 106 days a year of freezing. The crunchy, nice city on a hill has become its own, she said.

“There are many people here who love where they live and want to protect it,” G -Ja Welch said for Dulut.

Although some cities have accepted their definition as climate havens, it remains a challenge for the smaller local authorities to find resources to plan new residents and climate resilience, said G -n Van Berkel.

Van Berkel works with Dulut and other cities in the Greater Lakes area to plan climate change, including the welcome of new residents moving due to climate change.

The city of Dulut declined to respond to the BBC's request for comment on how to prepare for a potential welcome for climate migrants.

So far, said Porter, the Grand Lakes region and other cities of climate asylum see no high levels of migration. But if that changed, many wouldn't be ready, he said.

“It would be necessary to invest in local communities … so that these communities can take over the type of population, which some of the literature for climate migration point to,” said Porter.

For example, in the city of Dulut, the presence of housing can be a problem, said G -ja Alexander. She said that although the city has a place to create new homes, it is currently not enough new developments for a growing population. As a result, in the years since she moved there, she said, housing prices have increased.

And any new homes and other developments must also be made with climate change, said G -n Van Berkel.

“We do not want to make the wrong steps that could be very expensive with our infrastructure when we have climate change by growing our ugly head,” he said.

In 2024, a category 4 hurricane destroyed over 2000 homes and businesses in the climate asylum of Kelsey Lah of Asheville, North Carolina.

She moved there in 2020, attracted by the warm climate, restaurant and music scene in the city, after a series of devastating fire seasons and muddy squares near her city Santa Barbara, California.

Before moving, Mrs. Lahr explored the most climate-resistant living areas, with Asheville qualifying near the top because of its softer temperatures and internal location, protecting it from flooding.

But last year, Hurricane Helen plowed through West North Carolina, killing more than 100 people in the state and discharging the new hometown of Asheville of G -Ja Lah. Many have been left without power for nearly 20 days and without drinking drinking water for more than a month.

“Apparently South Appalachia is not the” climate refuge “that is built,” said G -Ja Lah.

In Dulut D -Ja Alexander, she said her family also learned quickly that they could not escape from climate change.

During its first summer, the city was hit with the same smoke and poor air quality that diverted them from California – this time from Canadian fires.

“It was like, this really deep joke that my universe was playing,” she said. “Unless we handle the root cause (climate change), we will always feel as if we have to take and move.”

Since then, she has moved to Wisconsin for personal reasons, but says she does not regret this first time for Minnesota. Nor d -lah regrets that he moved to Asheville.

Although D -lah often misses the ancient forests of Yosemite National Park in California, where she will spend her summer working as a ranger in the park, a future that can bring more climate disasters, she requires casualties, she said.

“Somehow I think the climate is a myth,” she said. “Everyone has to evaluate the risk where they live and go from there.”