As climate change intensifies, communities like Oyster, Virginia, grapple with the complexities of relocation amid rising sea levels and frequent extreme weather events. Many wonder whether relocation—or managed retreat—is a sustainable response to climate risk.

UCLA Professor of Urban Planning Liz Koslov shares insights on the challenges of managed retreat in a wildfire context, offering a comprehensive perspective on this climate adaptation strategy in a new Bloomberg article.

“One big issue with that is that in a flood context if you remove development, you’re both reducing exposure and you’re reducing the risk, because you’ve restored a floodplain, or at least it’s absorbent space,” Koslov says. “Whereas with fire, a big contributor to fire risk is a lot of flammable overgrowth. If you just do a buyout with no attention to what happens to the land afterwards, [you] could increase fire risk rather than reduce it.”