Pamela Jones-Morton, 78, and Barbara Siebert, 79, built their house in southwest Florida’s Estero in 2000 with the intention of growing old there. It was a fortress, even by Florida standards.
Foam sealed the roof’s plywood panels onto special joists, which were rebarred into cement bricks. If the house ever flew away, it'd be in one piece, like “The Wizard of Oz,” Jones-Morton joked.
Estero hadn’t had a hurricane in over 40 years, but the couple, originally from Maryland and Ohio, weren’t taking any chances.
They moved in full time in 2004. Hurricane Charley barreled through later that year. Hurricanes Wilma and Irma followed. In 2022, “Ian is what broke us,” Jones-Morton said.
She piled debris in the street as helicopters whirred overhead, delivering supplies to nearby Sanibel Island.
“We have retired. We have no major income, just our investments, and we cannot lose this house,” Jones-Morton said to her wife. “We just can’t afford to do this.”
Siebert agreed and, in 2024, they moved to Gainesville.
There, they met Ellen Siegel, a longtime Miami resident who left her coastal home when sea level rise backed sewage up into her bathtub.
Trading stories with Siegel one day, Jones-Morton had a revelation.
"I'll be damned," she said, "I am a climate migrant. We absolutely, unequivocally moved to Gainesville because of climate change.”
Sea level rise alone could drive more than 23,000 climate migrants from Florida’s coasts to Alachua County in the next 75 years, according to the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida. That adds an extra 8% to the county’s population growth projections, an increase researchers call relatively small, but significant. County leaders say they’re preparing through policy, drafting food, housing and transportation goals to welcome continuous growth without leaving current residents behind.
Another chapter of Florida migration
Just as climate is part of what’s prompting this wave of migrants to leave coastal Florida, it was what compelled the game-changing population growth that made the modern Sunshine State.
Following World War II, Florida’s population nearly doubled in the 1950s, from 2.7 million people to nearly 5 million.
In 1969, the political analyst Kevin Phillips coined the term Sunbelt to describe a super region of the south, southwest and southern California known for sunny weather and breakneck population and economic growth.
“Service personnel had been stationed in the Sunbelt during the war and realized ‘hey, this is a great, cheap place to live,’” said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University and director of its Center on Climate Change and Urbanism.
That growth continued as the sunshine endured and household air conditioning made the region’s heat and humidity manageable. People kept coming in the 1990s and 2000s, too, driven more by cheap housing, affordable energy and low property taxes than weather.
In the region today, “there's still a net population gain,” Keenan said, “but that net population gain is slowing down.”
Demographic changes come from who stops coming and who starts leaving. Across the Sunbelt, in general, utility bills are rising and affordability is falling, he said. Combined with the growing climate hazards of extreme heat and stronger storms, it’s enough to make some people leave.
“Among these highly mobile populations that are more sensitive, for instance, to temperature and climate, are people in their twenties who are wanting to build a long-term foundation,” Keenan said. “They're very sensitive to the idea that a hurricane or a flood could come by and wipe their community away.”
Jones-Morton, Siebert and about 4.6 million other Florida residents over the age of 65 are a mobile population, too. After a childhood in Ohio, Siebert told her foster parents at 16 she’d retire to Florida. She, like many others, wanted to seek the sun but climate hazards gave her an unexpected push inland.
“People are essentially moving away from the coasts,” Keenan said. “That is going to represent an enormous challenge to manage that growth in central Florida.”
Geographers and anthropologists are now distancing themselves from the idea of “climate havens” immune to disasters. Real estate marketers once touted Asheville, North Carolina, as a refuge from extreme heat and rising seas, but Hurricane Helene “swept the illusion away like a riverside cabin on Sept. 27,” wrote one local opinion columnist.
While Jones-Morton and Siebert still consider their Gainesville home a safer spot than their former neighborhood in Estero, drought-driven wildfires in north central Florida filled their courtyard with smoke this spring. It was the first time either woman had encountered a wildfire.
Keenan describes “receiving zones” instead of havens in his book, “North: The Future of Post-Climate America.”
“In the context of housing and human mobility, climate's just one dimension of a slew of different factors,” Keenan said, listing schools, affordability, job opportunities and crime as others.
Receiving zones attract people displaced by climate change with any number of these other factors, he said. Preparing for that growth sustainably is, as Keenan sees it, “not just a tremendous economic opportunity. It's an ethical imperative for the quality of life of Central Floridians.”
How to make a hospitable county
Alachua County’s population has nearly doubled since 1980 and demographers expect its growth to continue. They project the county’s population will grow 56% by 2100 or 48%, not accounting for migrants driven by sea level rise.
The difference between those estimates, though small, corresponds to a bit more traffic on the way to the grocery store, Keenan said, or an extra kid in the classroom.
“What are the costs of the quality of life in our daily routine that are impacted by these relatively small amounts of population growth?” he asked. “What do we need to do today to begin to plan for that tomorrow?”
Local governments develop what are known as comprehensive plans to guide policymaking on everything from schools to stormwater runoff. They update those plans about every seven years in Florida, in accordance with state law. Alachua County released a draft of its update earlier this year.
In 2025, Alachua County became one of the first landlocked communities in Florida to adopt what’s known as a “climate action plan.”
The “aspirational” plan, while not policy, closely references the county’s comprehensive plan, “so that this is all integrated over the long term,” said county resiliency specialist Jennison Kipp.
The plan lays out nearly 200 “action items” like using more buildings as cooling centers and training crisis center staff on the psychological impacts of climate change.
“ There was a very genuine, deliberate and thoughtful effort put in to ensure that as many voices as possible were reflected,” Kipp said.
The county studied which of its populations were most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, then arranged in-person interviews and sent out community surveys to hear their concerns. Staff and citizen boards provided input during the three-year drafting process, too.
“All of that is trying to address this continuous growth while not leaving behind or forgetting about the people who are already here,” Kipp said.
Local organizations have championed that cause for decades. The Alachua Conservation Trust, a local nonprofit, helps protect residents and resources alike by keeping development away from environmentally sensitive areas.
“Florida is like exhibit A of people willing to build in places that are flood prone,” said Tom Kay, the organization’s executive director.
Wetlands, shrubs, trees and other natural resources help soak up or slow down heavy rains as they flow to nearby creeks and rivers, he said. Paving over them can put new builds at risk, plus reroute water to longtime landmarks that didn’t use to flood.
“A big focus for Alachua County and for ACT is trying to protect those places to buffer those natural waterways so that they can continue to function in the way they were intended to,” Kay said.
He pointed to the example of the Santa Fe River, which reached record levels during Hurricane Irma in 2017, forcing some residents to evacuate. ACT hopes to prevent further development along the “dynamic and flashy” river, Kay said, both for residents’ safety and the river’s. It has protected about two-thirds of the land along the river so far, he said, and aims for three-quarters.
The Alachua County Forever program, partially funded by a countywide surtax, has protected more than 36,000 acres of land since 2000. Keeping development away from environmentally sensitive areas helps tourism, too, said County Environmental Protection Department director Stephen Hofstetter.
“There's incredible natural resources here. We have beautiful lakes. We've got a river that borders our boundary. We've got springs, which may be the biggest economic driver in our region,” he said. “Protecting those resources not only makes us more resilient, but it helps us economically.”
To Jones-Morton and Siebert, North Central Florida’s nature is part of what makes it feel like home. Avid birders, the pair frequented forests and trails around the region even before their move.
Today, they never miss a Florida Gators softball game and frequently attend lectures by professors in town. They speak fondly of their old house in Estero but would never move back.
“If we're together, then wherever we are...” Jones-Morton started. “...Is home,” Siebert finished.
