For the past 30 years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has been conducting a vast, real-world experiment in climate adaptation. Using money from a little-known grant program, the agency has paid tens of thousands of homeowners to leave flood-prone properties and move elsewhere, in a process known as “managed retreat.”

These homeowners have used FEMA money to move back from coastal areas and river basins from New Jersey to Texas to Iowa, usually fleeing in the wake of major floods and storms. But even though the buyout program has become the government’s primary tool for encouraging managed retreat, FEMA has never kept tabs on what happens to buyout participants after they leave their homes. As a result, there is scant information about how effective the program is at reducing flood risk — or about where these first waves of American climate migrants have gone.

A few years ago, researchers at Rice University set out to change that. In a new study published this week, they match federal records with private consumer address data to trace the path of almost 10,000 buyout households that have taken FEMA money, or around a quarter of all program participants. The study offers the clearest picture yet of how the buyout program works, and the strongest evidence so far that it reduces the risk that climate change has brought to American shores. While the findings show that most buyout homeowners move only short distances, they prove that those participants actually do seek new homes with substantially lower flood exposure.

But the study also finds that program outcomes look very different depending on the racial makeup of a given neighborhood. Homeowners in majority-white areas tend not to take buyouts unless the areas around them face extreme levels of flood risk, while homeowners in other neighborhoods are more likely to take buyouts even when the risk is more moderate.  And when homeowners in white neighborhoods do take buyouts, they overwhelmingly seek new housing in other majority-white areas in the immediate vicinity of their old homes.

Read the full article about FEMA’s flood buyout program by Jake Bittle at Grist.