“Companies large and small, some with longtime roots in their neighborhoods, are on the hunt for new real estate that is less prone to weather and climate extremes,” writes Axios:
The corporate migration underway indicates vulnerable communities may see an exodus of large employers in the coming decades as oceans encroach. Inland areas prone to flooding or wildfires mare see similar challenges. Within the past three years, tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a major hospital in South Carolina, and the nation’s eighth-largest airline by passengers carried have all decided to move their infrastructure to higher ground…
According to the Charleston Post and Courier newspaper, the hospital has been located downtown for 165 years….
Meanwhile, in Houston, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is working to complete its new global headquarters in Spring, Texas, after experiencing extensive flooding at its former Houston-area campus in 2016 and then in 2017 during Hurricane Harvey…. Separately, in Florida, the discount airline Spirit is making an extreme weather resilience move of its own. Earlier this year, it announced that it would add a second operations center in Orlando to supplement its current headquarters in Miramar, Florida, just southwest of the airline’s largest hub of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport… The hurricane susceptibility of southeastern Florida helped motivate the decision, according to news reports….
Many more businesses are no doubt contemplating similar protective actions, including at the international level where this would manifest itself in a shift of corporate capital and jobs from less climate secure nations to ones with fewer extreme weather risks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.