Originally published April 2, 2022 at The Narwhal. Read the full story here.

Driving into the valley housing the little spit of land that is the tiny community of Lehigh, Alta., feels like entering another world. Wide-open prairie drops suddenly into a landscape more suited to a moon of Jupiter than a place of this earth. 

The gravelly walls of the valley slope down from the high plains, hoodoos teeter off the highway and the entire landscape is tinted by the soft brown shade of the rounded hills. It feels closed in after driving along the wide expanses of this corner of southern Alberta. 

The valley was shaped by the forces of climate and change: water cascaded from glacial lakes as the ice age slowly whimpered away. Carved channels were eaten away by rivers, ice, rain, snow and wind. The process left a deep and long scar.

Nestled in that valley, the town of Drumheller stretches along a floodplain encompassing several communities. There’s Nacmine to the west and East Coulee to the east. There’s the downtown and the little pockets of life, including Lehigh, a once bustling hamlet of coal miners and their families, now reduced to a smattering of homes spread out over a small, flat plain. 

Each of these neighbourhoods hug the temperamental Red Deer River. 

The area is prone to flooding and almost all of the inhabited areas are identified by the provincial government as flood zones. Drumheller was walloped in 2005 and again in 2013, but the recorded history of flooding dates back over a century. The situation is only expected to get more intense.

Climate projections show the area will face more extremes in the near future. Drier dry spells. Heavier and more intense rains. A warmer climate that can hold more water and dump it at will. Lehigh will inevitably face an inundation.

It’s not alone. 

Whether it’s due to sea level rise or wildfires or land sliding into the sea as permafrost melts, communities across Canada — and the world — are grappling with similar problems: climate change has made areas once livable, even desirable, into danger zones.

Across Canada, flooding is considered the biggest climate change risk, consuming more than 75 per cent of federal disaster assistance, according to a 2020 policy brief from the non-partisan think tank Centre for International Governance Innovation.

According to the World Bank, as many as 216 million people could be forced to move within their own countries due to the impact of slow-but-steady changes as the climate shifts. 

Approximately 18 of them live in Lehigh.

The local government is busy fortifying. The Town of Drumheller has $55 million mostly from the provincial and federal governments to spend on dykes and berms to protect the greater good. 

But about $20 million of that funding has been allocated to buy out properties — or portions of them — and force many residents out of their homes. The government plans to wipe these communities off the map before the floodwaters do.

In Lehigh, the entire community will disappear. 

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NARWHAL.