The costs and consequences of climate change on our world will define the twenty-first century.
Michael Werz and Laura Conley, Center for American Progress
In its 2007 report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that warming of the global climate system from fossil fuel emissions is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average and ocean temperatures, with widespread melting of snow and ice and a rising average global sea level. Given rising temperatures and increases in precipitation, the availability of freshwater will shift. Some areas of the planet will be much wetter, some much drier. Both drought and flooding will increase. Water stored in glacier snowpack will decline, reducing water supplies to more than a billion people. Global changes in land use patterns and the overexploitation of resources will set populations in motion. The conclusion today is inescapable: humans have emerged as a major force in nature and are altering the structure of the planet. We are now witnessing the human devastation of the earth.1
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, declared climate change to be “the defining challenge of our times.”2 Today there is a new awareness that environmental factors—worsened in an atmosphere heated up by massive worldwide carbon dioxide emissions—can be triggers for major population movements. As the planet continues to warm, it will foster extreme weather events like tropical cyclones, and floods will increase in intensity due to warmer sea surface and atmospheric temperatures. Rising sea levels in the South Pacific and elsewhere will destroy small island states. In other areas, glacier retreat will lessen available supplies of freshwater. Areas vulnerable to water stress and drought will be at high risk.
Figure 1.1: The scientific consensus on climate change has grown stronger with each examination.
No one can wait to act until 100 percent scientific proof that human-caused climate change is in place, especially when the lives and livelihoods of considerable numbers of people are at risk,3 but for all intents and purposes we are already there. Scientists have concluded that fossil fuels are driving global warming with 95 percent certainty—the same degree of scientific certainty as the consensus that cigarettes can kill and that HIV causes AIDS (see figure 1.1).4
Though many predictions about future impacts of climate changes come in ranges, there is “little doubt” that parts of the earth are becoming less habitable due to factors related to climate change, argues the International Organization for Migration.5 Already, warmer surface temperatures have brought changes to the global climate at rates unseen over previous millennia. With global temperature predicted to rise two to five degrees centigrade by century’s end, migrations will become larger and more problematic.6 Thus, climate or environmental refugees could become one of the foremost human crises of our times. As UN Undersecretary-General Achim Steiner has argued, “The question we must continually ask ourselves in the face of scientific complexity and uncertainty, but also with growing evidence of climate change, is at what point precaution, common sense, or prudent risk management demands action?”7
Lester Brown, in his book World on the Edge, writes that “over the longer term, rising-sea refugees will likely dominate the flow of environmental refugees.”8 How far might sea levels rise? The most conservative projections estimate between one and three feet. The ever-practical and forward-looking Dutch, for planning purposes, are assuming a two-and-a-half-foot rise by 2050.9 Maybe the Dutch can withstand two and a half feet, but this is enough to obliterate large portions of island nations like the Maldives. Yet scientists now think we are locked in to a sea level rise of at least three feet, and that is only with aggressive worldwide reduction of fossil fuels. Without climate action, sea levels could rise six feet by the end of 2100 and as much as ten feet within two centuries, creating a huge threat to coastal communities around the globe.10
Ten percent of the world’s population currently lives in low-lying coastal zones, and this population sector is growing rapidly. Sustained global warming of about three degrees centigrade, experts agree, will result in sea level rise of one-quarter meter by 2040 that will damage coastal wetlands, impair fisheries, and disrupt fresh groundwater supplies, with saltwater intrusion ruining farmlands and affecting drinking water supplies. Large urban centers such as Shanghai, Manila, Bangkok, Dhaka, and Jakarta, are already vulnerable to subsidence. Rising tides and storm surges are already putting areas of land underwater—places as diverse as neighborhoods in Norfolk, Virginia; major parts of southern Louisiana; and island republics like Tuvalu and the Maldives in the Indian and Pacific oceans. In the Western Hemisphere, Americans may find themselves struggling to resettle tens of millions forced to migrate because of rising tides along the Gulf of Mexico, South Florida, and the East Coast, reaching nearly to New England. While scientists cannot predict the details of short-term human history, there is little doubt that changes will be momentous. Renowned climatologist James Hansen argues that China will have great difficulties despite its growing economic power as “hundreds of millions of Chinese are displaced by rising seas. With the submersion of Florida and coastal cities, the United States may be equally stressed.” With global interdependence, he notes, “there may be a threat of collapse of economic and social systems.”11
On the northern Atlantic coast of the United States, sea levels are rising about four times faster than the global average, conservatively predicted to rise six feet by 2100. New York, Norfolk, and Boston are particularly at risk and already experience damaging floods from even minor storms.12 On a small inlet off the coast of Virginia called Chin-coteague, a wildlife haven of wild beaches and feral ponies, beaches are losing about twenty feet of coastline a year.
In July 2013 a Rolling Stone article headline blared: “Goodbye, Miami.” Writer Jeff Goodell predicted that due to the rising tides Miami would be uninhabitable by 2030 and completely underwater by the end of the century, when it would essentially transform into a snorkeling spot, “where people could swim with sharks and sea turtles and explore the wreckage of a great American city.”13 Goodell’s article sparked some controversy, but it was not unreasonable. In fact, of all the people in the United States who will be affected by sea level rise, at least 40 percent live in Florida, according to analyses by the news organization Climate Central. And Miami faces a unique risk: its precarious foundation. Miami, and much of South Florida, is built on a foundation of porous limestone. Any levees or seawalls would be ineffective against floods. Ocean water would simply leach through the bedrock instead. The effects of this are already taking place, with seawater seeping onto the streets through the drains, flooding outdated sewage systems. According to the Florida Department of Transportation, the rising seas will flood major coastal highways after 2050 and cause them to deteriorate, saturating and eroding the limestone beneath them. Scientists and experts are already warning the state government of a future mass exodus as people move away from flooded Florida.
The latest research shows that it will not be just Floridians who need to flee. Sea level rises could force between four and thirteen million people in coastal American communities from their homes by 2100.14 It is not clear where they will go.
The good news is that not all cities are locked into an unlivable sea level scenario. Strong action on climate change would make all the difference for fourteen major US cities, including Jacksonville, Florida, and a handful of cities in Virginia and California.15
As Andrea Appleton notes in the Johns Hopkins Health Review, “With climate change comes uncertainty about water resources.” Further, she adds that “a real water scarcity could require a fundamental thinking of how we manage water.”16 We take water for granted now, but that attitude will undergo radical change as the century progresses. A lot of what people believe about water is nonsense. People think there will always be water and when they turn on their taps water will flow. This will not necessarily be true in the future, though there will always be water for the wealthy. The quotidian work of water over the centuries, however, is not the stuff of the popular media. We fill our baths and hot tubs with the expectation that we can discard the wasted water when we are finished. That there will always be water is an idea deeply rooted in our subconscious. It is the major selfish conceit of the affluent West.
Awareness of water as an ecological concept is fairly recent, dating for the most part from the mid-twentieth century. The growing desertification of the planet and the disappearance of wetlands of the world have helped to give us a stronger environmental focus. It is only now in the twenty-first century that we are beginning to realize that water is the key component of climate change. For some time, experts have argued about the earth’s carrying capacity to support ever-larger populations. For example, will there be enough food and water on the planet to support a population of eight to ten billion people? Meanwhile, in developing nations, water issues intensify every day between rich residents of overcrowded cities and their poorest neighbors. The World Water Forum, at its third triennial meeting, in Istanbul in 2009, offered a grim assessment in its “Water in a Changing World” report. It was still business as usual for the five billion people, or two-thirds of the planet, who do not have access to safe water, adequate sanitation, or enough food to eat.17 Each year, the World Water Forum reported, the world increases by eighty million people, continually stressing our global freshwater resources.
Looking at water through the critical lens of the twenty-first century, we see our rivers drying up. Some of the world’s largest rivers, including the Yellow, the Niger, and the Colorado, are drying up as a result of climate change with potentially disastrous consequences for many of the world’s populous regions and cities of the world.18 Water in the Rio Grande evaporates before reaching the Gulf, the flow of the Nile has choked by a dam, and reservoirs lose millions of gallons of water through evaporation. In many parts of India, farmers desperate for irrigation water plunder their aquifers faster than rainfall can replenish the withdrawn water. Scientists also predict that those rivers that have seen stable or increased flows, such as the Brahmaputra in South Asia and the Yangtze in China, could wither as inland glaciers melt and rainfall patterns are altered as a result of climate change.19
More than half the world’s wetlands have disappeared, and climate change around the world has altered weather patterns and led to water shortages.20 Such developments may unleash conflict and major out-migrations in developed countries as well. In the United States hydrologists fear that as water as a commodity becomes increasingly scarcer, conflicts will arise between the United States and Canada over access to the Great Lakes. As the Southwestern states and California swelter under the onslaught of a multiyear drought, governments increasingly turn a hungry eye toward tapping Lake Superior and bringing the “blue gold” to irrigate their parched lands. Consider the Colorado River, a major water source for seven states and parts of northwestern Mexico. Currently the Colorado River barely meets the needs of the many millions who rely on it. If water levels drop further, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California, said to Newsweek, it could “derail the system altogether.”21 Additionally, drought-induced population out-migration may strain state and federal budgets with relocation costs and the attendant problems of community upheaval.
When profound water shortages or ravaging floods put populations on the move, they must go somewhere, and this migration can create conflict in the area receiving migrants. The arrival of migrants to areas that already are experiencing water shortages, such as parts of India, can burden the economic and resource base of the receiving area.22 And when these migrants belong to different ethnic or religious groups, residents may feel threatened and respond aggressively. No matter how peaceful climate refugees may be, in most cases their arrival will generate significant levels of public suspicion and mistrust. As Rafael Reveny notes, sudden drastic environmental changes can push many people to migrate quickly. The arrival of Bangladeshi climate refugees in India led to violence in the 1980s.23 Similarly, the absorption of Dust Bowl migrants in California during the 1930s depression had more than its share of conflict. “Okies” from the Oklahoma plains faced slurs, discrimination, and beatings. Their shacks were burned, and police manned the California border to block their entry into the state.
The main crisis to come, however, will be the water rivalry between India and China, which undoubtedly will produce an anguished flow of climate refugees. China’s unique water power status stems from its control of the headwaters of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers that flow into India and other Southeast Asian countries. As both China and India have nuclear weapons, hydrologists worry that water conflicts between India and China may result in nuclear attacks on dams and other riparian systems. China’s aggressive dam construction of India’s headwaters in the high Himalayas is a constant irritant to India As the Carnegie Foundation points out in its report, “A Crisis to Come,” China now has hydrohegemony over key headwaters that flow into much of South Asia and more dams “than the rest of the world combined,” yet has historically poor environmental practices over these waters, “which has had devastating consequences for the environment”:
Headwaters—China is the largest source of transboundary river flows, including many, such as the Brahmaputra River, that flow from the Tibetan plateau to much of South Asia.
Dams—No country in history has built more dams than China, which has built more dams than the rest of the world combined.
Environmental practices—China’s use of rivers has been ecologically unsafe, which has had devastating consequences for the environment.
The Carnegie Foundation offers this perspective: “After many years of denying plans to build a mega-dam on the Brahmaputra River, one of the major rivers of Asia, China recently announced plans to begin construction. This river is one of India’s and Bangladesh’s largest sources of water, and any water diversion could be devastating to both countries.” Water conflict between China and its neighbors has real national security implications, a problem that will only become worse.24 Water issues in this part of the world involve the fate of the Tibetan Himalayan plateau and rivers that flow from there to serve the water needs of a billion people. Currently, glaciers in Tibet are melting as a result of increased temperatures. After an initial burst of too much water, there is going to be a shortage. Climate models suggest “peak meltwater” could be reached by the 2050s, with major rivers losing up to 20 percent of their flow. China will monopolize what’s left of the water resource, and that will lead to major problems. With China and India attempting to store water for their combined four hundred dams, water shortages will create instability in the region. Clashes along the border between Chinese and Indian troops over the past five decades have resulted in deep mistrust on both sides. Both countries have memories of a short but brutal war between them in 1962.25
Agriculture has become the modern Agasthya, the mythical Indian giant who drank the seas dry.26 Unless careful provisions are made, the expansion of agriculture, with its immense need for irrigation water, may gobble up what is left of the planet’s groundwater in virgin lands and wilderness. To deal with “Agasthaya,” research into new crop yields that produce seeds tolerant of increasing temperatures and water scarcity is increasingly a part of a survival agenda. One should mention, however, that the technological innovations of the Green Revolution have largely run their course, and there is little prospect in agricultural yields increasing at the exponential rate they have in the past as a result of new farming techniques.27 Despite manifold technological innovations, agriculture appears to have plateaued. According to world climate expert Lester Brown, the world agricultural harvest in 1993 was only 4.2 percent higher than that of 1984 while world population increased by 16 percent. During this time, grain output per person declined by 11 percent. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reports that about 793 million people were estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2015.28 If projections of world population growing to 9.8 billion by 2050 come true, farms will have to produce three times as many calories as today. Further, there are few new areas remaining that can be opened up for agriculture around the globe. The problems are compounded in a number of countries by inadequate government. As UN observers have said, in certain countries it is not so much faulty as failed governments or no government. Only a few countries in this area seem capable of remaining self-sufficient in food—Kenya, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.
At present, droughts top the list of worst global disasters. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, droughts have been responsible for the deaths and uprooting of millions of people—China in 1907, with a toll of twenty-five million; Ukraine in the Volga region of the Soviet Union in 1921–1922, 5 million; and droughts in India in 1965 caused a death toll of 1.5 million. In addition, storm surges in Bangladesh routinely kill thousands.
Throughout Africa, desertification has become so pervasive that whole villages and farms are overtaken by sand. The 1982–1984 droughts in Africa, for example, left 184 million people in twenty-four African countries on the brink of starvation. Ten million left their homes in search of food with two million displaced persons winding up in refugee camps in five countries. Many who waited too long to migrate died. As a result of these disasters owing to climate change, more people are being killed or displaced by landslides, cyclones, and floods than ever before.29 The Stern Review, a British government report on the economics of climate change warned: “As temperatures rise and conditions deteriorate significantly, climate change will test the resilience of many societies around the world. Large numbers of people will be compelled to leave their homes when resources drop below a critical threshold. China, for instance, could see three hundred million of its people suffer from the wholesale reduction in glacial meltwater.”30
Landlessness derives from environmental factors as much as economic ones. Experts point out that this problem is particularly acute in Mexico, Central America, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Where people own little or no land in agriculture communities, the productive value of farmland is degraded, as too much pressure is placed on too little to obtain a livelihood. Meanwhile, the United Nations estimates that we will have to feed an extra 1.3 billion people in this decade alone and 4.1 billion by 2050. In Malaysia and other countries, deforestation has resulted in a decline of rainfall, with disastrous impact on local rice production. Recent studies have pointed out that the deforestation of the Himalayan foothills has had a multibillion-dollar negative impact on agricultural systems in the Ganges Valley of India.31
Whatever the cause of deforestation, it eliminates the homelands and livelihoods of large numbers of people in the developing world. Desertification is now at work on over one-third of the world’s surface—some forty-five million square kilometers drying out to a state of severely depleted productivity. Desertification is leading to burgeoning catastrophe in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with some of the world’s greatest population pressures. As early as the 1980s scientists pointed to the Sahel region, the Horn of Africa, and a dry corridor from Namibia through Botswana and Zimbabwe to southern Mozambique. By 1987 an estimated ten million people had become environmental or climate refugees in semiarid lands. Today a total of 900 million people are at risk in areas undergoing desertification. At the same time, these areas also have populations growing at rates of over 3 percent a year. Drought in Africa is now different. Areas in the Sahel, Somalia, and elsewhere face untold calamities because there is less water and more people. Water shortages cause major problems for health, agriculture, and industry. What is especially relevant is that in 90 percent of the developing world there is a lack of clean water for domestic use, which results in various diseases and maladies like cholera and intestinal parasites.
Meanwhile, much of the region suffers from a food deficit. The region’s hopes of purchasing food from outside are meager because of its adverse trade relations and deficiencies in technological innovation and political will. In sum, United Nations experts believe that sub-Saharan Africa’s outlook provides abundant scope for rapidly growing numbers of climate refugees. Food shortages are already largely responsible for driving people out of Egypt and Tunisia.32
Recently there has been a major falloff in Russian wheat harvests, because temperatures in the heartland have risen to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Elsewhere, in another major grain belt, Australia’s Murray River and Queensland areas, harvests have been severely diminished. The Murray River has been plagued for years by crop-killing drought, and the recent floods in Queensland have severely diminished Australia’s agricultural productivity.
The Wall Street Journal summed up the problem: “China’s farmers need water because China needs food. Production of rice, wheat, and corn topped out at 441.4 million tons in 1998 and has not hit that level since. Seawater has leaked into depleted aquifers in the north of China, threatening to turn land barren”33. Similar developments have already happened on the Great Plains of the United States. Genetic research into more hardy grains for an uncertain future proceeds apace with the problem. The real project ahead is to get people into actually valuing water in a realistic manner, says water expert Peter Rogers. “We do not have to experience a water crisis,” said Rogers, “but we could have a really serious one if we ignore the warning signs and do not provide the leadership and the social determination required to avoid it.”34 Meanwhile, 2011 unfolded as a year of food crisis. Prices for food reached record global levels, driven by increases in the price of wheat, corn, sugar, and oils.
Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman has argued that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are changing our global food system. Responding to assertions that climate change has no bearing on the problem, he admits that changing patterns of consumption and population growth have their influence on high food prices. But with climate change he argues that this is just a beginning. We may have had a few bad winters, but “don’t let the snow fool you.” In a warming world, “there will be much more and much worse to come.”35
Migration is driven by a number of factors that are interrelated and often conjoined with the problems of social and economic privilege. Listed below are the principal drivers of climate refugee populations:
Of these drivers, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels could drive many millions of people to migrate. Recent studies point to the fact that at least twenty million people were displaced by sudden-onset disasters in 2008 alone. The floods in New Orleans in August, 2005 caused by Hurricane Katrina forced the evacuation of thousands of the city’s inhabitants while tens of thousands of African Americans were left behind in a flooded water trap because of a lack of transportation out of the city. On average worldwide, about 106 million people have been affected by flooding between 2000 and 2005 and 38 million affected by hurricanes. It is well known that even today with our advanced technological apparatus, no climate model is able to predict with accuracy the damage of storms and floods to densely populated areas and whether the damage will have tragic consequences. Frequent storms and floods are destroying the Bangladeshian landscape. Largely due to this, 12–17 million Bangladeshis moved to India and a half million moved internally in the 1990s.
Starting in the 1990s, a number of extreme weather events have occurred with sharp weather shifts, which have a capacity to generate large numbers of climate refugees. As the atmosphere slowly but steadily warms up, global warming models predict more violent weather in many parts of the world. The number of natural disasters has more than doubled in recent years. This increase is due to a sharp rise in the number of weather-related disasters, and these disasters are happening in developed countries too. Superstorm Sandy on the eastern coast of the United States cost $50–$80 billion in damages in 2012.
Figure 1.2: Displacement from weather events far outpaces displacement from geophysical events. Source: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
Climate disasters like hurricanes and droughts have caused profound economic losses in recent times. From 1970 to 2012, there were over 8,835 climate disasters that resulted in US $2.4 trillion of economic losses with corresponding health epidemics, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organization. Africa offers an arresting case in point. African states are likely to be the most vulnerable to multiple stresses, with up to 250 million people projected to suffer from water and food insecurity and, in low-lying areas, a rising sea level.36
An excellent example of this driver involves the town of Chernobyl in the Ukraine. After the explosion of a nuclear reactor nearby, Soviet officials announced plans to demolish Chernobyl. The Chernobyl accident, with a radioactive fallout fifty times that of Hiroshima, and irradiating an area of 200,000 square kilometers, caused 116,000 people to evacuate within 30 kilometers of the nuclear station. The city’s death warrant extinguished any hope of returning for the ten thousand former residents. Thus, these people have become part of a growing class of displaced persons—environmental refugees. Similarly, the Bhopal spill of toxic chemicals in India laid waste to the countryside, forcing major population displacements. The gradual poisoning of land and water by toxic waste and the effects of natural disasters made worse by human efforts are also adding to the ranks of climate refugees. Other proposed disruptions, like the building of hydroelectric dams, can set populations in motion, though for supposedly benign reasons. Dam projects have already resulted in the resettlement of twenty million people in India and thirty million in China, and they currently uproot more than ten million people in developing worlds every year, according to the World Bank. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River has uprooted over one million people. In developing countries more than one thousand large dams are currently under construction. These dams, when operational, will have a profound impact on local communities.
Global population pressures are further compounded by rapid urbanization in developing countries. In 1950 only 18 percent of humankind lived in urban communities, whether of the developing or developed worlds. By 1993 the overall total of developing-world urban population had expanded from 285 million in 1950 to 1.4 billion in 1990. Just three countries—India, Nigeria, and China—are expected to account for 37 percent of the projected growth of the world’s urban population between 2014 and 2050. India is projected to add 404 million urban dwellers; China, 292 million; and Nigeria, 212 million.37 It is daunting to contemplate Mexico City’s urban population of seventeen million, the equivalent of the national populations of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark combined. Developing cities like Jakarta and Lagos have populations exceeding ten million, greatly straining an infrastructure that has been little improved since Indonesia and Nigeria were colonial dependencies. Urban planners point out that the ideal size for a typical city is one million people! Beyond that number, pollution, health problems, and the overloading of housing and other cities begin to negatively impact the environment.
In developing-world cities, generally more than one billion people are believed to be living in conditions so polluted that the air is not fit to breathe.38 Most of them live in squatter settlements, shantytowns, and slums. Nigeria seems to symbolize a host of negative factors leading to a perfect future storm of refugees. Soil erosion, desertification, deforestation, widespread water pollution, and outright water shortages point to a less than hopeful future for that country and its conurbations.
How far does urban population growth tie into the overriding issue of climate refugees? In most cases population growth is not the sole factor. But it is that growth that puts tremendous strain on environments. It is worth pointing out that those areas of the world with the most rapidly expanding urban populations are those with the most land degradation, water deficits, agricultural stresses, unemployment, and poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa appears to be caught in a demographic trap where population in the countryside and towns and cities has already exceeded environmental carrying capacity.
Extreme environmental events like tsunamis and cyclones tend to capture media attention, but it is gradual changes in the environment that are likely to have a much greater impact on the movement of people in the future. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) noted that twice as many people have been affected by droughts as by storms over the past thirty years—1.6 billion people and approximately 718 million, respectively.39
Many lesser-developed countries today share experiences similar to that of the 1930s American Dust Bowl. Access to freshwater and arable land continue to be points of social friction and conflict. “The smallest amounts of arable land per capita are in Africa and Asia, particularly East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East,” writes Rafael Reuveny. “About one billion people in the world lack access to drinkable water, including about half the population in sub-Saharan Africa and one-third in Asia.”40 The migration examples of the US Great Plains as well as the more recent example of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina exemplify how people leave areas due to intense weather-related disasters. But as social scientists like Reuveny and others have pointed out on the matter of migration, “The key issue is not how strong a disaster is per se, but rather how strong it is relative to the ability of people to withstand it.”41
When it comes to discussion of climate change and migration, researchers can easily identify conflict hotspots. The problems of sub-Saharan Africa are so severe in terms of water, desertification, and conflict that it is hardly surprising that the new terminology for climate refugee should be coined there. Jeffrey Mazo of the Institute for Strategic Studies argues that the ongoing civil war in Darfur represents the “first modern climate-change conflict,”42 a position partly supported by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.43 Darfur’s violence has taken place in a drought that began in the 1980s. The drying climate disrupted traditional patterns of coexistence between farmers and herders and led to scarcity, which contributed to fighting, and “by 2003, it evolved into the full-fledged tragedy we witness today.”44 In a growing number of nations such as Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan, Liberia, Somalia, Mozambique, and Haiti, normal state services, even boundaries, have disappeared. Armed conflict in the semiarid regions of Africa has been exacerbated by drought. In these regions people displaced by climate-related disasters and conflict face many challenges in terms of food, water, shelter, health care, and gender protection.
One of the area’s greatest challenges is that automatic weapons have become cheap and are widely dispersed, giving rise to warlords who are shoving aside chiefs and clan elders. Climate migrants in northwest Africa, for example, are causing unsettling developments in terms of economies and international security.45 Unfortunately, the existing global institutional framework cannot address a problem as gigantic in scope as northwest African countries and their climate problems. Nations are jealous of their hegemony and do not wish to cede authority to collective international action. Finally, nations have problems understanding why they have to take action to facilitate migration of peoples who are not being helped by their own governments.
When people are forced to work agricultural lands of diminishing economic value or to survive working at very low wages, they become part of a driving migratory force that rationalizes “anyplace but here.” Essentially the global trade system of the modern era allows multinational corporations to scour the planet in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. Rather than chain the worker in place, however, the global system makes populations restive. Capital moves freely around the planet, and soon large migratory populations will move as well. These people know of a better place—the Western European nations and the United States—and they see it on television and the internet.
Low-wage societies are essentially polluting societies as corporations in their midst extract commodities with little thought to the environment. When coupled with the other drivers that we have identified, economics is probably an igniting force equal to natural disasters and war.
The potential for migration when linked to a rise in sea level is considerable. Populations living at an altitude of less than one meter will be directly vulnerable as the century unfolds. Flood zones in highly populated South Asia (near the Indus, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Yangtze, and Pearl Rivers) will pose great risk for resident populations. Drought will also force populations to move. For example, in the Sahel between 1973 and 1999, desertification displaced nearly one million people in Niger. The periodic drought and desertification that plagued northeast Brazil between 1960 and 1980 prompted 3.4 million people to emigrate. Bangladesh, already known for its disastrous floods, faces rising waters in its future from climate-driven glacial meltdowns in neighboring India.46 Also, in the Andes region of South America, water shortages caused by melting glaciers will drive climate, migration, and security concerns. Finally, China is in the midst of highly problematic environmental change with water shortages and atmospheric pollution. China’s water stresses affect millions of people who in the future will become internally displaced migrants and transborder refugees.
As we now see it, climate change will fundamentally affect the lives of millions of people who will be forced over the next decades to leave their villages and cities to seek refuge in other areas. The United Nations has projected that in 2020 we will have fifty million environmental refugees. While scholars debate the magnitude of this refugee flow and argue that these assumptions are built upon formulations of human behavior that are too generalized, current research by Norman Myers of Oxford University and others identify twenty-five million people on the planet as environmental refugees.47 Currently, there is little real research on environmental refugees from the standpoint of national initiatives for amelioration or global governance. While research slowly enters public consciousness in the coming decades, experts like Camilo Mora argue that climate change will increasingly threaten humanity’s shared interests and collective security in many parts of the world, disproportionately affecting the globe’s least-developed countries.48
The conclusion today is inescapable: humans have emerged as a major force in nature and are altering the structure of the planet. We are now witnessing the human devastation of the earth. Climate refugees, once thought to be a problem confined to segments of the developing world, are on the verge of becoming a global problem. How we respond to this problem will dictate how well we can sustain ourselves in what we call civilized human society.
Michael Werz and Laura Conley, “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict,” https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2012/01/03/10857/climate-change-migration-and-conflict/.
1. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007, https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms1.html.
2. António Guterres, “Maintenance of International Peace and Security: New Challenges to International Peace and Security and Conflict Prevention,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Security Council Briefing, http://www.unhcr.org/.
3. Achim Steiner, “Climate Migration Will Not Wait for Scientific Certainty on Global Warming,” Guardian, May 11, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/11/climate-change-scientific-evidence-united-nations.
4. See figure 1.1: Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” EOS Transactions: American Geophysical Union 90, no. 3 (2009): 22–23; William R. L. Anderegg et al., “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 27 (2010): 12107–12109; Cook et al., “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropotenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature,” Environmental Research Letters 8 (2013): doi:10.1088/1748–9326/8/2/024024.
5. “Migration, Environment and Climate Change: Assessing The Evidence,” International Organization on Migration, edited by Frank Laczko and Christine Aghazarm, 2009, http://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/migration_and_environment.pdf.
6. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/.
7. Steiner, “Climate Migration.”
8. Lester Brown, World on the Edge (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 73.
9. Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey, “How High Will Seas Rise? Get Ready for Seven Feet,” Yale Environment 360, January 14, 2010.
10. Brandon Miller, “Expert: We’re ‘locked in’ to 3-Foot Sea Level Rise,” CNN.com, last modified September 4, 2015.
11. James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 259. Hansen believes the beginning of these storms is at hand. See James Hansen et al., “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms: Evidence from Paleoclimate Data, Climate Modeling, and Modern Observations That 2 °C Global Warming Could Be Dangerous,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 16 (2016): 3761–3812.
12. Melanie Gade, “Sea Level Rise Accelerating in U.S. Atlantic Coast,” US Geological Survey, June 24, 2012, https://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2012/10/research.html.
13. Jeff Goodell, “Goodbye, Miami,” RollingStone.com, June 20, 2013.
14. Chris D’Angelo, “Sea Level Rise Could Displace 13 Million Americans,” Huffington Post, March 16, 2016.
15. “Sea Level Rise Will Swallow Miami, New Orleans, Study Finds,” Phys.org, October 12, 2015.
16. Andrea Appleton, “Thirsty Planet,” Johns Hopkins Health Review Spring/Summer, 2015, 2: no. 1.
17. “Water in a Changing World,” UNESCO Forum, Istanbul, Turkey, March 16, 2009.
18. James Murray, “Study Warns Global Rivers Are Drying Up,” http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/1801434/study-warns-global-rivers-drying
19. Murray, “Global Rivers Are Drying Up.”
20. Shane Harris, “Water Wars,” Foreign Policy, September 18, 2014, http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/18/water-wars/.
21. Peter Gleick quoted in Michael Klare, “Wars for Water?” Newsweek, April 15, 2007.
22. Rafael Reuveny, “Climate-Induced Migration and Violent Conflict,” Political Geography 26, no. 6 (2007).
23. Reuveny, “Climate-Induced Migration.”
24. Brahma Chellaney, Ashley J. Tellis, “A Crisis to Come? China, India, and Water Rivalry,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 13, 2011, http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/09/13/crisis-to-come-china-india-and-water-rivalry-event-3362.
25. Ed King, “Climate Change Could Lead to China-India Water Conflict,” Climate Home, http://www.climatechangenews.com/2014/06/11/climate-change-could-lead-to-china-india-water-conflict/.
26. Economist, “Sin Aqua Non,” April 8, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13447271.
27. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Allen Lane, 2010), quoted in “Marching on Their Stomachs,” Economist, February 3, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18060808.
28. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015, http://www.fao.org/hunger/key-messages/en/.
29. Jodi L. Jacobson, “Environmental Refugees: A Yardstick of Habitability,” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 8 (1988): 257–258.
30. Nicholas Stern, Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (London: HM Treasury, 2006).
31. James Owen, “Himalayan Forests Vanishing, Species May Follow, Study Says,” National Geographic, May 30, 2006.
32. Joanna Zelman, “50 Million Environmental Refugees by 2020, Experts Predict,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011.
33. Justin Lahart, Patrick Barta and Andrew Batson, “New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears,” The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2008.
34. Peter Rogers, “Running Out of Water: Or Just Another Six-Point Plan to Resolve the Water Crisis?” Oxford Martin School Seminar, December 3, 2010. Archived at the London Water Research Group: https://lwrg.wordpress.com/news/archived/.
35. Paul Krugman, “Droughts, Floods, and Food,” New York Times, February 6, 2011.
36. UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M. L. Parry, O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden, and C. E. Hanson, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
37. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, 2014.
38. Norman Myers and Noel Brown, “The Role of Major Foundations in the Implementation of Agenda 21: The Five-Year Follow-Up to the Earth Summit,” report to the Earth Council, n.d., http://www.grida.no/geo/GEO/Geo-1–019.htm.
39. International Organization for Migration, Migration, Environment, and Climate Change: Assessing the Evidence (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2009), 17.
40. Rafael Reuveny, “Climate-Induced Migration Migration and Violent Conflict,” Political Geography 26, no. 6 (2007).
41. Reuveny, “Climate-Induced Migration,” 661.
42. Jeffrey Mazo, “Darfur: The First Modern Climate Change Conflict,” Climate Conflict: How Global Warming Threatens Security and What to Do about It (New York: Adelphi Books, 2014), 73–74.
43. Economist, “Cimate Wars,” July 8, 2010.
44. Mazo, “Darfur.” 73–74.
45. Michael Werz and Laura Conley, “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict,” https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2012/01/03/10857/climate-change-migration-and-conflict/.
46. Ibid.
47. Norman Myers, Environmental Exodus: An Emergent Crisis in the Global Arena (Washington, DC: Climate Institute, 1995).
48. Camillo Mora et al., “The Projected Timing of Climate Departure from Recent Variability,” Nature 502 (October 10, 2013): 183–87.
