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Governments should plan for increased relocations for millions of people likely to be displaced by natural disasters and extreme weather linked to global warming, scientists warn. Projections by leading climate scientists of rising sea levels, heatwaves, floods and droughts linked to global warming are likely to oblige millions of people to move out of harm’s way, with some never able to return. ... Chaloka Beyani, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, told Reuters that governments should step up planning for migrants. “For the future we are looking more to planned relocations for people who are prone to frequent hazards,” he said. ... Climate change also added reasons for people to leave home by disrupting food and water supplies. “Access to resources, constrained by climatic factors, breeds conflict,” he said.
There were horrific massacres in 1947. In 1970, the refugees were put in camps, with little overt violence, but those camps persisted for the better part of a decade.
“Natural disasters displace three to 10 times more people than all conflicts and war in the world combined,” said Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).In a recent report, NRC found that in 2013 floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters drove 22 million people out of their homes — three times the number of people displaced by war and twice as many as were displaced by extreme weather in the 1970s. The study also found that certain parts of the world were disproportionately affected by disasters: More than 80 percent of those displaced over the last five years lived in Asia.
The growing flow of migrants into drought-prone Niger, whose own population often struggles with hunger, raises tough questions about why people are moving from one risky place to another and how to head off related tensions, experts say.
Chancellor Angela Merkel signaled she’ll use Germany’s economic power to turn a record influx of refugees to the nation’s advantage and urged citizens to reject social conflict fomented by nationalists with “hate in their hearts.”In a New Year’s address devoted to the impact of the refugee crisis, Merkel said coping with migration will cost Germany “time, effort and money,” according to prepared remarks provided by her office on Thursday. If handled right, the challenges of today will be the opportunities of tomorrow, she said.Merkel pressed home the point that she’s determined to treat the influx as a chance to modernize and rejuvenate Europe’s biggest economy, a stance that’s won her international accolades while eroding her poll ratings at home. The domestic fallout pushed other crises such as the unresolved conflict in eastern Ukraine and the threat of the U.K. leaving the European Union into the background in her outlook for 2016.
French-speaking Indians who live deep in Louisiana bayou, some 50 miles south of New Orleans, became the United States' first official climate refugees last week when the federal government awarded them $48 million to relocate.The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe has inhabited Isle de Jean Charles for centuries, but because of a slow-moving disaster caused by sinking land, climate change and oil exploration, they've all but lost the land they call home. With more than 1,900 square miles of land vanishing in the past 80 years – equivalent to the size of a football field lost every 45 minutes – the tribe members who live in Isle de Jean Charles have to find a new place to live.
“If I start thinking about it, I wonder how it'll be in 15-20 years for my children, or if I'm still alive, what will my children do,” Mejía said. “Because if winter is not good, what will their life be?”
Unless there are serious cuts to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, at least 30 per cent of the northern hemisphere’s surface permafrost could melt within just 80 years, the report warns.This melt would unleash billions of tonnes of carbon stored in what are currently permafrost areas, which will accelerate rates of global warming even more.The upshot would be warming seas and rising coastlines, which could immediately threaten 280 million people, the document says.
For several years now, scholars and legal advocates have been asking how to respond to people displaced by environmental conditions. Do existing models of humanitarian response and resettlement work for this new population? Could such persons be recognized as in need of protection under international law, similar to political refugees?Among the most complicated political questions is who should step up to deal with the harms of climate change, considering that wealthier countries pollute more but are often shielded from the worst effects. How can responsibility be assigned, and more importantly, what is to be done?In the absence of coordinated action on the part of the global community to mitigate ecological instability and recognize the plight of displaced people, there’s a risk of what some have called “climate apartheid.” In this scenario – climate change combined with closed borders and few migration pathways – millions of people would be forced to choose between increasingly insecure livelihoods and the perils of unauthorized migration.
Many millions in North Africa and the Middle East could be forced out by rising heat by mid-century:https://www.cyi.ac.cy/index.php/in-focus/climate-exodus-expected-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa.htmlEDIT: Sundarbans next wave of climate refugees:https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/591832/climate-refugees/and in Western Alaska:https://www.kyuk.org/post/quinhagak-climate-change-means-they-may-have-moveEDIT 2:Climate refugee target Canada?https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canada-climate-refugees-1.5165029
Climate change is sometimes pouring down or boiling above. But it's not always obvious. And for a segment of the population throughout the United States, climate change could be the culprit that displaces them, creating a new wave of American refugees. Rising sea levels and temperatures are already uprooting residents and leading some experts to question if we'll see a mass migration north.Superstorm Sandy struck over Halloween in 2012. And it was a monster. The East Coast was decimated by biblical storm surges that killed 117 people. Twenty-two of those deaths were in Staten Island.Denise English, her husband and two daughters survived the superstorm, escaping with their lives from their two-story home on Fox Beach Avenue as the shifting shoreline (already hampered by erosion) quickly swallowed up most of the homes in their Oakwood Beach neighborhood."We were petrified," she recalled to Newsweek, of the whipping gusts and rising waters.In the wake of the storm, the English family permanently evacuated, as did so many of their neighbors, literally leaving the borough's once tight enclave to the birds.Patricia Snyder, whose house was on the same street as the Englishes', left behind the home she had lived in since she was an 8-year-old girl when Sandy delivered 6 feet of gushing water."Everything was gone from my childhood," Snyder said. "It's all a memory, including the antique furniture that belonged to my grandfather."Save for a few stragglers, the Oakwood Beach community is virtually gone. Many relocated out of New York and their homes razed, transformed into open space."Anyone who sold a home to the state, [it's] back to nature forever," said Tirone.This back-to-the-land transformation witnessed in Oakwood Beach is repeating itself in southern swaths of Louisiana and Maryland's Eastern Shore, which scientists believe are also becoming tough places to live.
Extreme weather events displaced a record seven million people from their homes during the first six months of this year, a figure that put 2019 on pace to be one of the most disastrous years in almost two decades even before Hurricane Dorian battered the Bahamas.The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, which compiles data from governments, United Nations humanitarian agencies and media reports, concluded in a report published Thursday that floods, landslides, cyclones and other extreme weather events temporarily displaced more people in the first half of this year than during the same period in any other year.
What happens when climate change causes extreme events to become chronic, potentially rendering some communities unviable? This question is fuelling a new strand of global research focused on “climigration”. Climigration is the planned relocation of entire communities to new locations further from harm. And it has already begun.
Rust Belt cities, like Buffalo, Duluth and Cincinnati, are capitalizing on the moment to market themselves as a place for climate migrants to land. Pittsburgh, though, appears to be less aggressive to adopt it as a marketing strategy for the city.
The Great Climate Retreat is beginning with tiny steps, like taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas from Staten Island, New York, to Houston and New Orleans — and now Rittel’s Marathon Key. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map.By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008. ...
And this is just the beginning. According to a study commissioned by the Senegalese government, 80% of Saint-Louis territory will be at risk of flooding by 2080, and 150,000 people will have to relocate. Most of west Africa’s coastal cities, home to 105 million people, face a similar threat.
In Louisiana, the coast has been losing at least a football field’s worth of land every 100 minutes, which has prompted thousands of coastal Louisianans to migrate from the state. The Urban Institute estimated that in 2018 more than 1.2 million Americans left their homes for climate-related reasons. One 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, predicts that one in 12 Americans in the southern half of the country will relocate over the next 45 years due to slow-onset climate influences alone. While mega-disasters like the wildfires in the western US capture our attention, slow-onset disasters such as sea-level rise or annual flooding are even more likely to cause permanent displacement.
Weeks after Hurricanes Eta and Iota struck Central America in quick succession, nearly 100,000 Hondurans are living in shelters, many of which have become coronavirus hotspots. The country’s economy has been paralyzed.It is an unprecedented crisis, Honduran President, Juan Orlando Hernández said in an interview with The Washington Post on Friday. Hernández warned that in the absence of a coordinated international response, migration from Honduras to the United States could surge.“Imagine someone who lost everything, his house, his source of income, who feels hopeless and believes that there’s nothing left for him,” Hernández said. “And then he has a relative (in the United States) who says: ‘Come here.’ ”...Hernández and several other senior Honduran officials visited Washington this week to lobby for a humanitarian assistance package from multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and from the U.S. government. He stressed the link between the hurricanes and climate change, suggesting that wealthier countries that emit more greenhouse gases have a debt to pay in the recovery effort.
When Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Rose Dyson was one of the lucky ones. Her house, in a mostly Black, working-class neighborhood near the Mississippi River, was perched on some of the city’s highest ground — and while the floodwater devastated homes in other parts of the city, it never reached her doorstep.But in the years after the storm, the topography that had saved Dyson’s neighborhood became a selling point. A wave of new residents moved in, investors snapped up dilapidated buildings and housing prices skyrocketed. When Dyson’s annual property tax bill hit $4,000 two years ago — more than 20 times the amount she said she paid when she first moved in — she decided she had to give up the home she had dreamed of growing old in.“What I was paying went absolutely outrageous crazy — it was as if I had rebuilt the house and had a big mansion,” Dyson said. “I couldn’t keep up.”Like many Black families in the area, Dyson was pushed out not by Hurricane Katrina, but by gentrification that followed in its wake. Her neighborhood, which has the second-highest median elevation of any census tract in New Orleans, went from 75% Black in 2000 to 71% White by 2019, according to Census data — one of the most dramatic racial shifts in the city over the last two decades.Experts and local activists say the changes affecting the neighborhood are an example of climate gentrification — a process in which wealthier people fleeing from climate-risky areas spur higher housing prices and more aggressive gentrification in safer areas. As growing evidence finds sea level rise and flooding risk starting to affect real estate markets in the American cities most vulnerable to climate change, that trend could lead to residents being priced out of higher-ground neighborhoods, often in Black and minority communities. ...
