The Looming Climate Refugee Crisis:
Over the next twenty-five years, hotter temperatures, combined with more intense humidity and changing weather patterns, are set to make large swathes of the earth uninhabitable for up to 3.5 billion people. Especially in the global south, extreme climate change will push massive numbers of people from their homes. Because these people will be forced to move in order to save their lives, these people are best thought of as “climate refugees,” not migrants. As such, we believe that the rights afforded to refugees are applicable to them.
While concerns about climate change have been on the radar of policy makers since the mid-1980s, and of the general public since at least 2006 with the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, at this point – nearly forty years later – two things are tragically apparent:
First, the efforts to prevent climate change, especially the rise in global temperatures by limiting the amount of anthropogenic (i.e., caused by humans) carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, have largely failed and, unfortunately, are very likely to continue to fail. This is not because of a lack of awareness, but rather because of insufficient political will in both the developing and industrialized world.
This is because the cost of restructuring lives to reduce greenhouse emissions is staggering and cannot be minimized.
In the advanced industrialized world, the chief political problem is one of uncertainty as to timing. The most disastrous effects of climate change – even though they are inevitable and even though we are already starting to see the early effects – are perhaps a decade or more in the future. Unfortunately, no mainstream political party, neither on the left or the right, has the political will to force its electorate to suffer the staggering cost of prevention today. It is far easier for politicians to make well-intended pledges around climate change that are at best unenforceable, or at worst, likely to do little more than kick the can further down the road. It is not surprising that not a single UN climate change target has ever been met.
In the developing world, especially the global south (namely China, India, SE Asia, South and Central America, and Africa) preventing climate change will involve a significant decline in standards of living in places where the standard of living is already at a danger point. Simply put, the newly developing countries have not and will not shift away from CO2 production because they cannot withstand the instability resulting from such changes.
As a result of this largely political failure (regardless of how understandable it may be), a world that is 3-4 degrees hotter is likely, if not inevitable, by the end of this century. The deleterious effects of these rising temperatures, however, are already being felt, and will only continue to grow over the coming decades.
Second, the people of the world are already beginning to suffer the effects of rising temperatures. The number of migrants, for example, has doubled globally over the past decade. Tragically, and not surprisingly, the people who have been most affected, and who are likely to be most affected going forward, are the world’s poorest.
While wealthy nations are best positioned to adapt to the changing climate, when it comes to the poorest people effected, there is no way for them to adapt.
Their only choice will be to move or die.
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In other words, migration is going to be the only adaptation available for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in the next decade.