Climate Driven Migration Has Begun

Climate and Capitalism, June 15, 2009

Forecasts of environmental migration vary widely – the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration estimates that 200 million people will be displaced by 2050, while the respected charity Christian Aid predicts 700 million in the same time frame. More important than specific 40-year forecasts is the conclusion of In Search of Shelter that climate change is “already causing migration and displacement.”

The report, jointly produced by the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security; CARE International, and Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, says that the scope and scale of climate-induced migration will “could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before,” and that “people in the least developed countries and island states will be affected first and worst.”

The following points are from the report’s Executive Summary. The full In Search of Shelter report can be downloaded from here or here.

• Climate change is already contributing to displacement and migration. Although economic and political factors are the dominant drivers of displacement and migration today, climate change is already having a detectable effect.
• The breakdown of ecosystem-dependent livelihoods is likely to remain the premier driver of long-term migration during the next two to three decades. Climate change will exacerbate this situation unless vulnerable populations, especially the poorest, are assisted in building climate-resilient livelihoods.
• Disasters continue to be a major driver of shorter-term displacement and migration. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones, floods, and droughts, the number of temporarily displaced people will rise. This will be especially true in countries that fail to invest now in disaster risk reduction and where the official response to disasters is limited.
• Seasonal migration already plays an important part in many families’ struggle to deal with environmental change. This is likely to become even more common, as is the practice of migrating from place to place in search of ecosystems that can still support rural livelihoods.
• Glacier melt will affect major agricultural systems in Asia. As the storage capacity of glaciers declines, short-term flood risks increase. This will be followed by decreasing water flows in the medium- and long-term. Both consequences of glacier melt would threaten food production in some of the world’s most densely populated regions.
• Sea level rise will worsen saline intrusions, inundation, storm surges, erosion, and other coastal hazards. The threat is particularly grave vis-à-vis island communities. There is strong evidence that the impacts of climate change will devastate subsistence and commercial agriculture on many small islands.
• In the densely populated Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River deltas, a sea level rise of 1 meter could affect 23.5 million people and reduce the land currently under intensive agriculture by at least 1.5 million hectares. A sea level rise of 2 meters would impact an additional 10.8 million people and render at least 969 thousand more hectares of agricultural land unproductive.
• Many people won’t be able to flee far enough to adequately avoid the negative impacts of climate change-unless they receive support. Migration requires resources (including financial, social, and political capital) that the most vulnerable populations frequently don’t have. Case studies indicate that poorer environmental migrants can find their destinations as precarious as the places they left behind.

World’s first ‘climate refugees’

AlJazeera, April 21, 2009

Environmentalists predict that climate change will affect more than 375 million people every year by 2015, due to natural disasters and rising sea levels. 

Thousands of people in Bangladesh are thought to be the world’s first “climate refugees” due to severe flooding. 

Nicholas Haque reports from Kutubdia island in southern Bangladesh.

The Gathering Storm

What Happens When Global Warming Turns Millions of Destitute Bangladeshi Into Environmental Refugees?

By George Black, On Earth, Summer 2008

By the end of the first day, it’s already become an ingrained reflex: brace for impact as yet another suicidal rickshaw, luridly painted with pictures of birds, animals, and Bollywood stars, swerves suddenly into our path. Our driver bangs on the horn, shimmies to the right, avoids an onrushing bus by a matter of inches, then calmly resumes his navigation of the demented streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. I relax my death grip on the dashboard and exhale. Mostafizur Rahman Jewel, our translator, raises an eyebrow in amusement.

“No problem,” I say, feigning nonchalance. “Piece of cake.”

“Piece of cake?”

“It’s slang. Something really easy, no sweat. Like not killing that rickshaw-wallah. How do you say that in Bangla?”

“Panir moto shohoj,” he answers. “Easy like water.”

Easy like water. This is ironic, to say the least, because water, from the rivers, from the ocean, from the ground, is this country’s existential curse. Bangladesh and its 150 million people — the world’s seventh-largest population, compressed into an area the size of Iowa — have somehow contrived to have too much water, too little water, and more and more water of the wrong kind.

The long-range apocalypse facing the country is global warming and the accelerating sea-level rise that will accompany it. Think of the computer-generated image midway through Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which shows an inexorable blue wave engulfing a great swath of coastal Bangladesh. But while the Four Horsemen gather their forces, the daily short-term menace is the steady northward creep of salt from the Bay of Bengal. Today the land is saturated with people; little by little it is also becoming saturated with salt.

It all begins with topography. In his novel The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh, who grew up in Bangladesh, recounts the Hindu legend of how the Ganges Delta was formed. The goddess Ganga, from whom the river takes its name, descended from the heavens with such force that she would have split the earth apart had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by weaving it into the ash-covered strands of his hair. But then his braids unraveled and the river divided into thousands of channels. Now consider the map of Bangladesh, where three formidable rivers — the Brahmaputra, the Meghna, and the Ganges (known, once it crosses the Indian border, as the Padma) — converge to form a vast, tangled delta that I will spend a week exploring with the photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, half on water and half on land. There is no other landscape like it on the planet.

Bangladesh’s problem, like Lord Shiva’s hair, has many strands. All three of its great rivers rise in the Himalayas, from which they carry a huge load of sediment, made worse in recent years by the deforestation of the Himalayan foothills. Because Bangladesh is as flat as a pool table, most of it no more than a few feet above sea level, the flow of its rivers is sluggish. Riverbeds clog with silt and water levels rise; shorelines erode, swallowing up farmland; islands of sand and mud form, disperse, reform elsewhere. From May to November, the monsoons blanket the country with torrential rain, pushing the rivers over their banks, driving people from their homes, drowning them. Some years Bangladesh is lucky and only a third of its territory is flooded. Sometimes it’s half; sometimes it’s two-thirds or more.

Go to On Earth website to read the rest of the story.