“It used to be just adaptation,” Obuson said about the Philippines. “It’s way past adaptation. It’s really a question of survival now.” Since 2013, typhoons and storms have displaced nearly 15 million people.
The most common number now used by scientists to project sea-level rise, based on the accelerating pace of melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, is three feet over the next 80 years. If this projection holds true, Pacific islands such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Tokelau will soon be swallowed by the ocean. Kiribati’s government bought 20 square miles of land in Fiji to relocate its people. Many people from the Marshall Islands have already migrated to the United States, and a good percentage live in the town of Springdale, Arkansas. In 2016, the United States government extended a $48 million grant to relocate 60 people from Louisiana’s increasingly flooded island Isle de Saint Jean.4
According to the United States Geological Survey, Louisiana lost 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000—the equivalent, as journalist Brett Anderson describes it, “of the entire state of Delaware dropping into the Gulf of Mexico.”5 If trends continue, by 2064 rising water will take from Louisiana another landmass larger than Rhode Island.6 The state’s shape on today’s maps is no longer accurate; the once familiar boot shape has increasingly appeared more chewed up and dissolved into islands. As it stands, the disfiguration will only accelerate.
The New York Times has called people from the Isle of Saint Jean the first U.S. climate refugees.7 This is a disputable claim, of course, considering all the people who evacuated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and never came back; all those forced to leave their homes after Hurricane Sandy; and the unknown numbers who have fled California to escape either the years of drought or the floods of early 2017.
Climate change means either too little or too much water, and we are already experiencing both. A March 2016 report titled “Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise”8 shows that future sea-level rise might even be more pronounced than originally thought. If greenhouse gas emissions are not sufficiently cut, the sea will likely rise more than six feet by 2100, double the commonly cited forecasts of the United Nations climate science body. If this occurs, due to atmospheric pressure that will accelerate the melting of polar ice, we will see an inundation of densely populated mega-cities and millions of acres of low-lying areas inland. “At that point it becomes about retreat” from cities, one of the lead co-authors, Rob DeConto, told The Guardian, “not engineering of defences.”9
One-third of the world’s population lives near a coast. Looking specifically at low-elevation areas most vulnerable to rising seas, that means close to 700 million people are at risk. To grasp what this means exactly for U.S. coastal cities and areas, there is an interactive map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency that visualizes the impact of rising water in places such as Miami, New York, San Juan, or the Florida Keys which, in a five-foot rise scenario, will completely vanish into the ocean. Miami, already spending millions of dollars on saltwater sea pumps, will eventually become the northernmost Key, much like nearby Biscayne. All this is happening now.
Sea level in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia has risen 18 inches since the beginning of the 20th century. “Hundred year” flooding events are happening now with such frequency that a redefinition may be in order. One resident named Elisa Staton, whose house had lost half its value after being flooded, told reporter Brooke Jarvis, “I hate that house—that house has been my nightmare for ten years.”10 What Staton is describing is not only the most common, but the most expensive disaster in the United States—flooding. On a global level, floods are now impacting 21 million people worldwide annually. By 2030, a “double exposure to inundation”11 is expected, and will impact more than 54 million.
The future potential for havoc becomes more pronounced when you add to the DeConto report another one titled “Ice melt, sea-level rise, and superstorms,” whose lead author, climate guru James E. Hansen, is the person who famously brought climate change to the attention of the U.S. Congress in 1988 when he was a top scientist at NASA. Hansen’s latest report focuses on how the incoming cool, dense water from melting ice sheets will impact the ocean’s circulation patterns.12 Such shifts will also likely further accelerate the speed at which the ice is melting. The result: faster-rising seas coupled with the most violent superstorms ever experienced in recorded history.
“I think the conclusion is clear,” Hansen said after the report was released. “We are in a position of potentially causing irreparable harm to our children, grandchildren and future generations.”13
Rising sea levels are just one of multiple ecological factors projected to dislocate unprecedented quantities of people. Though the numbers are often disputed, the most common projection used by the United Nations is that 250 million people will be displaced by 2050. In a New York Times front page report in February 2017 about climate change and water shortages in Mexico City, Michael Kimmelman cited a report that suggested the number may be much higher: 750 million.14 Another study referenced in Kimmelman’s article predicts 10 percent of Mexicans between 15 and 65 could eventually migrate north due to rising temperatures, droughts, and floods.15
“Although the exact number of people that will be on the move by mid-century is uncertain,” stated Koko Warner et al. in the report In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, “the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before.”16
An average of 21.5 million people were displaced every year between 2008 and 2015 from the “impact and threat of climate-related hazards.”17 In the same time span, 26.4 million people are estimated to have been displaced each year by disasters more generally. This number means that one person is forced from their home every second, and according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a person is more likely to be displaced by environmental forces than by war.18 When you correlate the origins of the United Nations’ 64 million “persons of concern”—a number that refers to refugees and has tripled since 2005—with the geographic locations of climate turmoil seen in data from NASA’s Common Science Climate Index, as journalist Jessica Benko has done, the overlap is “striking” and vivid on a map.19 And while many displaced people will try to stay close to home, approximately 244 million people currently live outside their country of birth, up from 80 million in the 1980s (and a 41 percent increase from the year 2000). Since so many people are undocumented, and therefore uncounted, the actual number is likely much higher. People are traveling across borders in unprecedented numbers, and expectations—including those of people who live in vulnerable areas—are that this will continue. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, 12 percent of respondents—a percentage representing 500 million families20—stated that they thought environmental problems would force them to move within five years.
The upsurge has multiple factors, including, as described by sociologist Christian Parenti, a 30-year-long economic restructuring that has produced unseen levels of poverty and inequality. Volatile political and social situations often worsen economic processes that enrich a few while impoverishing many. Climate change will only intensify these inequalities and widen the gulf between those who are environmentally secure and those who are not. Parenti calls this the “catastrophic convergence.”21 The economic, political, and ecological factors are not separate; rather, they compound each other to create increasingly untenable situations over vast swaths of the Earth.
With the forecast, Koko Warner does not mince words: “In coming decades, climate change will motivate or force millions of people to leave their homes in search of viable livelihoods and safety.”22 It will be “staggering”