#climate migrants

[tearsofrefugees]

Australia receives first climate migrants from sinking Pacific nation Tuvalu

Tuvalu is already losing ground to encroaching tides and storm surges and could be underwater by 2050

[rjzimmerman]

In Central America, Climate Change Is Driving Families North

Extreme weather is forcing farmers and their families off their lands

Whether trump and his sandbox republican playmates like it or believe it, a lot of the migrant to the US from Central America are farmers who can’t farm any longer because of a changing climate and the effect that has on their farms. Lower precipitation, increasing plant diseases, decreasing yields. Here’s a vide describing one family’s efforts to leave their farm and migrate to the US.

[protoslacker]

“Climate change has to become seen as a reason for far greater levels of global cooperation than we’ve seen before. If we don’t see it that way, then we’re going to be in big trouble. This problem is bigger than any of us, it’s bigger than any nation state, any political party. “We’re going to be steamrolled by this stuff unless we take serious action now.”

Scott Ludlam quoted in an article by Ben Doherty in The Guardian. Australia warned it has radically underestimated climate change security threat Senate inquiry starts as report into political, military and humanitarian risks of climate change across Asia Pacific released

[tearsofrefugees]

83 million internally displaced, the highest figure ever recorded – IOM Report

The latest International Organization for Migration (IOM) World Migration Report shows that growing instability brought by conflict, climate

[rjzimmerman]

As Himalayas Warm, Nepal’s Climate Migrants Struggle to Survive

Pushed out of their village by a drought and lack of food, a group of Nepalis are fighting to amplify the voices of those forced to relocate by the planet’s warming.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

High in the Himalayas, on a rugged plateau dotted with empty mud huts, an exodus has begun.

In the village of Dhye, crops are stubby, dead stalks. Water is scarce. The only school closed a few years ago. With dwindling food, most families have packed their belongings and left, driven out by a faceless, man-made enemy.

They are Nepal’s climate-change migrants, and there will be more.

“I love this village,” said Sonam Chhiring Gurung, 76, one of the final holdouts, “but I can’t survive here much longer.”

Climate change is remaking the Himalayan region, putting at risk millions of South Asians who depend on its water resources and pushing mountain dwellers in northern Nepal, home to the world’s highest peaks, to build new settlements at lower altitudes.

Glacial melt has accelerated in the 1,500-mile-long Himalayas. Land once used for growing vegetables has become barren. Yak herders say they are struggling to find grazing patches for their animals. Scientists have found that rising temperatures could spread malaria and dengue to new areas of the Himalayas, where mosquitoes have started to appear in the highlands.

Around the world, tens of millions of people have already been displaced as a result of a warming planet. Researchers estimate that the number of climate-change migrants — those fleeing natural disasters, droughts or other calamities — could reach a billion by the end of the century.

[rjzimmerman]

13 million U.S. coastal residents are expected to be displaced by 2100 due to sea level rise. Researchers are starting to predict where they’ll go.

Blue indicates counties where flooding will displace residents if sea levels rise by six feet by 2100. Counties in shades of pink and red will see higher-than-average migration, with the darker shades representing larger population increases. (PLOS One)

Excerpt from this story from CityLab:

Climate experts expect some 13 million coastal residents in the U.S. to be displaced by the end of this century. A new PLOS One study gives some indication of where climate migrants might go.

Dilkina and her team used migration data from the Internal Revenue Service to analyze how people moved across the U.S. between 2004 and 2014. Movement from seven Katrina and Rita-affected counties to unaffected counties between 2005 and 2006 was categorized as climate-driven migration. Researchers then combined that analysis with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projections on the effects of sea level rise on coastal counties, and trained a machine-learning model to predict where coastal populations will move when forced to leave their homes—and how that, in turn, affects the migration of non-coastal residents.

In the worst-case scenario, in which sea levels rise by six feet by 2100, the resulting map shows portions of almost all counties on the East and West Coasts, and along the Gulf of Mexico, under water. It also shows that cities closest to the flood-prone areas, and that aren’t typically attractive destinations for newcomers, could see a higher-than-average influx of migrants. In Florida, for example, that means people may increasingly move to the shrinking core of the peninsula as the coastlines disappear into the ocean. Demographer Mathew Hauer, whose climate migration research was a building block for Dikina’s, explained in Audubon Magazine that people tend to move to familiar places nearby, where they might already have friends, family, or some other support network. People may also flock to major urban centers like Dallas and Houston, which the model predicts will absorb the most migrants, and drive up the pace of urbanization.

[rjzimmerman]

This video might force us to look at some of those migrating from Central America to the US in a different light. These folk are not running away from gangs or violence, but their inability to continue farming on their small plots of land as the climate changes.

From Vice:

Audelio Mejía’s family has grown corn in the agricultural heart of Central America, known as the Golden Triangle, for three generations. But for the last year, the 50-year-old smallholder farmer has seriously considered migrating north with the help of a coyote.

He’s not afraid of gang violence or political persecution, like many migrants who would claim asylum in the U.S. He’s worried about rain — and the lack of it.

“It used to be that it would rain tomorrow or the day after. Now the rain just arrives suddenly, or drought comes,” Mejía said. By 2050, climate change will displace an estimated 150 million to 300 million people worldwide. Mejía could be one of them.

[tearsofrefugees]

‘We had to leave everything behind’: Meet Europe’s climate migrants

“Everyone has gone mad after the storm. It’s a form of collective PTSD,” says one Greek villager faced with relocation.