But experts estimate that as many as 250 million people—a population almost that of the entire United States—could be on the move by 2050. They will go because temperatures are rising and desertification has set in where rainfall is needed most. They will go because more potent monsoons are making flood-prone areas worse. They will go because of other water events caused by melting glaciers, rising seas and the slow and deadly seepage of saline water into their wells and fields.
The worst migration cases will be nations like the Maldives and small islands in the Pacific. Their inhabitants will go because their homelands will likely sink beneath the rising sea.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a minimum of 207 million people in Latin America, Asia and Africa will not have enough water inside a decade. In Asia, an extra 130 million people will be at risk of hunger by the middle of the century. By 2100, crop revenues in Africa will drop 90 percent. And scientists see Bangladesh as ground zero.
The country's 150 million inhabitants live in the delta of three waterways about the size of Iowa, and the majority of the country sits less than 20 feet above sea level. According to the IPCC, rising sea levels will wipe out more cultivated land in Bangladesh than anywhere in the world. By 2050, rice production is expected to drop 10 percent and wheat production by 30 percent.
By the end of the century, more than a quarter of the country will be inundated.
About 15 million people in Bangladesh alone could be displaced. That's the equivalent of every person in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
A migration that will change the face of the world
But while more climate migrants will come from Bangladesh than from any other country, scientists say that from Mozambique to Tuvalu, from Egypt to Vietnam, climate migration will change the face of the world.
"This will be the largest migration in history. This is not migration as we've known it before," said Edward Cameron, a former senior adviser to the government of the Maldives. "We're talking about people migrating from sensitive places into other very sensitive places."
In some ways, large-scale migration is nothing new. Humans, after all, have been on the move since early man left East Africa. But these shifts will not be the migrations of pioneers or adventurers seeking opportunities in new lands. Rather, social scientists say, they will be the movement of people who are rushed, unwanted and unprepared, into unfamiliar and perhaps hostile new environments. Most of those who will be uprooted already are living on less than $1 per day.
The first shifts will start within countries. Scientists see families flocking from rural and coastal areas to cities where livelihoods are less tied to fickle weather patterns. It's a pattern that is already happening against a background of rapid global urbanization, in which the desperate rate of growth far outpaces jobs and infrastructure.
Mohammad Ayub Ali, 40, is part of that mosaic. He left the central Bangladesh town of Sherpur because the failing crops couldn't earn him a living. A ruinous flood in September was the final straw.
Now Ali drives an eye-catching pink and orange rickshaw through the capital city Dhaka's teeming streets, where he earns the equivalent of $15 per month. He lives in a one-room metal shack with his mother, wife and two children.
"It's not that great over here, but it's better than over there," he said. Nearly 3.5 million people in Dhaka—about 40 percent of the population—live in slums, like Ali. The World Bank estimates that by midcentury, half of all Bengalis will live in urban centers.
Subscription Center
See what we're tweeting about
4 Comments
Add CommentThe entire planet needs to adopt China's one child policy. The primary force driving climate change is an overpopulation of homo sapiens and extinction of the other similar sized species not seen as food or pets by homo sapiens. Our planet had over time developed into a bio-diverse balanced system, we are destroying the balance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo prevent (actually delay) another extinction we all need to act now. Recognise the benefits of biodiversity, far more important than a multi cultural homo sapien planet.
If we don't act evolutionary pressures will restore balance, but it wont be a humane process.
I have an idea...rather than restrict ourselves to one child, how about we limit our maximum age to 35 years and then we are summarily put to death? Hmmm, seems I've heard that story line before. I wonder how mother earth managed to save itself from cataclysmic climate change in eons past.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate is ALWAYS changing. Always has, always will. As a result, some areas become uninhabitable and others become habitable. Don't go prescribing vasectomies for everyone. If you believe in anthropogenic global warming, then that means that man-kind was smart enough to change the climate in one direction so we should be smart enough to change it in the other as well right? If you don't believe in it, then what difference does it make what we do either way?
It will be almost impossible to get people to agree to terminating their life at a given age, I would happily comply with such a global requirement and donate all my organs to the sick and the rest of my body to science. Asking people to lower fertility is possible. Science can modify microorganisms that reduce fertility, to be non pathogenic. We wont need vasectomies, when you want a baby just take a pill.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur planet does regulate the environment using feedback mechanisms that is why we exist. Still there have been five major extinctions. We know the fifth could have been a result of a meteorite impact followed by an increase in volcanic activity. Our earth has a thin plastic skin on which we live followed by a molten layer. The impact of the meteorite may have exerted pressure on the molten mass. Liquids cannot be compressed and would try to squeeze out of every nook and cranny; this could be an explanation for the resulting volcanic activity.
Climate has been changing on earth ever since it formed 4+ giga years ago, but change has always been slow, except for some freak events, each of which can be attributed to a cause, some of which are still unknown.
We are now talking about rapid temperature change. Species are becoming extinct at rates greater than that experienced during the fifth extinction (40 K years approx.). Many scientists believe we are in the sixth extinction, I agree. To do nothing is to doom a decent but egocentric species to extinction.
Excellent article !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile the Earth has always endured natural climate change variability, we are now facing the possibility of irreversible climate change in the near future. The increase of greenhouse gases in the Earth?s atmosphere from industrial processes has enhanced the natural greenhouse effect. This in turn has accentuated the greenhouse ?trap? effect, causing greenhouse gases to form a blanket around the Earth, inhibiting the sun?s heat from leaving the outer atmosphere. This increase of greenhouse gases is causing an additional warming of the Earth?s surface and atmosphere. A direct consequence of this is sea-level rise expansion, which is primarily due to the thermal expansion of oceans (water expands when heated), inducing the melting of ice sheets as global surface temperature increases.
Forecasts for climate change by the 2,000 scientists on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) project a rise in the global average surface temperature by 1.4 to 5.8°C from 1990 to 2100. This will result in a global mean sea level rise by an average of 5 mm per year over the next 100 years. Consequently, human-induced climate change will have ?deleterious effects? on ecosystems, socio-economic systems and human welfare.At the moment, especially high risks associated with the rise of the oceans are having a particular impact on the two archipelagic states of Western Polynesia: Tuvalu and Kiribati. According to UN forecasts, they may be completely inundated by the rising waters of the Pacific by 2050.According to the vast majority of scientific investigations, warming waters and the melting of polar and high-elevation ice worldwide will steadily raise sea levels. This will likely drive people off islands first by spoiling the fresh groundwater, which will kill most land plants and leave no potable water for humans and their livestock. Low-lying island states like Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives are the most prominent nations threatened in this way.“The biggest challenge is to preserve their nationality without a territory,” said Bogumil Terminski from Geneva. The best solution is continue to recognize deterritorialized states as a normal states in public international law. The case of Kiribati and other small island states is a particularly clear call to action for more secure countries to respond to the situations facing these ‘most vulnerable nations’, as climate change increasingly impacts upon their lives.