Climate Change is Coming for Your Country

And your sense of national identity.

Image Courtesy of Danish Refugee Council - Rohingya Refugee Camp in Bangladesh. Home of 920,000 people.

Climate change is going to be the worst for the racists. Climate change is currently displacing about 20 million people per year. This number is set to increase over time, with a 2020 report by the Australia-based Ecological Threat Register (ETR) estimating that 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050. The report highlights a future for humanity that is far from rosy. Some of the findings include:

·        Over one billion people live in 31 countries where the country’s resilience is unlikely to sufficiently withstand the impact of ecological events by 2050, contributing to mass population displacement.

·        By 2040, a total of 5.4 billion people – more than half of the world’s projected population – will live in the 59 countries experiencing high or extreme water stress, including India and China.

·        5 billion people could suffer from food insecurity by 2050; which is an increase of 1.5 billion people from today.

·        The lack of resilience in countries covered in the ETR will lead to worsening food insecurity and competition over resources, increasing civil unrest and mass displacement, exposing developed countries to increased influxes of refugees.

A report from that same year, entitled: Future of the human climate niche, paints an equally pessimistic picture. The report explains that like most animals, we humans are comfortable in a certain climate niche, and have settled our cities and civilization in these temperate zones that have existed for thousands of years. However, under a business-as-usual scenario, over the next fifty years, about a third of humanity will be forced to live in conditions that no large-scale settlements ever have. The authors note that adaptation is unlikely. This mass of 1 to 3 billion people will have to find new places to live. Less dire estimates still assume about 216 million people will need to find new homes by 2050 due to climate change.

Unless we tackle climate change, and fast, we will have a refugee crisis on our hands that the world has never seen – and never even imagined was possible.  

To put this in perspective, the war in Ukraine created about 8 million Ukrainian refugees one year after the war began. About 5.3 million people have been displaced within Ukraine over that same time period. Ten years after the start of the Syrian civil war began, the UN Refugee Agency reported that about 6.8 Syrians had become refugees, with another 6.9 internally displaced. These numbers are laughably quaint compared to what is coming.

A plea to the racists.

Racist people of the world, climate change is going to hit you hardest. Because you are going to have all the problems everyone else does, but on top of that, more people you hate will come to live next door to you. Climate change is the biggest threat to your worldview that you will ever face. If we don’t all do our part to aggressively combat climate change, there will be hordes of people at your border, all the time, coming to get into your country. The countries most at risk from climate change are mostly from countries whose populations are predominantly black and brown.

The majority of climate change refugees are not going to come to your countries on huge ocean supertankers or caravans hundreds of miles long, they will come in legally for the most part and not leave. Or they will seek asylum from countries and cities where human life is no longer viable. So look for some rich countries to tighten their asylum laws in the future.

People won’t be leaving their homes because they are just going to try on your neighborhood for a lark. That’s not how it works. They will be leaving their cities because their cities will be impossible to live in. No matter how poor or disadvantaged someone is, two major factors usually keep them where they live. First, they don’t want to leave. Picking up stakes and going to a completely new country is often devastating. People must leave all they know, all the social and economic connections they have made, leave family and friends. Moving is a pain in the ass when it is just across town. It can be horrifying when you have no other choice.

The second reason people usually stay where they are is that they don’t have the means to leave. Leaving is expensive in both real cost and the opportunity cost they are throwing away. Most refugees know that they are not wanted where they are going, they don’t want to go there. They are going because they have no other choice.

Future climate migrants will be coming to your country because theirs has become a living hell. Whether it is from typhoons or hurricanes destroying their homes, water running out, flooding destroying all they have, or wars over scarce resources due to climate change, they will be coming.

As I discussed earlier, climate change will make some places on earth just too hot to live. As major areas of the world begin to experience wet bulb temperatures above what people can endure, people will be faced with the simple choice of “stay and die”, or “leave and live”.  Places in Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and tropical regions around the equator are most likely to experience this first. But as time goes on, more of the earth will become a hothouse where people must leave or likely perish.

Calm down, liberals. I’m coming for you now.

To anyone who says they will welcome any refugees with open arms no matter where they come from, good for you. You get a gold star for compassion. But you can’t use compassion as food, water, or shelter. All these climate refugees coming in the next 30 years will need places to stay, food to eat, and water to drink for starters. No country, no matter how compassionate or generous has the resources to handle the immigration onslaught that is on its way if we don’t address climate change immediately.

It's not that developed countries in the future will be cruel when these refugees come to the door or fly in and never leave – it’s that they simply won’t be able to absorb that number of refugees that are coming.

Add to this the prospect that those resources in your developed country will be degraded and diminished by climate change in the coming decades and the problem will only get worse with time. There will be less to eat (crop yields will decline with climate change), there will be less water to go around (water resources are already stressed), and there will be less habitable land even in rich countries (for example the American Southeast and Southwest will become less hospitable).

Liberals. You need to solve climate change, so you don’t have to face the hypocrisy that will confront you in the future when you tell your leaders to turn away those refugees from India, Africa, or the Caribbean, and make them go back to the hell they are leaving.

Internal immigration will be a problem too.

The United States is a big place, with some areas more vulnerable to climate change than others. The American South and Southwest are more likely to suffer damage from climate change than the Midwest for example, though the Midwest will still have to deal with problems like flooding, extreme weather, and heat waves.

People are beginning to understand this.

Because of its location far away from the coasts and current temperate to cold climate, Duluth, Minnesota and Midwestern cities like it are being discussed by some as “climate safe havens” or “climate change proof” cities. Of course if many people get this same idea and start to move to Duluth and other places like it, these “climate change proof” cities will go through the growing pains of many other “boomtowns” throughout history, such as not having the infrastructure, facilities or jobs to handle the influx of internal migrants.

But for every boom, there will be a bust. If climate change continues unabated, cities threatened by ocean waters such as Miami (most all of South Florida frankly), New Orleans as well as parts of New York, Boston, and other coastal cities will suffer significant losses to their population. This migration will, over time change the political map, as states with fleeing climate migrants will lose seats in the US House of Representatives and in the Electoral College.

Even within states, there will be winners and losers. Arizona for example, is expected to see a significant portion of its population leave the hotter and drier Southern part of the state, for the cooler more mountainous enclaves in Northern Arizona. The same type of dynamic is likely to play out in Southwestern states from Texas to California.

If climate change continues unabated, the American South is likely to see an exodus to rival and perhaps surpass the one that followed reconstruction, when the Jim Crow South proved inhospitable to many African Americans who moved North hoping for a better life.

This will be a refugee crisis the likes of which you can’t imagine.

Even if everyone’s internal combustion engine cars turned into EVs overnight, all coal, and natural gas powerplants were magically replaced by nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal plants, and all our agriculture become carbon-free – tomorrow; we would still have a large climate refugee wave coming. The CO2 and methane in the atmosphere have already locked in a humanitarian crisis. Every year we don’t act, or act too slow, just makes it worse.

No country can handle such a refugee deluge. The best way to deal with it is not to build a wall or institute draconian immigration laws, but to tackle climate change now, so the refugee crisis doesn’t happen.

Let’s assume the lower bound of the potential refugee crisis. If 216 million people need a new home between 2021 (the year that the report was written) and 2050, that means about 7.4 million people will be displaced due to climate change each year. These numbers will be much worse in the coming decades than they are now. That 7.4 number is the average. That average number is about equal to the refugee crisis from the first year of the war in Ukraine. That is the lower bound estimate of what is coming.

If we have about 1.2 billion climate refugees over the next 30 years, that averages out to about 40 million a year. That is as if the whole state of California needed a new place to live next year, and then another California would need a new home the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Those numbers will start out smaller than that and build over time. If we remain on the same business-as-usual trajectory, we are on a path for far greater than 40 million climate refugees per year in the decade from 2040 – 2050. How does a society, a civilization even function at that point? I would argue … not very well.

We are going to find out.

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