STATE OF EMERGENCY

FORCED MIGRATION DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE IS AN ALARMING TREND THAT IS EXPECTED TO DISPLACE 117.2 MILLION PEOPLE BY THE END OF THE YEAR.

BY DANIEL BARRICK ARTWORK JAMAAL HALE

Humans have long been a nomadic species and there are many reasons people decide to pack up and leave home. While some move in search of work, study or economic opportunities, others are forced to relocate due to war, persecution, terrorism and most recently, climate change. With soaring numbers fleeing the environment they formerly lived in due to uninhabitable conditions, It is projected by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) that by the end of 2023, 117.2 million people will be forcibly displaced or stateless.

You may have heard the term “global warming”, but what exactly does it mean?

Carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and nitrous oxide are all important greenhouse gasses that help regulate the Earth’s temperature by trapping the sun’s heat within the atmosphere. However, excessive amounts of these gasses, produced by fossil fuel emissions from cars, coal-production, livestock farming, waste management and more, are causing ‘global warming’, more aptly described as ‘climate change’, to accelerate faster than at any point in recorded history. Over time, changing weather patterns are disrupting the usual balance of nature, posing many risks to human beings and all other forms of life on Earth.

“It is projected by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) that by the end of 2023, 117.2 million people will be forcibly displaced or stateless.”

Amongst the unnerving effects of climate change are widespread forest fires. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, wildfires alone have forced an average of over 200,000 people to leave their homes every year for the last decade. For example, in 2021, a forest fire in Paradise, California destroyed over 19,000 buildings in one day, and killed 86 people. Even Europe’s famously mild Mediterranean climate is now plagued by dangerous temperature fluctuations leading to soaring heat which then causes blazes, smoke, floods and, most recently, collapsing glaciers.

Studies of the Arctic region reveal that 20,000 square miles of ice have been melting per year since 1979. Data compiled by the World Meteorological Organization has shown that as a result, the sea level has risen faster since 1900 than it has in the last 3000 years. And this isn’t a problem that will only affect those in the distance. Not only are places like Bangladesh, India, China, and London in danger, but places with low coasts in America are soon likely to become uninhabitable, such as New York and Los Angeles.

The prospect of one becoming a climate refugee themselves in the near future is not unthinkable and it is a growing problem that will only worsen with time. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) predicts that by the year 2050, 1.2 billion people could be affected by these threats. Exacerbating the problem is that despite a 2015 Paris climate agreement that called for a task force on climate related migration and a 2018 global compact which outlined the need for protection for those on the move, there are still no international laws or processes in place to mitigate the oncoming cataclysm.

Climate change is not only something that affects the very environment that we stand and live on, but it’s also something that affects our food and water supplies, creating shortages and many difficulties in acquiring the various resources we need to stay alive. Often, climate change issues are shrugged off by individuals who don’t see the problem manifesting within their vicinity, but if there’s any good to come out of the millions of people being forced to migrate from their homes, it’s that hopefully those of us currently less affected will take heed of the warnings and do what we can to circumvent the process before it becomes more widespread and eventually, too late.