The crisis in Southeast Asia
A recent report on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta farming area, produced by Oanh Le Thi Kim and Truong Le Minh of Van Lang University in Vietnam, found that climate change was the dominant factor in 14.5 percent of migrants' decisions to leave their country. Agriculture around the Mekong Delta has been failing to produce adequate yields recently, plunging local people into poverty. Although the crisis is difficult to quantify because of the complex relationship between climate change and poverty, the fact is that the 24,000 people who chose to leave the region due to the changed climate may be a massive underestimation.
The Mekong Delta region is the canary in the coalmine – one of the first places in the world to feel the real and lasting effects of climate change. Several contributing factors make it a particularly vulnerable region: Rising oceans have led to coastal lands literally falling into the sea, and the soil has become contaminated with seawater, stopping anything from growing there.
In response to the Mekong Delta study, researchers Alex Chapman and Van Pham Dang Tri wrote: “All this demonstrates that climate change threatens to exacerbate the existing trends of economic migration. One large scale study of migration in deltas has found that climate factors such as extreme floods, cyclones, erosion and land degradation play a role in making natural resource-based livelihoods more tenuous, further encouraging inhabitants to migrate.”
The situation in Vietnam may become all too common as climate change morphs the nature of our world and sparks a global crisis, revealing today's findings to be only the tip of the iceberg. The science shows that climate change will cause even more droughts, floods, heat waves and other life-threatening weather conditions. These extreme weather events will render farming all but impossible across huge areas of the globe, in particular sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.
The crisis in Africa
Africa is of particular concern to Europe because of its proximity. Europe has already been destabilized by the impact of mass immigration from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, it looks like the next great wave of migrants could come from the Sahel belt in Africa. Here, environmental changes have already had devastating effects in a region suffering increasingly catastrophic weather events.
The countries most affected by climactic changes have been northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Mali. In 2012 alone, more than 6 million people were displaced by floods in northeastern Nigeria, and over half a million in Chad. As of April 2017, 2.5 million people across the region have been forced to leave due to nature's inhospitable conditions. Another 6.9 million are now “food insecure” and on the verge of being forced to migrate.
Trapped in a cycle of drought and flood, farmers have not been able to resume their activities and food production has almost drawn to a halt. The inevitable consequences of climate change – famine, immigration, conflict and political instability – are already playing out in microcosm in the Lake Chad Basin of Africa, where conflict has intensified in the last few years. Boko Haram attacks and suicide bombers have now started to target civilians, and the trauma is palpable as millions are being forced from their homes and farming fields, leaving the region’s infrastructure in tatters.
Meanwhile, the arrival of displaced masses from Nigeria on the borders of Cameroon, Chad and Niger have led to increases in ongoing cross-border attacks. Most of the area is now in an “emergency” state on the verge of famine. This is just the start of what many foresee will be a global climate change immigration crisis as temperatures rise and more farmland stops producing the crops that entire regions depend on.
In other words, if you thought the Syrian migrant crisis and subsequent backlash in Europe were bad, wait for what's coming. New research predicts that if the devastating effects of climate change continue, more than 1 million immigrants will likely be entering Europe annually by 2100.
The study, which looked at immigration paterns in over 100 countries, revealed that if a region’s climate varied from optimum 20 degree agricultural conditions, it would lead to a 28 percent to 188 percent increase in immigration. With the forecast of continued world warming, future figures will probably be at the higher end of the scale.
Casting blame on the West
The precursor to this study included widely reported research suggesting that climate change would exacerbate the Syrian crisis. It contended that droughts in Syria’s Fertile Crescent region between 2007 and 2010 would impel the political crisis and subsequent exodus, which proved to be the case. Indeed, the timeline for political dissolution only began in Syria around 2007-2008, despite Bashar al-Assad being in power since 2000.
It has been easy to blame an evil dictatorship for the genocide in Syria, but much harder to look closer to home and admit that the unrest may have ultimately been caused, in part, by every individual in the U.S producing 16 metric tons more carbon emissions than anyone anywhere else in the world.
As Michael Werz, a senior fellow at American Progress, told the Washington Post: “There is a mass of evidence that climate is impacting the way that people behave. Also substantial evidence that climate is a likely driver or contributor to massive migratory movements. It’s hard to argue it’s the only driver, but it is certainly a driver.”
There's no better recipe for social unrest than mass displacement and migration combined with resource scarcity. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the first national leader to recognize that migration caused by climate change is now a global “humanitarian crisis”.
But the sad truth is that every day, nothing changes, and another 100 million tons of carbon get dumped into the atmosphere. Everyone seems reluctant to leave the banquet and start the rationing, but the reality remains that the world is dealing with a finite amount of resources. What we squander today we will not have when climate change initiates more droughts, crops failure and famine.
The Baby Boomer generation may have given up with a "not in our lifetime" approach that disregards any sentimentality about leaving the planet for their children. After an era of worshipping the “religion of comfortableness,” as Nietzsche puts it, we, their children, might not just be uncomfortable: we may be left fighting for our lives.
All this is taking place, of course, even as the Trump administration fails to take heed of the known national security threats posed by climate change migration. At least the George W. Bush administration, despite publicly denying the existence of climate change, also put the crisis on the list of national security issues. Trump has now taken it off that list and inscrutably described climate change initiatives as part of an “anti-growth energy agenda.”
But what’s more "anti-growth" than death and suffering on a mass scale? Even though the most adverse effects of climate change probably won’t affect North America first, in the long run no one will be spared. “It’s short sighted,” said Wolfram Schlenker from Columbia University, one of the scientists behind the 2017 study. “Incidents that occur abroad come back to hurt you in your own country.”
What many of us have been fearing may finally have begun, and no amount of political spin will get us out of the global crisis we'll experience once large swathes of our earth become uninhabitable to human life, and mass migration ensues as an inevitable response.
