TIDING US OVER. As In These Times reports this week, parts of the world are already dealing with the effects of straining the natural environment, and those effects are having concrete social impacts on vulnerable communities. "Environmental stress forced more than 25 million to migrate in 1998, according to a Red Cross and Red Crescent study -- roughly the same number that fled armed conflict," the magazine reports. And that was way back in 1998. If the diminishing amount of inhabitable land has already prompted massive migration in some parts of the world, it will only worsen with the changing climate:
In Bangladesh, refugees who can no longer farm on drowning coastal land are falling inward to cities already crammed with jobless and desperate masses. Smaller than Illinois, Bangladesh has 140 million people, almost half the U.S. population. Imagine what it will be like in 50 years, when the Bay of Bengal is predicted to cover 11 percent of Bangladesh's land.
We can expect to see waves of climate-driven migration in threatened areas all over the world, creating a new breed of "climate refugees" -- a group no nation or international treaty is yet prepared to deal with. And the problem isn't limited to equatorial developing nations -- it will be here in places like New Orleans' Ninth Ward and small Midwestern towns along the Mississippi.
By the time the U.S. gets around to dealing with our emissions problem, we might already be knee-deep in a humanitarian problem at home and abroad, which makes me wonder whether any of the bills in this year's bumper crop of climate change legislation are going to take adapting to this reality into account.
--Kate Sheppard
