A week ago, my wife and I had lunch with a neighbor who is a retired real estate broker. This past summer was particularly wet in our part of the country, and many houses in this neighborhood were flooded—some with several feet of water. My neighbor told me that he knew at least half a dozen families were looking to move to higher grounds in the same neighborhood because their houses were flooded. But it’s not just floods in the eastern U.S. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, and more droughts, particularly in the western U.S. So my neighborhood is not an isolated case—it is a microcosm of climate migration worldwide and it foretells of what to come.
The most well-known climate-driven migration is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Droughts and soil erosion centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, affecting some 100 million acres. This environmental disaster drove tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms and migrate westward, many to California.
But population displacements due to weather and climate disasters have been happening much more often recently. The Guardian reported in 2015 that more than a million people fled from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many never returned. They escaped to Baton Rouge, Birmingham, San Antonio, Dallas and Atlanta. The biggest number headed to Houston, a 350-mile drive along the Gulf coast (and itself no stranger to hurricanes). At the time, it was the biggest climate-driven migration since the Dust Bowl.
A report from Hunter College (New York, NY) shows that, one year since Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, nearly 160,000 residents of the island have relocated to the mainland U.S.
In November 2020, Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota, both Category 4 hurricanes, made landfall two weeks and 15 miles apart, in Nicaragua. They were two of the most intense storms from the Atlantic Ocean in recorded history. These storms displaced nearly 600,000 in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. CBS later reported that with few options at home, in mid-January 2021, up to 9,000 people gathered to join a caravan in Honduras heading to Mexico and the U.S. in search of relief.
As climate change causes more severe weather disasters such as droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, population displacements have become one of the most devastating crises of our time. By an Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimate, weather disasters, many of them tied to climate change, displaced 17.2 million people around the globe in 2018.
Research shows there is a complex relationship between climate change and conflicts. A 2017 report from CNA, a US-based military think tank, documents a series of conflicts ranging from civil unrest, terrorism, to state-to-state conflicts in the India Subcontinent, Middle East, and Africa. The report concludes that water stress is a contributing factor to these conflicts. The result has been massive migration—an unplanned adaptation—northward into Europe.
In 2020, 95% of all forced migration from conflict areas occurred in countries vulnerable to climate change. Disasters due to sudden and slow-onset natural hazards often hit areas plagued by conflicts, forcing the population to flee multiple times, as was the case in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Bangladesh.
In the future, climate change will exacerbate water stress through shifting precipitation patterns, saltwater intrusion of coastal groundwater, and shrinking glaciers reducing river flows. In certain areas, reduction in rainfall may cause agricultural productivity to drop to a level that it is not economically viable. In general, environmentally fragile communities and ecosystems will likely collapse first. New water management practices, as climate change adaptation measures, are needed for these regions to prevent further disasters.
The World Bank Groundswell report (September 2021) pointed out that in the absence of concrete climate adaptation measures, climate impacts such as increases in water shortages, drops in crop productivity, and sea-level rise compounded—could force over 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050. This estimate is for six regions vulnerable to climate change—Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia, North Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again in the U.S. The Great Plains today is the breadbasket for the world. However, in an article in Nature, University of Chicago and NASA researchers showed that because of projected water shortages, Dust Bowl-era agricultural yields will become the norm by 2050. At that point, a Dust Bowl type abandonment may happen. Projections are inherently imprecise, but the trends of climate-driven disasters—the steady baking, burning, and flooding—suggest that we are already immersed in a slow-brewing but more expansive replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops over a much larger region.
Migration, as a climate adaptation measure, is usually not planned, despite the situation of homeowners looking for higher ground in my hometown. Under the onslaught of natural disasters, the retreat is often rushed, chaotic, and even panic. For example, in the evacuation from wildfires in California in 2018, chaos caused some people to die in fleeing cars.
For years, we Americans have denied the reality of climate change, with our decisions blinded by political division and heavy subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. But it’s not too late to open our eyes and act.