Eventually, we will all be climate refugees

For most Europeans, climate change is steadily starting to show its face. We’ve experienced unprecedented heatwaves and seen the impacts of drought on our forests, rivers, and crops. We’re witnessing the disappearance of wildlife and noticing strange changes in the seasons. For many people around the world, however, far devastating effects have already been felt. Climate change is already too intense to withstand and has forced them from their homes¹.

Since the year 2000, people in poorer countries have died from related disasters, many of which were climate related, at rates seven times higher than those in wealthy countries². In 2018 alone, global-warming-exacerbated weather threats, including storms, cyclones, floods, droughts, wildfires and landslides, displaced around 16 million people³. These aren’t just abstract numbers. Behind every one of these is a personal story of loss and danger – desperate humans fleeing their homelands and risking everything to find safety. In East Africa, for example, it’s either migration or starvation for nearly 11 million people⁴. There’s no other choice.

According to a recent report by the UN Human Rights Council⁵, warming of 1.5°C (which we’re likely to reach in the next twenty years) will leave around 500 million people vulnerable to water stress, 36 million with lower crop yields, and expose up to 4.5 billion to heatwaves. By 2030, climate change will plunge around 100 million more people into poverty worldwide⁶, and by 2050, a minimum of 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America alone could be displaced from their homes, becoming climate refugees^1:1. And this is just the beginning. Without immediate and radical action, we’re likely to experience worldwide warming of 4°C by the end of this century⁷.

4°C warming will lead to genuinely apocalyptic consequences. It would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Imagine the following. Land-wise, the tropics are uninhabitable and Southern Europe has become a desert. Extreme weather events like typhoons, heatwaves and droughts regularly batter the globe. And the oceans haven’t fared any better. They contain massive dead zones, and sea levels have risen several metres⁸. The vast majority of humanity are forced to seek refuge in Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, Greenland, and the southern tip of South America – the last few havens where agriculture is still possible^7:1.

Without radical efforts to fight the climate crisis, our planet will gradually become inhabitable. The poorest are the first affected, but eventually, we’ll all be at risk of losing our homes and having to migrate to survive. If we wait until we’re all climate refugees, it’ll be far too late. We need to act now!