As pressões migratórias globais vão aumentar
progressivamente com as Alterações Cliamáticas.
OVOODOCORVO
Americans: the next climate migrants
'We're moving to higher ground': America's era of climate
mass migration is here
Illustration: R
Fresson for the Guardian
By the end of this century, sea level rises alone could
displace 13m people. Many states will have to grapple with hordes of residents
seeking dry ground. But, as one expert says, ‘No state is unaffected by this’
by Oliver Milman
Mon 24 Sep 2018 09.00 BST Last modified on Mon 24 Sep 2018
16.42 BST
After her house flooded for the third year in a row,
Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of
boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and
retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding
rains and swelling seas.
Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century
house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s
eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in
of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from the last flood, local
authorities agreed this historic slice of Charleston could be torn down.
“I was sloshing through the water with my puppy dog, debris
was everywhere,” she said. “I feel completely sunken. It would cost me around
$500,000 to raise the house, demolish the first floor. I’m going to rent a
place instead, on higher ground.”
Millions of Americans will confront similarly hard choices
as climate change conjures up brutal storms, flooding rains, receding
coastlines and punishing heat. Many are already opting to shift to less
perilous areas of the same city, or to havens in other states. Whole towns from
Alaska to Louisiana are looking to relocate, in their entirety, to safer
ground.
The era of climate migration is, virtually unheralded,
already upon America.
The population shift gathering pace is so sprawling that it
may rival anything in US history. “Including all climate impacts it isn’t too
far-fetched to imagine something twice as large as the Dustbowl,” said Jesse
Keenan, a climate adaptation expert at Harvard University, referencing the
1930s upheaval in which 2.5 million people moved from the dusty, drought-ridden
plains to California.
This enormous migration will probably take place over a
longer period than the Dustbowl but its implications are both profound and
opaque. It will plunge the US into an utterly alien reality. “It is very
difficult to model human behaviour under such extreme and historically
unprecedented circumstances,” Keenan admits.
The closest analogue could be the Great Migration – a period
spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million black people
departed the Jim Crow south for cities in the north, midwest and west.
By the end of this century, sea level rise alone could
displace 13 million people, according to one study, including 6 million in
Florida. States including Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey will
also have to grapple with hordes of residents seeking dry ground.
“There’s not a state unaffected by this,” said demographer
Mat Hauer, lead author of the research, which is predicated on a severe 6ft sea
level increase. There are established migration preferences for some places –
south Florida to Georgia, New York to Colorado – but in many cases people would
uproot to the closest inland city, if they have the means.
“The Great Migration was out of the south into the
industrialized north, whereas this is from every coastal place in the US to
every other place in the US,” said Hauer. “Not everyone can afford to move, so
we could end up with trapped populations that would be in a downward spiral. I
have a hard time imagining what that future would be like.”
Within just a few decades, hundreds of thousands of homes on
US coasts will be chronically flooded. By the end of the century, 6ft of sea
level rise would redraw the coastline with familiar parts – such as southern
Florida, chunks of North Carolina and Virginia, much of Boston, all but a
sliver of New Orleans – missing. Warming temperatures will fuel monstrous
hurricanes – like the devastating triumvirate of Irma, Maria and Harvey in
2017, followed by Florence this year – that will scatter survivors in jarring,
uncertain ways.
The projections are starting to materialize in parts of the
US, forming the contours of the climate migration to come.
“I don’t see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously
thinking about what to do with the future climate refugee stream,” said Orrin
Pilkey, professor emeritus of coastal geology at Duke University. “It boggles
the mind to see crowds of climate refugees arriving in town and looking for
work and food.”
Pilkey’s new book – Sea Level Rise Along Americas Shores: The
Slow Tsunami – envisions apocalyptic scenes where millions of people, largely
from south Florida, will become “a stream of refugees moving to higher ground”.
“They will not be the bedraggled families carrying their few
possessions on their backs as we have seen in countless photos of people
fleeing wars and ethnic cleansing, most recently in Myanmar and Syria,” Pilkey
states in his book. “Instead, they will be well-off Americans driving to a new
life in their cars, with moving trucks behind, carrying a lifetime of memories
and possessions.”
Dejected with frigid New York winters, Chase Twichell and
her husband purchased a four-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach in 2011, with the
plan of spending at least a decade basking in the sunshine. At first, keeping a
pair of flip-flops on hand to deal with the flooded streets seemed an
acceptable quirk, until the magnitude of the encroaching seas became apparent
when the city spent $400m to elevate streets near Twichell’s abode.
Twichell began to notice water pumps were spewing plastic
bags, condoms and chip packets into the bay. Friends’ balconies started getting
submerged. Twichell, a poet, found apocalyptic themes creeping into her work.
Last year, she sold the apartment to a French businessman and moved back to upstate
New York.
“It was like end of the world stuff,” she said. “It was
crazy for us to have such a big investment in such a dangerous situation.” Her
neighbours initially scolded her but now several are also selling up, fretting
that the real estate and insurance markets for properties like theirs will
seize up.
“It was horrible but fascinating to see it,” Twichell said.
“It’s like we got to see the future and it wasn’t pretty. It’s like a movie
where there’s a terrible volcano that is destroying everything, only it’s much
slower than that.”
A sense of fatalism is also starting to grip some local
officials. Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami, has seen a colleague, spooked
by sea level rise, move to California and some neighbours sell their houses
before an expected slump in prices. Stoddard and his wife regularly discuss
buying a fallback property, perhaps in Washington DC.
“Most people will wait for the problem to be bad to take
action, that’s what I worry about,” he said. “We can buy a lot of time, but in
the end we lose. The sea level will go over the tops of our buildings.”
Sanitation is an immediate preoccupation for Stoddard, given
the large proportion of residents who aren’t served by sewage works. “If you’re
using a septic tank and your toilet starts to overflow into your bathroom
because of water inundation, that’s a basis-of-civilization problem,” he said.
“A medieval city wasn’t a nice smelling place and they had a lot of diseases.”
Those living near the coasts will face pressures of the
gradual (sea level rise) as well as dramatic (storms) nature but people inland
will also be harried to move by climate change.
Farming techniques and technology have improved immeasurably
since the Dustbowl but rising temperatures are still expected to diminish
yields for crops such as maize, soybeans and wheat, prompting the departure of
younger people from farming. By 2050, Texas county, the largest wheat-producing
county in Oklahoma, could spend an extra 40 days a year above 90F (32C)
compared with now.
A firefighter
monitors a backfire near Clearlake, California. The Rocky Fire burned over
60,000 acres and forced the evacuation of 12,000 residents.
A firefighter
monitors a backfire near Clearlake, California. The Rocky Fire burned over
60,000 acres and forced the evacuation of 12,000 residents. Photograph: Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
A study published last year found that the economies of the
southern states, along with parts of the west, will suffer disproportionately
as temperatures rise. In what researchers called potentially one of the largest
transfers of wealth in US history, the poorest third of counties are expected to
lose up to 20% of their income unless greenhouse gas emissions are severely
curtailed. Wealth, and potentially people, are expected to shift north and
west.
Meanwhile, cities already struggling with heat will see
wealthy residents head for cooler climes. Last year, 155 people died in Phoenix
due to a particularly fierce summer. Increasing heat will start testing the
durability of the populace, even those shielded by air conditioning. In the
western states, wildfires are getting larger, razing homes in ever more
spectacular ways and choking thousands of people with carcinogenic smoke.
Further to the south, at the border, there are suggestions
that people from Central America are being nudged towards the US because of
drought and hurricanes in their homelands, part of a trend that will see as
many as 300 million climate refugees worldwide by 2050.
“People will get very grumpy and upset with very hot
temperatures,” said Amir Jina, an environmental economist at the University of
Chicago who co-authored the research on economic losses. “Even if you have air
conditioning, some areas start to look less habitable. By the middle of the
century parts of the south-west and south-east won’t look attractive to live
in.
“That insidious climate migration is the one we should worry
about. The big disasters such as hurricanes will be obvious. It’s the pressures
we don’t know or understand that will reshape population in the 21st century.”
Prodded to name refuges in the US, researchers will point to
Washington and Oregon in the Pacific north-west, where temperatures will remain
bearable and disasters unlikely to strike. Areas close to the Great Lakes and
in New England are also expected to prove increasingly attractive to those
looking to move.
By 2065, southern states are expected to lose 8% of their US
population share, while the north-east will increase by 9%. A recent study
forecast that the population in the western half of the US will increase by
more than 10% over the next 50 years due to climate migration, largely from the
south and midwest.
But these population shifts are uncertain and are bound by a
tangle of other factors and caveats. People will still largely follow paths
guided by nearby family or suitable jobs. Even those who do want to move may
find favoured locations too expensive.
Some will just grimly hang on. “With property rights as
strong as they are in the US, some people may choose to go down with the ship,”
said Harvard’s Keenan. “The question is whether they have the means and the options
to do anything else.”
“People can usually cope with being a little less
comfortable, but if you see repeated storms or severe damage to crops, that
will trigger change,” said Solomon Hsiang, who researches how climate change
will affect society at the University of California.
“There will be pressure to move a little north. It won’t be
everyone, though, it won’t be like the great migration of wildebeest in Africa.
Whole cities picking up and moving would be hugely expensive.”
Smaller towns are giving relocation a go, however. In 2016,
the community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was the first place to be
given federal money to replant itself. The population, situated on an island
being eaten away by the sea, is looking to move to a former sugar cane farm 30
miles inland.
“We are called climate refugees but I hate that term,” said
Chantal Comardelle, who grew up in the Isle de Jean Charles community.
“We will be the first ones to face this in the modern US but
we won’t be the last. It’s important for us to get it right so other
communities know that they can do it, too.”
About a dozen coastal towns in Alaska are also looking to
relocate, as diminishing sea ice exposes them to storms and rising temperatures
thaw the very ground beneath them. One, Newtok, has identified a new site and
has some federal funding to begin uprooting itself.
A buyout of damaged and at-risk homes has already occurred
in New York City’s Staten Island in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, while certain
flood-prone houses in Houston, pummeled by Hurricane Harvey last year, are also
being purchased and razed.
But the cost of doing this for all at-risk Americans would
be eye-watering. Estimates range from $200,000 to $1m per person to undertake a
relocation. If 13 million people do have to move, it seems fantastical to
imagine $13tn, or even a significant fraction of this amount, being spent by
governments to ease the way.
“As a country we aren’t set up to deal with slow-moving
disasters like this, so people around the country are on their own,” said Joel
Clement, a former Department of the Interior official who worked on the
relocation of Alaskan towns.
“In the Arctic I’m concerned we’ve left it too late. Younger
people have left because they know the places are doomed. These towns won’t be
relocated within five years and I’m sure there will be a catastrophic storm up
there. My hope is no lives will be lost.”
Ultimately, the US will have to choose what it wants to
defend and hope its ingenuity outstrips the environmental changes ranged
against it. Not everyone will be able to shelter behind fortifications like the
‘big U’ planned to defend lower Manhattan. Wrenching decisions will have to be
made as to what and where will be sacrificed.
“We won’t see whole areas abandoned but neighborhoods will
get sparse and wild looking, the tax base will start to crumble,” said
Stoddard, mayor of South Miami. “We don’t have the laws to deal with that sort
of piecemeal retreat. It’s magical thinking to think someone else will buy out
your property.
“We need a plan as to what will be defended because at the
moment the approach is that some kid in a garage will come with a solution.
There isn’t going to be a mop and bucket big enough for this problem.”
Where should you move to save yourself from climate change?
Climate change
Heatwaves, hurricanes and floods will make some places in
the US inhospitable
Oliver Milman
@olliemilman
Mon 24 Sep 2018 09.00 BST Last modified on Mon 24 Sep 2018
10.46 BST
Siuslaw national forest, Oregon - the Pacific north-west
might be an option for those wanting to flee from climate change’s impact.
Climate change is fueling heatwaves, hurricanes and floods,
gradually making certain places in the US challenging, if not outright
miserable, to live in.
Scientists, and some members of the public, are starting to
question where in the US will remain comfortable to call home.
The answer, broadly speaking, is north and maybe west.
Florida has seen a population boom in recent decades but the southern portion
of the state is on course to be submerged by rising seas. The Gulf coast will
get supercharged hurricanes, while the south-west and south-east US will be
baked by increasingly hostile heat.
“Areas towards the
north and away from the ocean and that central corridor where you get tornadoes
probably look best,” said Vivek Shandas, an expert on climate change’s impact
on cities at Portland State University. Shandas recommends looking to live in a
“band roughly above the 42nd parallel” – a line of latitude that divides New
York and Pennsylvania and forms the southern borders of Oregon and Idaho.
Places close to a reliable source of water without being
flood-prone as the seas rise are attractive, such as areas near the Great Lakes
and the Pacific north-west. “Seattle doesn’t break 90F that often so it’ll be
nothing like Phoenix in terms of tolerability of heat,” said Shandas. “Places
like Portland, Oregon, and Boise, Idaho, will be relatively safeguarded, apart
from a bit of wildfire smoke.”
There will be bastions elsewhere. “Cincinnati, for example,
is surprisingly good,” said Shandas. “It’s close to the Great Lakes, away from
hurricanes, away from the eastern seaboard. It will get more heatwaves, but
then again we all will.”
Boise, Idaho: another
place which could be shielded from the worst of climate change.
Much of the east coast will look dicey if the seas rise at
such a pace that they’ll be 6ft higher by the end of the century, but plenty
will rest on local decisions made to shield residents from flooding. New York
City, for example, is flanked by rising water and is already stiflingly hot in
summer, but a multibillion-dollar strategy to build flood defenses and buy out
vulnerable areas should help stave off the worst impacts.
Climate resiliency is a growing focus for many towns and
cities that fret about expensive clean-up costs from disasters, shading people
from the heat or dealing with an eroding tax base should residents decide to
uproot and head somewhere safer.
The scope of these climate considerations is vast, touching
on everything from transport links to the availability of flood insurance.
Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation expert at Harvard University, said that he
likes Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, as climate refuges as they tick
many of the appropriate boxes.
“Their sources of energy production are stable, they have
cooler climates and they have access to plenty of fresh water,” Keenan said.
“They also have less vulnerability to forest fires, as compared
to somewhere like the Pacific north-west. They also have a legacy of excess
infrastructural capacity that allows them to diversify their economy in the
future. Land prices are cheap and they have a relatively well-educated and
skilled labor force.”
These safe havens are more of a fantasy wishlist for many
moderate-to low-income people as property and rental values rise in desirable
areas. Others won’t want to leave more vulnerable parts of the US due to more
umbilical links, to family and jobs and a sense of home.
“As we saw after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria,
communities that are able to move can do so, especially if family and friends
do the same,” said Shandas. “Those with less resources are left behind.”
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