Climate Refugees Will Search Hard for Homes

Where can the climate refugees go, if 2 billion are driven away by rising tides, and the interior available becomes ever more inhospitable?

By 2060 around 1.4 bn people could be climate refugees, driven from low-lying coastal cities by sea level rise.  By 2100, as the global population may have reached 11bn, there could be 2bn climate refugees.

To feed those 9 to 11 bn people expected in the second half of the century, farmers will have to grow as much food in 40 years as they have grown in the last 8,000 or so.

And in a world of accelerating sea level rise and climate change, in which farmland is being degraded and turned to desert, in which ever more land is set aside for carbon storage in the form of forest, and in which the strains of survival increase social divisions and social conflict, there is a new challenge:  where will the 2bn climate refugees find new homes?

“The colliding forces of human fertility, submerging coastal zones, residential retreat, and impediments to inland resettlement are a huge problem,” said Charles Geisler, professor emeritus of development sociology at Cornell University, in New York state.

“We offer preliminary estimates of the lands unlikely to support new waves of climate refugees due to the residues of war, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary productivity, desertification, urban sprawl, land concentration, ‘paving the planet’ with roads, and greenhouse gas storage zones offsetting permafrost melt.”

In any concerted attempts to contain climate change and limit global warming, climate scientists have to consider two big things.  One is:  how to drastically reduce fossil fuel use. The other is:  how to use the land surface so that it takes up atmospheric carbon dioxide most efficiently.

Professor Geisler and his co-author Ben Currens, an earth and environmental scientist at the University of Kentucky, look at the big picture of land use in the long term.

They report in the journal Land Use Policy that they considered the implications of an ever faster rate of global sea level rise, as atmospheric temperatures warm and glaciers melt.

A study in Nature Climate Change has just confirmed that the seas that in the last century were rising by on average 2.2mm a year are now rising by 3.3mm a year.  “Although reclaiming land from oceans has been an important human project for millennia,” write Geisler and Currens in their study, “it seems that oceans are now ‘reclaiming’ the land.”

They start from the premise that global mean sea level rise will continue beyond 2100, and from the prediction that for every 1°C of climate warming, humans should expect an eventual 2.3 meter rise in sea levels.

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