The world did not achieve a single goal to save nature: UN report on biodiversity

The story published Tuesday is the second installment in a series on global climate migration that stems from a collaboration between ProPublica and the New York Times, with the support of the Pulitzer Center.

While the first article in the series focused on the movement of climate refugees across international borders, the last story focuses on how climate migration within the US will reshape the country.

As report author Abrahm Lustgarten explains, “In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will try to flee the emerging dangers of global warming, in search of cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety.”

But here in the United States, many people have “avoided for years facing these changes in their own backyards,” he writes.

“The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not only by policies that minimize climate risks, but also by costly subsidies and incentives aimed at challenging nature,” Lustgarten adds in the report. “People have largely gravitated toward environmental hazard, building up along the coasts from New Jersey to Florida and settling through the cleared deserts of the Southwest. “

In light of a summer in which millions of people have endured the devastating combined effects of a pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves, the journalist wonders: “Could Americans finally be waking up to how the weather is going about to transform their lives? And if so, if there could be a major domestic relocation in sight, was it possible to project where we would go? ”

Lustgarten argues that the United States, where 162 million people – nearly one in two – “will likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment” in the coming years, is “a nation on the cusp of a great transformation.”

“The changes could be particularly severe” for 93 million Americans, and “if carbon emissions rise to extreme levels, at least four million Americans could find themselves living on the fringes, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life.” , according to the analysis.

The story is accompanied by a set of maps that describe likely changes in the niche of human habitation, and the scenarios “suggest massive disruption in the places where Americans live and grow food today.”

Several factors are driving changes in the suitability of different settings, the researchers note. These include extreme heat and humidity, the collision of which will create what scientists call “wet bulb” temperatures that will “disrupt the norms of daily existence,” as well as larger and more frequent wildfires, rising sea levels, decreasing of crop yields and economic damages related to higher energy costs and lower labor productivity.

According to the analysis, the greatest climate risk exists in the southeastern and southwestern counties, where hazards are likely to intermingle and lead to “aggravating calamities.”

“The cost of resisting the new climate reality is increasing,” the report states. Florida public officials “have already recognized that defending some highways against the sea will be unaffordable,” Lustgarten explains. Additionally, “the nation’s federal flood insurance program requires for the first time that some of its payments be used to retreat from climate hazards across the country.”

If “it will soon be too expensive to maintain the status quo,” as Lustgarten argues, what can we expect?

The author paints a grim picture of the possible consequences of mass relocations between now and 2070, arguing that such a population shift is:

likely to increase poverty and widen the gap between rich and poor. It will accelerate the rapid, perhaps chaotic urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their ability to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequalities. It will consume prosperity, delivering repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and southern regions, which in turn could bring entire communities to the brink of collapse.

Mobility itself, global migration experts note, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others are left behind. Those who stay run the risk of being trapped as the land and society around them cease to offer more support.

While a growing number of citizens consider climate change a top political priority, Lustgarten argues that “lawmakers, who left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal decisions about which communities to save, often at exorbitant costs. , and which ones to sacrifice. ”

Lustgarten devotes considerable attention to what he describes as the negative effects of the country’s property insurance system, which has distorted perceptions of risk and incentivized real estate development in locations vulnerable to disasters. The experts he spoke to anticipate shocks to the financial system and the downfall of “entire communities” once “all the structural disincentives that had built up the irrational response of Americans” to the threats posed by climate change begin to ” reach your logical end point. ”

“Until now,” the report notes, “market mechanisms have essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as costs rise, insurers quit, bankers divest, and farm subsidies become too wasteful, and so on. successively. —All the burden of responsibility will fall on individual persons. “

“And that’s when the real migration could begin,” says Lustgarten.

Past experiences with socio-environmental disasters in the US raise concerns about the well-being of displaced people and those left behind. When the Dust Bowl “prompted an exodus of about 2.5 million people” from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, “they funneled into the squalid slums” of California, the author writes.

Experts told Lustgarten that similar problems are likely to emerge in the 21st century, as hundreds of thousands of climate refugees move to cities already battling poverty, inequality and “long-forgotten infrastructure systems. “suddenly pressured to expand in increasingly adverse conditions. “

In the 1930s, “Colorado tried to seal its border to climate refugees,” the report notes. And “the places that the migrants left were never fully recovered.”

Barring a reorientation of economic priorities and resources through far-reaching legislation such as the Green New Deal, Lustgarten suggests that decisions made by policy makers “will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, and the most disadvantaged will be relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. “

Published with permission from Common Dreams.