Climate change could create millions of climate migrants by 2050
Droughts, floods, sea level rise, and other climate change impacts are uprooting people from their homes.
(Photo credit: Daniel Mietchen / CC BY-SA 2.0)
As seas rise along the coast of Bangladesh, salt water is seeping into farmland, destroying soil fertility. So some farmers and families are moving to the huge city of Dhaka in search of better opportunities.
It’s one of many places around the world where droughts, floods, sea level rise, and other climate impacts are forcing people to migrate.
Huerta: “The majority of climate migrants move internally within their own countries. … And within that, a majority of them move into cities specifically because that’s where more jobs are, more housing, more opportunities.”
Claudia Huerta is with C40 Cities, a global network of mayors taking climate action.
Her group partnered on a report that projects climate migration trends for 10 cities, including Sao Paulo, Brazil; Accra, Ghana; and Dhaka.
Huerta: “By 2050, 8 million people are expected to move to the 10 cities studied in this report as a result of climate change.”
That’s if climate pollution is not greatly reduced in the coming years.
But the research also shows that, if the world were to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, millions fewer people would need to migrate.
Huerta says it highlights the urgency of global climate action – to reduce the number of people forced from their homes by the impacts of a warming world.
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media
This article was originally published by Yale Climate Connections.
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