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The looming climate emergency will actually be a mesh of mutually accelerating emergencies: droughts, fires and famines; pandemics; mass extinctions; floods and erosion; and all of this will drive waves of refugee crises.
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"Where Will Everyone Go?" is the most ambitious attempt yet to model the migration patterns of the climate emergencies. Baruch College geographer Bryan Jones was commissioned by @propublica and the @nytimes to model 5 scenarios.
https://www.propublica.org/article/2020-climate-migration-part-1-methodology#978948
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https://www.propublica.org/article/2020-climate-migration-part-1-methodology#978948
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I. Optimistic: "climate impacts are rapidly reduced on a global scale, there is regional convergence toward higher levels of development"
II. Pessimistic: "climate change impacts are on the high end of current plausible scenarios with significant challenges to development"
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II. Pessimistic: "climate change impacts are on the high end of current plausible scenarios with significant challenges to development"
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III. Climate-friendly: Progress on climate mitigation, no progress on development
IV. Development-friendly: Little action on climate, lots of progress on development
V. Moderate: some of each
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IV. Development-friendly: Little action on climate, lots of progress on development
V. Moderate: some of each
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The scenarios were run on a supercomputing cluster over a course of days, using sophisticated models with billions of inputs:
https://assets-c3.propublica.org/Climate-Migration-Modeling-Methodology.pdf
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https://assets-c3.propublica.org/Climate-Migration-Modeling-Methodology.pdf
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The outcomes were then turned into a series of vital narratives that tell the real stories of Mexican and Central American climate refugees, and use these to explore the five scenarios.
https://features.propublica.org/climate-migration/model-how-climate-refugees-move-across-continents/#980800
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https://features.propublica.org/climate-migration/model-how-climate-refugees-move-across-continents/#980800
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The takeaways are both brutal and energizing. There's no question that we are facing mass-scale displacement as farmland becomes unproductive, and, in some cases, uninhabitable - literally lethal in a matter of hours to unprotected humans.
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But how much of this displacement takes place is entirely in our hands. There's huge variation between the degradation in the scenarios based on how seriously we take climate mitigation.
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Likewise, the human cost of displacement is in our hands: as displacement drives mass urbanization, we can abandon migrants to crime and deprivation, or create thriving prosperous cities, resilient to climate-based emergencies: floods, pandemics, fires, extreme weather.
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The model does what a model should: shows us the costs and benefits of different approaches. The costs of inaction are brutal, an existential challenge to our civilization and species.
The benefits? We live and thrive.
The choice is ours.
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The benefits? We live and thrive.
The choice is ours.
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