The climate book, p.19
The Climate Book, page 19
In 2016, the banks that hold Guevara’s land as collateral for seed warned him that the next growing season would once more prove futile. His family was spending their savings in order to buy food he once grew. Meanwhile, violent gangs tried to recruit his children and sought ‘rent’ from the family. Guevara’s wife, Maria, started to sell pupusas from a rented window of a shop facing the road so that they ‘at least have a little money left for [their] son’s milk’.
Across Central America, more than 3.5 million lives have been upended by the dry years that began in 2014. Half a million of those people across El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras faced immediate and acute malnutrition – even starvation – as farmers struggled to produce food; rations of rice had to be distributed. Worse still, the La Niña cycles – the weather phenomena likely to blame for the perilous drought – were increasingly frequent, a trend that will continue as long as fossil-fuel-driven emissions and human industrial activity keep heating up our planet. Others in Guevara’s village and elsewhere had started to leave their homes. The land – indeed the entire natural system – that Guevara depended on wasn’t just failing him, it seemed to be pushing him out.
One sultry spring evening after that last failed growing season, Guevara told his wife that he saw just one way forward: he would have to travel north to find work.
The following dawn, with little more than a change of clothes and $50 tucked into the sole of his shoe, he walked several kilometres to the nearby town of San Marcos Lempa and caught a bus to San Salvador, then another through Guatemala to the Mexican border, near Tapachula. He took taxis in order to avoid checkpoints, until he reached the town of Arriaga, where he clambered aboard La Bestia (The Beast), a lumbering freight train on which migrants stow themselves away for the harrowing ride north.
For two days, Guevara curled inside a small cage at the end of a cylindrical grain car, the only place he could rest without falling out of the train. Later, as the train passed through Veracruz and the weather turned colder, he crawled inside the tank, burrowing into the maize to keep warm and hide from the cartels that prey on migrants. After weeks of travel, Guevara waded across the Rio Grande and walked into the barren American desert, one of roughly half a million migrants to make their way across the US border from Central American countries that year.
Around the world, rising temperatures and climatic calamity are unsettling ever larger numbers of people. As droughts, floods, storms and heat make it more difficult to farm, work, and raise children, populations are moving in search of temperate conditions, safety and economic opportunity. Food insecurity is fast becoming the planet’s most significant human threat, leading the world to the precipice of a great climate migration.
For 6,000 years, humans have lived within a relatively narrow band of environmental conditions, seeking out a mild mix of precipitation and heat roughly equivalent to the climates of Jakarta and Singapore on one end of the scale and to those of London and New York on the other. Today, just 1 per cent of the planet is considered too hot and dry for civilization. But, by 2070, researchers have concluded, 19 per cent of the planet – home to some 3 billion people – might be uninhabitable. This suggests that the world is about to see hundreds of millions of people displaced, and billions more suffer, as the fastest and most disruptive change in recorded history furiously unfolds.
Mass migration at this level will be globally destabilizing. While good can come from such change – the US, after all, is a product of immigration – the enormous scale of what’s to come is more likely to foster competition and conflict, as ever larger numbers of people fight over ever scarcer resources while, at the same time, geopolitical powers erect walls, fences and boundaries to keep migrants out. The world’s leading security and defence institutions are already warning that climate migration could lead entire nations to crumble, while shifting the balance of power and advantage to other countries, namely Russia and China, that will be willing to leverage such power.
The hotspots for change are just where one might expect them to be: across the equatorial regions that are already warmest, and which also have the largest – and fastest-growing – populations. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to roughly a billion people, and its population could double over the coming decades. The Sahel region in particular, with a population on track to reach 240 million by mid-century, faces the most severe water crises in the world and is already seeing the greatest numbers of internally displaced people. The World Bank estimates that Sahel nations could see as many as 86 million more people displaced by climate stress factors by 2050.
South and East Asia are other epicentres where enormous populations and uninhabitable heat and humidity are on a collision course. The World Bank has calculated that roughly 89 million people in those regions will be internally displaced.
Central America is just one more focal point for that change, and an important one. Climate models project that the region will be among the world’s fastest-warming places, experiencing longer droughts, shorter growing seasons and bigger and more destructive storms. The World Bank estimates that Central American nations will see as many as 17 million people internally displaced by climate stress factors by 2050, a figure which does not estimate how many will move northwards, like Guevara, to the United States. But the numbers could be even higher.
To try to understand how future migrants might move, I worked with demographer Bryan Jones at the City University of New York to build a computer simulation like the one used by the World Bank. Adding in the complexity of drought risk and moving across borders, the modelling suggested that by the middle of the century some 30 million Central Americans would migrate to the southern US border, influenced at least in part by climate factors.
But the model also suggested that different policy approaches to the challenges of climate change and migration would lead to distinctly different outcomes, so it is clear that the choices leaders make today will determine how the future plays out. In a harsh world which is seeing maximum climate warming along with strident anti-immigration policies and strict border controls, a world in which less and less money is being sent to developing nations as economic aid, more people will ultimately be displaced and their suffering will be greater. However, in a world where the warming of the planet is slowed and governments continue to support needy regions with foreign aid, there may ultimately be less displacement of people and greater stability.
Almost immediately after his arrival in the US, Carlos Guevara was captured and sent back home. He had hitched a ride in the desert, and the driver, speeding, was pulled over by the police. Guevara arrived back in El Salvador to find that his village had changed. Others had also fled the drought, migrating to the US and nearby cities, and the village seemed empty. However, at the same time, a United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) project had come to 14 Julio, offering farm aid and irrigation, and the hope that it might be possible for Guevara and others to dramatically improve their prospects for survival.
Guevara and I met on a bright, hot morning, in one of his fields. Leaves crunched beneath the cracked soles of his boots as he walked along rows of failed crops marked by grape stakes, trailing his fingers along once-supple vines that had become brittle. The dry field was a monotone brown. His son threw a stone into a shallow well. It landed with a thud, not a splash.
But as we continued past that field a new structure came into view: a metal-framed, plastic-walled greenhouse. The project was built as a WFP pilot project to build communal farms across El Salvador, and inside, humid air and orderly drip lines surrounded bountiful rows of broadleafed, healthy pepper plants and juicy tomatoes – more than enough to feed Guevara’s family, and plenty to sell for profit. Guevara had already reinvested the revenue from the first crop to expand his farm and buy a cow for milk, and his family was doing better than they had throughout the previous five years.
His future, though, remains precarious. The fate of the WFP project depends on the willingness of foreign donors to send more money. And Guevara knows that in five more years the climate will have changed for the worse. The greenhouse gives him reason not to try migrating north again – for the moment. But he has learned that he can’t trust in what the future might bring.
‘Hope is the last thing that you lose,’ he said. ‘As long as climate change continues, we will never have confidence that we can be fed.’ /
3.12
Sea-level Rise and Small Islands
Michael Taylor
Sea-level rise is one of the foremost challenges that climate change poses to small islands like the one which I call home in the Caribbean. Very often, the associated image is of entire islands on the verge of being swallowed up by the oceans. This is not an unreasonable picture: if emissions continue at current rates, sea-level rise of a metre or more is projected by the end of this century. Even if our efforts to limit global warming are moderately successful, some of that future rise is already locked in, and swathes of low-lying islands will be engulfed. This means that the existential threat from sea-level rise is all too real, and the image of disappearing islands in the future should be sufficient to rally global action around climate change. Yet even before we reach that calamitous stage, sea-level rise entails serious losses for small islands, which we can observe around us today.
Every ‘small islander’ can identify a point in the ocean which once used to be on land. Rising waters are eroding island beaches and coastlines which directly or indirectly support island livelihoods: much of the tourism in the Caribbean is beach-related, with the sector accounting for 7–90 per cent of GDP and, on average, 30 per cent of employment, directly and indirectly. In recent years, many of the highly prized Caribbean beaches have narrowed as they become trapped between rising seas and coastal development. This diminishes their attractiveness to tourists, with cascading impacts on the many people whose livelihoods depend on the viability of the industry. In a bid to protect the beaches and the jobs they create and sustain, Caribbean countries are resorting to expensive infrastructure, including breakwaters or sea walls – though the value of doing so is not yet fully known.
But the impacts of erosion extend beyond tourism, as many small communities are reliant on coastal resources for their survival. Fishing communities develop around beaches, which serve as housing and landing sites and informal trading hubs. Their options are limited when the beaches begin to recede. Fish shops and vending businesses are shuttered up and residents migrate inland in search of alternative livelihoods. As fishing ceases to be sustainable, entire communities eventually relocate. For small islands in the Caribbean, the image of sea-level rise is not just that of disappearing islands in the future. It is one of disappearing beaches, livelihoods and communities in the present.
Increasingly, we are witnessing even graver consequences of present-day sea-level rise. In some places, it is delaying or even undoing countries’ development, as it exacerbates the flooding from storm surges due to more intense storms and hurricanes in our warmer world. In the Bahamas, extreme flooding from superstorm Dorian in 2019 caused more than seventy deaths and substantial damage to the low-lying islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama, damage equivalent to a quarter of the country’s GDP. Unfortunately, such extreme events no longer seem rare. Only two years prior, three Category 5 hurricanes tracked through the Caribbean, including Irma – which, at the time, was considered the strongest ever open-Atlantic storm – and Maria, which followed just two weeks later. Among the countries impacted were the small island states of Barbuda, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands, for whom recovery is measured in years due to their contracted economies, depressed living standards and delayed development. Hurricane Irma destroyed 95 per cent of homes on Barbuda and left a third of the country uninhabitable. Even in the absence of an intense hurricane, damage penetrates further inland now than a few decades ago, posing a direct threat to these islands’ populations and infrastructure. In the Caribbean, most urban centres are coastal. More than 50 per cent of the region’s population live within 1.5 kilometres of a shoreline. If coastal waters rise by a metre, it is estimated that up to 80 per cent of the lands surrounding the region’s ports may be inundated.
To envision the impact of sea-level rise is also to picture an inheritance denied. It is contracting habitats, shifting the geographical location of coastal species, diminishing biodiversity and reducing ecosystem services. It is increasing the salinity of coastal aquifers, which are often relied upon by local people as their only source of fresh water. It is threatening many cultural heritage and ceremonial sites, which are located in coastal areas and cannot be moved in response to flooding. It is limiting the availability of beaches as public spaces for relaxation and enjoyment. Access to clean water, vibrant ecosystems, cultural heritage and recreational spaces are all reasonable expectations for the next generation to hold. It is the least we owe them.
With few exceptions, small islands have contributed least to climate change. But they bear the brunt of its consequences. This is not just a question of disappearing islands in the future: it is about threatened livelihoods, delayed development and a generational inheritance being denied today. /
3.13
Rain in the Sahel
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim
In the Sahel, rain is everything. In my community of nomadic pastoralists who live around Lake Chad, we have many words to describe the rain. There are those that announce the beginning of the rainy season and the start of our migration with our herds and those which tell us the dry season is coming and lead us to settle down around the lake. We have words to describe the gentle rains that irrigate our crops and words for those which come in storms to destroy our fields.
In this harsh environment, we have learned to live in harmony with nature. We cooperate with our ecosystems. Our cows fertilize the land all along the path of our transhumance. Every three or four days, we move from one place to another to allow nature the time to regenerate. And we are also living in harmony with our neighbours. In our region, where most people are either farmers or fishermen, our cattle are the only source of soil fertilization, and when we leave a place the land is good for agriculture.
Thirty years ago, when I was born, Lake Chad was enormous. And sixty years ago, when my mother was a child, the lake was almost a little sea in the middle of a desert. But today it’s a small drop of water in the heart of Africa. Ninety per cent of our water is gone. Our average temperature has risen. We are now living with temperature increases greater than 1.5°C, meaning that my people already live over the threshold of the Paris Agreement. And this is just a preview of what’s to come. According to the new report by the IPCC, we are approaching the gates of a climate hell. In the Sahel, our average temperature could be 2°C higher by 2030, and 3–4°C higher by the middle of this century. Over my lifetime, the face of the Sahel will not be the same.
Most of the rain is already gone. The land is often dry and infertile. Our cows used to produce 4 litres of milk each day, but now they barely produce 2 litres or even 1, because of the missing grass. And more and more often, rain, which had been our ally, is our enemy. Over the last five years, floods have repeatedly destroyed our lands, our houses, the culture of my people.
We now live on the edge of climate wars. People are fighting for the few resources left. When nature is sick in a region where 70 per cent of people depend on it for farming, people lose their minds. The old alliance between farmers and pastoralists has been broken in the competition for nature’s bounty. In Mali, North Burkina Faso and Nigeria we have seen villages burned by people who want to grab the land of their former friends.
But for me, the Sahel is still a land of hope. We have so many climate warriors fighting back. In my community, women have already implemented solutions to the changing climate. These Indigenous people are using their traditional knowledge to identify crops which can resist droughts and heatwaves so that we can have resilient agriculture. And in the memories of our grandmothers and grandfathers, we possess a map of ancient sources, sources that still provide water in the middle of the worst dry seasons.
Indigenous people’s traditional knowledge not only gives us words to describe the rain, it offers us the tools to fight back against climate change. From centuries of living in harmony with nature, observing the clouds, the birds migrating, the direction of the wind, the behaviour of insects, the behaviour of our cows, we are armed to resist. We may not have had the chance to go to school, but our elders have masters and doctorates in protecting nature and they are becoming specialists in climate adaptation.
We don’t want to be merely the victims of climate change. We will do our part. We are doing it already. Our way of life is climate neutral. We are the living proof that it is possible to maintain forests and savannahs and increase carbon stocks in nature while producing food. In most industrialized countries, agriculture is a major source of emissions. In my community, it is a carbon sink.
For a long time, we have been taking care of nature not only for us but also for the seven generations to come. This is how decision-making is done in my community. Before deciding anything important, one should consider what the past seven generations would have done in the situation and what the impact of a decision for the seven upcoming ones will be. It’s a way to put intergenerational equity at the core of every important decision.
Now the time has come for the global community to listen to my people, and to help them. For too long, Indigenous peoples have been considered representatives of our Earth’s history. But we don’t belong to the past: we represent the future.
