Cassandra's World IV
The Overlook
By Tom Clavin
“The Overlook” appears every Thursday at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it). Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!
For those of you sticking with this multi-part series, there is much to cover in this installment (the second-to-the-last one), so let’s get to it.
Previous installments have focused on the two biggest ingredients of climate change, heat and water. Let’s extend that to understanding how the impacts of severe heat, especially drought, and water, especially flooding, will affect the ability to grow and produce food. And at the same time as food sources are being imperiled, there are going to be more mouths to feed because the planet’s population is increasing, from 7.7 billion to 9.7 billion people by 2050. Most of those new mouths will be in regions either most affected by climate change or less able to tolerate the impacts . . . and probably both. The birth rates in the richer nations have been declining while they have been steady or are climbing in poorer nations – the ones with already strained food supply systems.
Nature wounded by climate change has many ways to respond, often to our disadvantage and in ways in addition to just the obvious. Case in point:. According to a study published in the journal CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, the financial burdens caused by invasive pests and plants in Africa may total more than $3.5 trillion per year. The hardest hit are corn, cassava, and tomatoes, which are staple crops for many people on the continent. So far, Nigeria is the hardest hit, with Congo, Niger, and South Africa not far behind. As one can surmise, more damaged crops are not only a financial burden but reduce the production of necessary food.
Many of us don’t hear about the increasing number of clashes throughout Africa between herders and farmers and others that are costing more lives because of advancing desertification. This is when fertile land becomes barren desert. In Nigeria, for example, 60 percent of its land is now affected by desertification, exacerbated by drought and climate change. In Lesotho in southern Africa, 33 percent of its arable land has been lost since 1970, and during that same time Botswana has lost 32 percent. The percentage is 23 in Honduras and 13 percent in Bangladesh. All this does not include countries, including Yemen and Syria and Iraq, whose capacity to produce food has been devastated by war.
To date, such clashes between frightened groups of people have killed tens of thousands in Mali, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and elsewhere. Millions more people have been displaced, with many joining the flow of migrants to southern Europe. Current estimates by the United Nations suggest that as many as 1 billion people will be forced to migrate because of the changing climate by 2050 (more about this coming up), and the competition for disappearing still-usable land will only get more intense.
Not all food sources, of course, are in the ground. The journal Nature released a study last year that stated climate change could result in a more abrupt collapse of many animal species than previously thought, starting in this decade if greenhouse gas emissions are not immediately reduced. The study predicted that “large swaths of ecosystems would falter in waves, creating sudden die-offs that would be catastrophic not only for wildlife, but for the humans who depend on it.”
Efforts are being made to keep what is left and to use technology to create more from fewer raw materials. Water, of course, is the most important and necessary ingredient on the planet (besides air). As the polar ice caps continue to melt and sea levels rise, more salt water will be produced instead of the fresh water in ever-greater demand. We can’t use salt water to raise crops and food-source animals can’t drink it. The slow pace of changing over to renewable energy means an ongoing reliance on fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas. In some parts of the world, as we are seeing graphically in India and China, declining air quality is killing people and causing both short and long-term illnesses in millions with health-care systems already strained to their limits.
Coupled with climate change, a major cause of the natural resources problem is the ongoing and intensifying population boom, especially in countries that can least afford it. As we get closer to a world population of 10 billion, there will not be enough water, food, and natural resources for all those people, especially ones in poorer countries. According to a report release by the U.N. in August 2019, the world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself. The report found that “the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming.” The authors – 100 experts from 52 countries – warned that “food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.”
The motivation to move created by hunger and its close cousin desperation cannot be overestimated. A different United Nations report stated that 820 million people worldwide are going hungry, and the number of people living in hunger globally rose for the fourth consecutive year. The pandemic made this tragedy worse. According to a New York Times article published during the midst of it, the pandemic meant food shortages for millions more people and created an “unparalleled crisis of hunger” around the world. “National lockdowns and social distancing measures are drying up work and incomes and are likely to disrupt agricultural production and supply routes.” According to the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, an additional 265 million people “could be pushed to the brink of starvation by year’s end.” This is compared to the 150 million similarly threated before the pandemic.
In the most-affected countries, there will be political and social instability. Governments unable to stem the tide of starvation =-- and most won’t because they can’t undo climate change -- will topple, to be replaced by other governments that discover power isn’t worth the intolerable conditions scarring their countries and inflaming upheavals.
One related consequence of climate change and hunger is disease. Especially with impoverished people and in weakened societies, there will be less resistance to disease and more diseases. Most people with low incomes and with immune systems almost disabled by hunger are stuck in unhealthy environments and assaulted by any number of ailments. Inevitably, they live in areas which did not have top-notch health-care systems to begin with, and those systems are now under greater burdens.
We should also expect that Covid-19 was, like we’re discovering about powerful storms, not a once-in-a-century event and possibly not even a once-in-a-decade event. Scientists are keeping their eyes on several new and concerning events. In Russia early this year, there was an outbreak of the H5N8 strain of avian flu. This not only caused the killing of 800,000 chickens but for the first time, Russian health authorities found, H5N8 jumped to people. Russia was able to contain this outbreak, but most countries do not have the resources Russia does. West African authorities have located the region’s first known case of the deadly Marburg virus, in Guinea. They are working to contain any spread of this highly infectious disease, which is from the same family as the virus that causes Ebola. Closer to home, a recent study conducted by Penn State University found that white-tailed deer in Iowa are contracting Covid-19 from humans and then rapidly spreading it among one another – and may be infecting humans who come in contact with them. Conceivably, the Covid-like cycle may never be broken: “There is no reason to believe that the same thing isn’t happening in other states where deer are present,” said one of the study’s leaders.
What is a foreseeable consequence of the combination of social and political instability and desperate, hungry people whose surroundings have become too dangerous, toxic or simply unsustainable? We’re already seeing it: mounting migration. To those people on the move for economic and political reasons (see the Belarus-Poland border dispute), add tens of millions who simply must do something or die.
These are the climate refugees. As more people experience shortages coupled with the effects of drought and floods, they will have only two options available: acceptance and death or do whatever has to be done to find food and water. The latter group will be on the move because they refuse to accept the first option. They might die anyway, but at least some will do so on the doorsteps of other countries and regions which have what their home countries and regions do not.
It should not be startling every year when news outlets report a caravan of thousands of migrants making their way through Mexico to the United States. This scenario is being played out on several continents. In Venezuela, 5.5 million people have left since 2015 and 6.6 million people in Syria have done the same. It is interesting to note that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves yet a third of its population face hunger.
Such journeys are but a minor harbinger of what I believe will be an increasingly common event in the coming years, not just in the Americas but throughout the world. In fact, many people are already on the move, and in recent years southern Europe has borne the brunt of desperate peoples looking for food and shelter as their homelands become less livable for various reasons.
[WHERE ADD ADDITIONAL MIGRATION INFO?]
The large caravan of people that originated in Honduras three years ago intensified the discussion of security along the U.S. southern border, including President Trump’s insistence on building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Even now, post-Trump, and maybe especially now I would not be surprised if this ends up happening. Indeed, I expect it to be the first of many – hundreds, if not thousands – of barriers that will be built around the world in the next two decades. We – and by “we,” I mean those with the means to do so and are to be included within them – will need walls to survive.
The desperate migrations of climate refugees will become more frequent and be filled with more people. In 2019, the International Displacement Monitoring Center reported that “floods, landslides, cyclones, and other extreme weather events temporarily displaced more people in the first half of this year than during the same period in any other year.”
This might sound fantastic, but increasingly, such treks by climate refugees cannot be avoided or stopped. Globally, similar journeys will become more frequent because there will be millions, and maybe eventually billions, who have no choice but to abandon their destroyed or barren homelands and pray they can find places in which to survive. Those who do not migrate will die from flooding or starvation caused by rising water levels and inland drought . . . or the hard-to-face possibility of pandemics spreading disease like prairie fires.
In 2020, Covid combined with climate change to exacerbate the situation. According to a recent New York Times article, “Storms, floods, wildfires – and to a lesser degree, conflict – uprooted 40.5 million people around the world [in 2020]. It was the largest number in more than a decade.” We can only wonder how many of these millions suffered from and transmitted the coronavirus.
We are beginning to see climate refugees within the United States. “We are now at the dawn of America’s Great Climate Migration Era,” stated Alexandra Tempus in a recent New York Times op-ed. “For now, it is piecemeal, and moves are often temporary,” offering as examples relocations caused by the Dixie fire in California and hurricanes hitting Louisiana. “But permanent relocations, by individuals and eventually whole communities, are increasingly becoming unavoidable.” When enough reservoirs and wells run dry in the Southwest, residents will want to relocate to where drinking water is. When enough destructive storms have hit coastal areas, those residents will look to find shelter inland. The U.S. climate refugee situation may become a microcosm of the international crisis.
Globally, several relief agencies have stated that by the end of this year as many as 70 million people worldwide will have been forced to flee their homes because of war, political persecution, and poverty. This number will only go up. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees also estimates that tens of millions of people have been displaced by climate-related or extreme weather events. This includes tragedies like the widespread famine in Darfur, monsoons and flooding in Bangladesh, and the catastrophic hurricanes in the Caribbean. The more out of whack our climate becomes, the more people will up and leave their homes. As our world heats up and sea levels rise, the commissioner’s report states, the “problem of forced migration around the world is projected to become far worse.”
Where are these migrants going to go? In the desperate attempt not to die, the have-nots will go to where the haves are. Spain, Italy, and other parts of Europe have been confronted by mounting migration as people, many from African nations, set sail in makeshift boats and in other ways transport their families to where they hope there are water, food, shelter, and jobs. (Tragedies, like the 27 people drowned in the English Channel this month, will become painfully routine.) According to a Pew Research Center report, the number of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa jumped 25 percent over the first decade of this century and surged 31 percent from 2010 to 2019. Persistently high fertility rates across Africa could result in younger and more mobile migrants overwhelming Europe’s aging demographic and defenses.
What to do, and do soon? Next week: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Tombstone, Blood and Treasure (with Bob Drury), and Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, just published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.