Katta O’Donnell – a 23-year-old law student from Melbourne – is suing
the Australian government for failing to disclose climate change risks
to investors in Australia’s sovereign bonds.
Sovereign bonds involve loans of money from investors to governments
for a set period at a fixed interest rate. They’re usually thought to be
the safest form of investment. For example, many Australians are invested in sovereign bonds through their superannuation funds.
But as climate change presents major risks to our economy as well as
the environment, O'Donnell’s claim is a wake-up call to the government
that it can no longer bury its head in the sand when it comes to this
vulnerability.
Katta O'Donnell is bringing the class action lawsuit against the Australian government. Molly Townsend
This is a standard similar to that owed by Australian company directors.
Analysis from leading barristers
indicates that directors who fail to consider climate risks could be
found liable for breaching their duty of care and diligence.
O'Donnell argues government officials providing information to investors in sovereign bonds should meet the same benchmark.
Climate change as a financial risk
Under climate change, the world is already experiencing physical
impacts, such as intense droughts and unprecedented bushfires. But we’re
also experiencing “transition impacts” from steps countries take to
prevent further warming, such as transitioning away from coal.
Combined, these impacts of climate change create financial risks.
For example, by damaging property, assets and operations, or by
reducing demand for fossil fuels with the risk coal mines and reserves
become stranded assets.
This thinking is becoming mainstream among Australian economists. As the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s Geoff Summerhayes put it:
When a central bank, a prudential regulator and a conduct regulator, with barely a hipster beard or hemp shirt between them, start warning that climate change is a financial risk, it’s clear that position is now orthodox economic thinking.
Why safe investments are under threat
Sovereign bonds are a long-term investment. Katta O’Donnell’s bonds,
for example, will mature in 2050. These time-frames dovetail with scientific projections about when the world will see severe impacts and costs from climate change.
And climate change is likely to hit Australia particularly hard.
We’ve seen the beginning of this in the summer’s ferocious bushfires,
which cost the economy more than A$100 billion.
Over time, climate risks may impact sovereign bonds and affect
Australia’s financial position in a number of ways. For example, by
impacting GDP when the productive capacity of the economy is reduced by severe fires or floods.
Frequent climate-related disasters could also hit foreign exchange
rates, causing fluctuations of the Australian dollar, as well as putting
Australia’s AAA credit rating at risk. These risks would reduce if the government took climate change more seriously.
Already, some investors are voting with their feet. Last November, Sweden’s central bank announced it had sold Western Australian and Queensland bonds, stating Australia is “not known for good climate work”.
Unprecedented, but not novel
O’Donnell’s case against the federal government is an unprecedented climate case, even if its arguments are not novel.
Australia has been a “hotspot”
for climate litigation in recent years, but the O'Donnell case is the
first to sue the Australian government in an Australian court.
Previous cases suing governments have often raised human rights, such as the high-profile Urgenda
case in 2015 against the Dutch government – the first case in the world
establishing governments owe their citizens a legal duty to prevent
climate change.
A Dutch court ordered the government to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by 2020. AP Photo/Peter Dejong
The O'Donnell case is also unique in its focus on sovereign bonds.
But cases alleging misleading climate-related disclosures are themselves
not new.
In another headline-making case, 23-year-old council worker Mark McVeigh is taking his superannuation fund, Retail Employees Superannuation Trust, to court seeking similar disclosures.
The O'Donnell case builds on this line of precedent, extending it to
disclosures in bond information documents. As such, courts will likely
take it seriously.
What precedent might it set?
If the O'Donnell case is successful it could establish the need for
disclosure of climate-related financial risks for a range of
investments.
At a minimum, a ruling in O'Donnell’s favour may compel the
Australian government to disclose climate-related risks in its
information documents for investors. This might make people think twice
about how they choose to invest their money, especially as investors
seek to “green” their portfolios.
It could also give rise to litigation using the same legal theory in
sovereign bond disclosure claims against other governments, much in the
way that the Urgenda case has spawned copycat proceedings from Belgium to Canada.
Whether the case provides the impetus for further government action
to improve the effectiveness of Australia’s climate policies remains to
be seen.
Still, it’s clear climate-related financial risks have entered the
corporate boardroom. With this case, they’ve now come knocking at the
government’s door.
A resolution calling on Chevron to disclose its lobbying on global warming passed this year. (Chevron)
As 2020 kicked off, Dan Gocher at the Australasian
Center for Corporate Responsibility, a shareholder advocacy
organization, was feeling “pretty optimistic” about its plans to force
big Australian energy companies to tackle climate change.
BlackRock,
the $6.8-trillion asset manager, and other large investors had
proclaimed an urgent need to arrest global warming. With the renewed
focus on climate change following devastating bush fires in Australia,
the ACCR was hopeful several climate-related resolutions filed at oil
and gas producers Santos and Woodside would gain strong shareholder
support at their annual meetings in April.
Then came the COVID-19
pandemic. “Once the virus hit, we said, ‘God, we won’t get anything
done [on climate change] for 18 months,’” Gocher said.
Like many
others, Gocher feared investors would swiftly retreat from recent
climate pledges as markets plummeted. Critics had long argued that the
fund industry’s nascent love affair with environmental, social and
governance investing, or ESG, was in reality a marketing ploy that would
be dumped at the first sign of trouble.
Instead, in spite of the pandemic, 2020 has proved to be a landmark
year for investor action on climate change, with significant resolutions
being passed and investment pouring into sustainable funds. With
regulators and clients increasingly calling for change, asset managers
are broadening their remit beyond energy-intensive industries such as
oil.
Rather than drive investor attention away from climate
change, the pandemic has cemented interest, with many investors fearing
the economic fallout seen during the pandemic could be replicated if the
world fails to halt global warming, said Mirza Baig, global head of
governance at Aviva Investors.
Until the coronavirus outbreak,
“there was still a significant portion of the investor base” that
believed tackling climate change “could wait until tomorrow,” he said.
“That has changed. Companies and investors are starting to look at the
importance of acting now.”
At Santos, 43% of shareholders
supported a resolution to require the energy company to set targets in
line with the Paris agreement to tackle climate change — the first time a
targets-based resolution had received such a high level of support in
any country. More than half of shareholders voted in favor of a similar
motion at Woodside a few weeks later. “We were very much surprised by
the support,” Gocher said.
In Japan, 35% of shareholders
supported the country’s first-ever climate change proposal at Mizuho
Financial, calling on the banking group to disclose a Paris agreement
plan.
In the U.S., a resolution calling on Chevron to disclose its
lobbying on global warming passed, while almost half of shareholders
backed a climate proposal at JPMorgan, the U.S. bank.
The fact
that only a few of these resolutions passed demonstrates that the
arguments within the investment world are far from settled. But pressure
on energy companies from the world’s most powerful investors is rapidly
increasing. Ordinarily for resolutions of this type, 99% of
shareholders vote according to management recommendations, according to
Follow This, a green shareholders’ group that filed resolutions at
European energy companies BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Equinor.
Overall,
in the U.S. and Canada, average investor support for environmental
resolutions during the first six months of 2020 was 32.7%, up from 21.9%
in 2019, according to Proxy Insight, a data provider.
“We have had the most successful [annual general meeting] season ever
[for climate resolutions], but because of COVID it didn’t get much
attention,” said Mark van Baal of Follow This. “One by one, these
investors see that climate change is such a threat to their assets.”
The Greta factor
Since the Paris agreement was drafted in 2015, the $85-trillion asset
management industry has slowly awoken to the growing risks of global
warming.
The enormous publicity surrounding the campaigns of Greta
Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion in 2019 forced even the most skeptical
of big investors to pay attention, said Wolfgang Kuhn, director of
financial sector strategies at ShareAction, a responsible investment
charity.
“You suddenly have every asset manager talking about how
deeply ingrained ESG is in their DNA,” he said. “There is good work
going on, but it is also true that if you are seen to be responding to
this trend and introducing the right products, you can make money from
this.”
European asset managers including Nordea, Legal and General
Investment Management, BNP Paribas Asset Management, Aviva Investors
and Robeco have been at the forefront of this movement.
Investment companies from the U.S. to Australia have been slower to
react. A study by ShareAction found that 38 of the world’s 75 largest
asset managers scored badly on ESG issues, including BlackRock, Vanguard
and State Street. The three firms are hugely influential and control
about a quarter of U.S. markets alone through the popularity of their
passive funds and other investment products, meaning their views drive
change in the corporate boardroom.
After years of criticism over
alleged inaction, BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, in
January revealed plans to put climate change at the center of its
investment process by rolling out new ESG funds, divesting some coal
holdings and taking a tough line on global warming during boardroom
discussions with businesses around the world. At the time, BlackRock
Chief Executive Larry Fink warned that global warming represented a risk
to markets unlike any previous crisis.
This prospect of a
financial hit has galvanized many investors. In an open letter in March,
pension fund executives, including Hiro Mizuno, who was at the time
chief investment officer of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund,
the world’s largest, said climate change has the potential to destroy
$69 trillion in global economic wealth by 2100.
Regulators such as
Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England, have also warned of a
big investment risk from “stranded assets” — where investors have
holdings that become unsellable because of climate change.
For others, their new foray into climate issues has been driven by
demand from clients, including younger investors who want their
investments to do good as well as generate a return. Even as investors
retreated from mainstream funds during the pandemic, ESG products
continued to attract cash. Sustainable funds in Europe pulled in nearly
$35 billion in the first quarter of 2020, compared with outflows of $172
billion across all European-based funds, according to Morningstar, the
data provider.
ESG fund performance has been strong. Research
from BlackRock in May found that sustainable strategies have
outperformed during this year’s period of intense volatility, with 94%
of leading sustainable indices beating their parent benchmarks in the
first quarter.
With a growing business case, more than 450 asset
managers, with $40 trillion in assets, have signed up to an initiative
called Climate Action 100+ to force the world’s biggest carbon emitters
to tackle global warming. BlackRock joined the group in January.
“There
has been a big shift in the past five years: The understanding, the
awareness of climate change has grown enormously, particularly in the
last year,” said Eugenia Unanyants-Jackson, ESG research head at Allianz
Global Investors.
“It is a physical risk to people, it’s a big risk to our investment portfolios, and we need to do something.”
Growth in ESG expertise
With their newfound interest in global warming and other ESG issues,
asset managers have gone on a hiring spree. The number of investment
professionals specializing in holding boards to account on issues such
as climate change and corporate governance almost doubled at the world’s
biggest asset managers over the last three years, according to
Financial Times research, while they have also invested heavily in
building new systems to examine climate risk.
Their interactions
with companies on climate issues are also changing. For years, small
religious organizations or advocacy groups spearheaded climate change
agitation at companies. These lonely crusades, though supported by a
handful of other mainstream investors, failed to rattle most boardrooms.
“A
lot of faith-based investors have been raising these issues for years
and years,” said Kate Monahan at Friends Fiduciary, a nonprofit
investment firm for 400 Quaker communities with more than $500 million
in assets under management in Philadelphia.
These religious investors now have company, with big asset managers
also taking a more active approach at annual meetings. BNP Paribas Asset
Management, for example, filed this year’s environmental lobbying
proposal at Chevron.
Asset managers are also more willing than
ever to use their vote to push for environmental change. “It was almost a
rule that [asset managers] don’t vote for an NGO [climate] resolution.
But it looks like that is changing now,” Van Baal said.
Still,
there is a divide in how big asset managers vote. BlackRock and Vanguard
supported no environmental resolutions in the U.S. in 2015, but those
figures rose to 13.8% and 16.7% respectively in 2019, according to Proxy
Insight. BNP Paribas Asset Management and Allianz Global Investors, in
contrast, backed at least 90% of environmental resolutions in the U.S.
last year.
BlackRock was criticized for failing to support the
climate resolutions at Woodside and Santos. But it supported other
environmental proposals this year, including the lobbying motion at
Chevron. It has also begun voting against the reelection of board
directors over climate concerns, taking this approach at 50 companies
globally this year.
“Because we believe climate risk is investment risk, we are most
focused on companies that face material financial risks in the
transition to a low-carbon economy and, as a result, present the
greatest risks to our clients’ investments,” said Amra Balic, head of
BlackRock investment stewardship for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Not
everyone is convinced by BlackRock’s approach. The chief executive of a
rival asset manager, who declined to be named, said targeting directors
over global warming, whether through boardroom discussions or voting at
annual meetings, was a good step, but often it was necessary to join
other investors in sending a big signal to companies through climate
resolutions.
“There are a lot of [asset managers] who say they do
[care about climate change] but can’t prove it,” he said. “There are
people who say they do [factor it into their investments], but look at
the voting record. Look at BlackRock’s voting record.”
Eli
Kasargod-Staub, executive director of Majority Action, a nonprofit
shareholder advocacy organization, added that support from the world’s
largest asset manager could have swung climate-critical resolutions at
Delta Air Lines, Dominion Energy and JPMorgan Chase to majority support.
Increased scrutiny
With public pledges and increased staff, companies now face the
prospect of intense shareholder scrutiny. Small shareholders such as
Monahan at Friends Fiduciary were easy to ignore, but large asset
managers cannot be easily brushed aside.
The jump by large
investment firms into the climate change fight “will send a shiver up
the spine of the companies that have not dealt with this before or are
ignoring the issue,” said Jamie Bonham, director of corporate engagement
at NEI Investments, a small Canadian investment manager with $5.8
billion of assets under management.
“You will see corporate boards
a lot more willing to negotiate with shareholders on avoiding
proposals,” he said. For companies, “they see the writing on the wall.
If they go to the annual general meeting, then it is quite possible they
are going to lose the vote.”
As well as increased scrutiny,
investors are asking tougher questions. The focus previously was getting
companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, but
shareholders are now increasingly demanding they outline a plan for a
transition to a low-carbon economy.
Rakhi Kumar, head of ESG investments and asset stewardship at State
Street Global Advisors, said: “Four or five years ago, you would
probably debate [with companies] if climate change was a risk or not.
Now you are no longer debating that. Most companies have got the message
that this is a concern for investors.”
It marks a big shift for
companies, many of which have lobbied heavily for a relaxation of tough
climate rules and a reduction in shareholder power.
In response,
some European oil companies such as BP and Shell have outlined so-called
net zero ambitions in response to investor pressure. But in many cases,
this has not been enough to appease all investors — resolutions calling
for several European oil companies to set hard targets on climate
change received more support this year than last, despite the companies’
pledges.
It is not just carbon-intensive companies such as oil,
petrochemicals and mining that are feeling the pressure. Barclays, the
U.K. bank, was forced to unveil a new climate plan this year after
shareholders targeted it. JPMorgan said in May that board member Lee
Raymond, a former chief executive of ExxonMobil, would step down after
intense pressure from activists and shareholders.
“It was part of every conversation in Davos. I’m talking about
climate, in particular,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said at his bank’s
investor day in February. “We’re taking it very seriously.”
The
path to greener investment is not assured, with other companies still
shrugging off asset managers’ new threat. “Our companies are not
worried,” said Charles Crain at the National Assn. of Manufacturers,
whose members include ExxonMobil.
In the U.S. there is growing
pushback against investors acting as climate warriors. Asset managers
are gearing up for a fight with the Trump administration over a new
proposal that threatens investors’ ability to incorporate ESG principles
into pension portfolios. At the same time, many well-known asset
managers are still reluctant to vote against management, meaning the
vast majority of climate resolutions do not pass.
Tom Quaadman at
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that although there has been more
support for environmental shareholder proposals this year,
behind-the-scenes conversations between companies and investors tend to
resolve climate change concerns before a proxy vote, convincing worried
investors not to vote against management.
“Clearly asset managers are being more vocal,” Quaadman said. “Even
with an uptick this year, the fact that there has been a low level of
those proposals passing indicates that companies are having very serious
discussions with their investors on this.”
Gocher, of the
Australasian Center for Corporate Responsibility, said it remains to be
seen whether companies will listen to shareholders.
“Getting these
votes doesn’t mean companies will change,” he said. “Really the test
comes in the next 12 to 18 months to see if investors demand the things
they voted for.” That will be the test of whether companies “heed that
warning investors have given them.”
Deutsche Bank said it will no longer finance oil sand or energy projects in the Arctic as part of its new fossil fuels policy.
The German lender is cutting ties with fracking projects in countries with scarce water supply, and aims to end business activities in coal mining by 2025.
By the of end 2020, Deutsche Bank will review all existing oil-and-gas businesses in Europe and the US, it said.
For businesses in Asia, a review is expected to conducted in 2022 but that will likely take longer as the region is highly dependent on coal power.
Deutsche Bank said
on Monday it would no longer fund oil sand or new energy projects in
the Arctic region, as banks become more conscious of their carbon
footprint, and contributions to climate change.
The German bank also said it would end all fracking projects in
countries with short water supply, and halt global business activities
in coal mining by 2025.
By the end of 2020, Deutsche Bank said it would review all planned
business activities that are highly dependent on coal in Europe and the
US.
A similar review of businesses in Asia is scheduled to begin
in 2022, although this is expected to take longer owing to the region's
high dependence on coal power compared to much of the world.
The moves are part of the bank's new fossil fuels policy that contribute to wider sustainability targets set in May this year.
The revamped fossil fuels policy provides a "strict framework" for
financing and capital market transactions towards bank activities tied
to coal, oil, and gas.
Chief executive Christian Sewing said the policy sets the bank's
"ambitious targets" and will help "the EU to achieve its goal of being
climate neutral by 2050."
Deutsche Bank issued its first own green bond, a bond tied to an environmental project, in June.
In February, JPMorgan
said it would stop all business with coal companies and restrict
financing to those that drill in the Arctic.
The bank still provides
some loans to coal businesses, but aims to phase those out by 2024.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis last year estimated
that over 100 financial institutions would move away from coal lending
"including 40% of the top 40 global banks and 20 globally significant
insurers."
Today, after more than two and a half centuries of fossil fuel use, that figure is around 414 parts per million (ppm).
If the build-up of CO₂ continues at current rates, by 2080 it will have passed 560 ppm – more than double the level of pre-industrial times.
Exactly how the climate will respond to all this extra CO₂ is one of
the central questions in climate science.
Just how much will the climate
actually change?
A major new international assessment of the Earth’s climate sensitivity, now published in the journal Reviews of Geophysics,
addresses this question. This research has improved our understanding
of how much the world will eventually warm if the carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere is maintained at double the level of pre-industrial times.
While an exact figure is still not possible, low levels of warming
are now found to be far less likely than previously thought. Very high
values are slightly less likely too. There is much greater certainty
that, if left unchecked, global warming would be high enough to bring
very severe impacts and risks worldwide.
The study, which was organised by the World Climate Research
Programme (WCRP) and involving many leading climate scientists
(including one of us: Tim), looks at a measure called “equilibrium climate sensitivity”.
This refers to how much global average temperatures will increase by in
the long-term following a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations. It
can be estimated using three main lines of evidence:
Temperature measurements made with thermometers from 1850 (when
enough global coverage began) to the near present. By comparing
temperatures, CO₂ levels and the effect of other climate drivers in the
past and present, we can estimate the longer-term changes.
Evidence from paleoclimate records from the peak of the last ice
age 20,000 years ago, when CO₂ was lower than now, and a warm period
around 4 million years ago when CO₂ was more comparable to today. We can
tell how warm the climate was and how much CO₂ there was in the
atmosphere based on the make-up of gases trapped in air bubbles in
ancient ice cores.
Present-day observations – for instance from satellite data – and
evidence from climate models, theory and detailed process models that
examine the physics of interactions within the climate system.
Despite its importance, equilibrium climate sensitivity is very
uncertain and for many years the standard estimate has been 1.5°C to
4.5°C. In its 5th Assessment Report,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave these values
as the “likely range”, which meant it considered there was at least a
66% chance that it fell within this range. Or, in other words, it judged
there was up to a 33% chance that warming would either be less than
1.5°C or more than 4.5°C.
The new study suggests that this “likely range” has narrowed to, at
most, 2.3°C to 4.5°C – or possibly an even narrower range*. The lower
end of the range has therefore risen substantially, meaning that
scientists are now much more confident that global warming will not be
small.
Global warming assessments old and new
Ranges of equilibrium climate sensitivity from the IPCC and the new study.
We won’t be saved by low sensitivity
An important implication is that humans would be taking an even
bigger risk than previously thought if we relied on low climate
sensitivity to allow us to meet the Paris Agreement
target of keeping global temperatures to “well below” 2°C above
pre-industrial levels, and to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to
1.5°C.
This is therefore further confirmation that CO₂ emissions need to
be rapidly reduced and ultimately reach net zero if the Paris targets
are to have a good chance of being met.
According to the study, if CO₂ does reach double the pre-industrial
level and stays there (or to be precise, if the total effect of all
human impact on greenhouse gases and other climate drivers reaches an
equivalent level), then there is up to an 18% chance that temperatures
will rise to 4.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and a no more than 5%
chance that they will go above 5.7°C.
This has important implications
for climate change risk assessments. In a risk assessment, it is normal to consider outcomes that are possible even if they are not the most likely.
The latest climate models have a wide range of climate sensitivities, with our own Met Office models
at the high end. This happens because climate sensitivity is not
something that scientists input to the models, but rather it emerges
from the same complex interactions the models simulate.
This diversity of models lets us understand the regional changes in
climate and extreme weather associated with different climate
sensitivities, and assess their potential impacts. This includes the
high sensitivities that are less likely but still possible. At the other
end of the range, seeing the minimum changes we can expect will help
inform climate change adaptation measures.
The new study allows a key aspect of climate models, their climate
sensitivity, to be seen in the context of other evidence. While there is
still more to be done to assess more precisely how the global climate
will respond to further increases in greenhouse gases, these advances
provide a much more solid base of evidence on which climate change
policy can be further developed.
*WCRP provides two sets of ranges. The first is based on a
“baseline” calculation which represents a single interpretation of the
evidence and may be over-confident. The second set of “robust” ranges
are designed to bound the range of plausible alternative interpretations
of the evidence and statistical modelling assumptions. The numbers
quoted in this article are from the robust range. For further details,
see Sherwood et. al, 2020
Scientists are working to better understand gyrfalcons, the only raptors that stay year-round in the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth.
A gyrfalcon soars over the cliffs and tundra of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. The birds are especially vulnerable to climate change because many stay year-round in the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth.
The gyrfalcon is the world’s
largest falcon, and one of the fastest: During long flights, it can
surpass speeds of 80 miles per hour. Weighing more than three pounds,
with a wingspan of four feet or more, it can take down prey twice its
size.
It’s also the only Arctic raptor that doesn’t need to head south for
the winter, staying behind instead to hunt prey in a frigid, dark
landscape. “Any organism that can live in such a hostile environment has
my respect,” says Travis Booms, a raptor biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
But the gyrfalcon faces a challenge it cannot flee or take down: The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast
as the rest of the planet, and biologists consider gyrfalcons one of
the region’s most vulnerable species, in part because they’re
ultra-specialized to survive in the cold. While many species are
shifting their ranges toward the cooler poles as temperatures climb, the
gyrfalcon can’t go any farther north. Though they’re not currently
classified as threatened with extinction, recent research in Alaska
suggests there’s cause for concern.
“The population is stable for now but may possibly be declining,”
Booms says, though it’s unclear by just how much. “There are some pretty
clear threats on the horizon.” He is part of a long-term study in the
Seward Peninsula, in western Alaska—home to 70 to 80 nesting pairs of
gyrfalcons, or about one-tenth of the state’s total population—to
understand how the birds are adapting to climate change.
Photographer Kiliii Yüyan
accompanied researchers visiting gyrfalcon nests on the peninsula in
June 2019. His photos provide an unprecedented glimpse of the birds in
their natural habitat, where they are very difficult to find and
observe. He was drawn to the project by the birds’ beauty and their role
as top predators in the Arctic, he says, as well as to the importance
of the research.
Gyrfalcons and golden eagles compete for nesting spots on cliffs across vast, uninhabited stretches of the Arctic. This former eagle’s nest sits on a bluff over a river on the Seward Peninsula. The region is uniquely suitable for gyrfalcon research because its network of roads allows researchers easier access.
Left: These gyrfalcon chicks are about 25 days old and ready to be banded by biologists so they can be identified in the future. The researchers must hike for miles and rappel down cliffs to band the chicks and take measurements and blood samples. Right: The youngsters are not immune to swarms of mosquitoes that arise during the heat of the summer. Scientists worry that avian diseases like West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes, could migrate north as the area warms.
“We frankly still know so little about gyrfalcons,” he says,
including how they manage to survive the winter and where they go then.
“I wanted to give people a close glimpse of this beautiful animal.
There are so few images of gyrfalcons out there,” Yüyan says. “What does
a gyrfalcon, aerial queen of the Arctic, look like in its own domain?”
Aeries, canaries
The Seward Peninsula is an ideal place to study gyrfalcons because it
has a robust network of roads, a rarity in the Arctic. These extend
from the small town of Nome and run within hiking distance of several
gyrfalcon nesting sites, or aeries, perched high on rocky cliffs that
rise above vast, uninhabited stretches of tundra.
Since 2014, the Peregrine Fund,
an organization devoted to raptor conservation and research, has been
studying the peninsula’s gyrfalcons in tandem with Booms and the Alaska
Department of Fish and Game, which has been studying raptors there for
20 years.
Each summer, a team of researchers visits some 20 gyrfalcon nests on
the peninsula at three different times: in May, when the eggs have been
laid; in June, when chicks are about 25 days old; and in mid-July, after
the chicks have fledged.
It’s not easy work. An average day requires hours of hiking through
difficult terrain, crossing rivers, climbing and descending cliffs, and
enduring swarms of mosquitoes. The June tour—when they take blood
samples and measurements from the chicks, and place leg bands on them—is
particularly difficult. The parents aren’t exactly pleased with the
human visitors.
“It’s somewhat intimidating rappelling down a cliff toward a nest and
having these large birds swooping at you [while] constantly screaming,”
says Devin Johnson, a doctoral student at the University of Alaska
Fairbanks who’s writing his dissertation on the links between
gyrfalcons’ diet and reproductive success. (The researchers’ remote
cameras show the birds quickly return to the nest and to a sense of
normalcy after they leave.)
Data gathered from these field visits will illuminate how gyrfalcons
are reacting to environmental changes in the area. These include more
intense spring storms—which can kill nestlings—and the growth of new
bushes and small trees across the tundra, which gives their prey more
places to hide. The scientists have also begun sampling the raptors’
blood for diseases such avian malaria and West Nile virus, to which gyrfalcons are likely more vulnerable than other raptors.
“If environmental change is occurring, it will be manifested in the biology of gyrfalcons,” says David Anderson, who runs the Peregrine Fund’s gyrfalcon research program. “We use them as a canary in the coal mine.”
Young gyrfalcons high up in a cliffside nest devour prey delivered by their mother. A camera trap placed by the Peregrine Fund biologists helps researchers to monitor the chicks and see what they eat.
Four million photos
Learning more about gyrfalcons’ diet is an important part of the
project because the birds prey almost exclusively on other animals that,
like themselves, are specially adapted to live in the cold north. And
like gyrfalcons, their prey are increasingly vulnerable in the warming
Arctic, says Mike Henderson, a raptor biologist with the Peregrine Fund
who manages the research program in the field.
Motion-activated cameras the researchers place at the nests every May
capture photos of all the prey gyrfalcons bring back. Since 2014, the
project has accrued more than four million photos of prey
items—including ptarmigans, ground squirrels, lemmings, and songbirds.
“We currently have more gyrfalcon diet photos than anyone in the world,”
Henderson says.
Left: Feathers litter the ground alongside wildflowers growing near a gyrfalcon aerie. The raptors specialize in hunting ptarmigans, chicken-like ground birds, as well as ground squirrels, lemmings, and songbirds. Right: This gyrfalcon, in Nome, Alaska, is cared for by local falconer John Earthman. "They're very engaging birds, highly intelligent," Earthman says. Many raptors used by falconers are caught “on the wing” after fledging in late summer or fall and released in the spring.
Their research shows the diet of gyrfalcons is more varied than
previously thought. But as to whether their diet has already changed due
to climate conditions, “it’s something we’re looking into—we really
need a longer-term data set to know for sure,” Johnson says.
Hunters and guides
Though gyrfalcon populations appear stable globally, Booms says
“there are some indications the species may be declining locally in
western Alaska and the Yukon Territory.” The southernmost population
being studied appears to be doing the worst, he says. The declines may
be due in part to difficulty finding prey and more intense spring
storms. But he says it’s too early to make definitive conclusions.
Michael Henderson, who manages the Peregrine Fund's gyrfalcon research project, cradles a recently banded juvenile gyrfalcon at a nest site.
The uncertainty is yet another reason why it’s important to monitor
Alaska’s birds, to get baseline data before the area warms even more,
Booms says.
Furthermore, a small number of gyrfalcons are legally taken from the
wild each year for use in falconry, in which people train the raptors to
help them hunt. Between about one and five are taken from nests in the
state each year, in a highly regulated fashion, Booms says.
Gyrfalcons are not only valued hunters but they’re also spiritual
guides for many Indigenous Arctic people. And that’s personal for Yüyan,
because his ancestors are Nanai, Native people in the Siberia region.
“Some of the most powerful
[spirit helpers] are falcons,” he says, including gyrfalcons. He says
he wants to help people understand that the Arctic is more than a big
expanse of ice. “It’s the last vast wilderness we have, with so much
incredible life and Indigenous culture. If we don’t know what’s out
there, we just assume there’s nothing. And keeping the Arctic exotic
will doom it to exploitation.”
A female white gyrfalcon soars through the air near Nome. In certain areas, 10 percent of gyrfalcons have such bright white coloration. “Gyrfalcons, especially the ghostly white-morph birds, are so stunning visually,” says photographer Kiliii Yüyan. “Their size and ferocity intrigue me. They have an intensity and awareness that reminds me that wild creatures have a vastly different perspective than humans.”
Vicki Perrett's home in Indented Head is at risk of going underwater during high tides or storm surges as a result of rising sea levels. ABC News: Steven Schubert
Key Points
The Victorian Government has instructed all councils to plan for a 0.8m sea-level rise by the year 2100
The
City of Greater Geelong has identified 1,614 properties that will face
inundation, and has submitted an overlay to the Planning Minister
The
overlay would require new buildings and renovations to meet certain
conditions, such as ensuring floors were above predicted flood levels
As Vicki Perrett plays with her granddaughter Rachel on the beach in front of her home on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula, she knows she has to cherish these moments.
And not just because children grow up so fast.
She also knows the beach they play on may not be there forever.
"The beach is coming closer towards us, towards the road and towards our property," Ms Perrett says.
"It's very prone to sea level rise here and to storm surges."
This stretch of coastline at Indented Head has already been earmarked as at risk of going underwater by 2100.
Ms Perrett's house is also in the danger zone.
The foreshore at Indented Head is being slowly eroded, and the road and homes are now at risk. ABC News: Steven Schubert
It
was identified as one of 1,614 properties across the Greater Geelong
region that may be faced with future flooding under a 0.8-metre sea
level rise.
"Our property is about 20cm above sea
level. There are others along the foreshore here that are actually below
sea level," Ms Perrett says.
"Probably not in our lifetime will the actual property be flooded, I would like to hope, but clearly, the foreshore is getting slowly eroded."
Councils ordered to plan for sea level rises
The Victorian Government has instructed all councils to plan for a 0.8m sea level rise by the year 2100.
That
figure is based on a 2007 report from the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which agreed on the projected
rise, but could not rule out larger increases.
Although
the worst impacts of sea level rises may still be decades away, this
bayside community, about an hour-and-a-half south of Melbourne, has
already had a taste of what is to come.
Four years ago, a "triple whammy" of a low-pressure system, strong onshore winds and very high tides battered the coastline.
"Parts
of the foreshore all the way from where we're living down to
Portarlington [about 6 kilometres away] were inundated ... so we know
what happens and what it does to infrastructure," Ms Perrett says.
Homes in the predicted inundation zone will require a special planning permit for new buildings and renovations. ABC News: Steven Schubert
The
City of Greater Geelong recently submitted its Land Subject to
Inundation Overlay to the State Planning Minister for approval.
Once
signed off, it means any properties within the predicted inundation
zone, including Ms Perrett's home at Indented Head, will require a
planning permit for new buildings and renovations, with permit
conditions usually requiring floor levels to be above the predicted
flood levels.
Ms Perrett says she understands
councils need to mitigate their risk, and the overlay would be useful
information for anyone buying or building a property within the
inundation zone.
But she feels more needs to be done to support residents whose property prices may be affected in the long term.
"I
can't mitigate my risk. I've rung my insurer, they won't change my
insurance policy so we just have to suffer the consequences," she says.
"For
the existing property owners, we're being told that, 'Oh don't worry,
it's not going to affect your property value.' But I think the subtext
to that is we don't want to have to reduce your rates.
"That clearly would impact on Council's revenue."
What can we expect from sea level rises?
Dr Kathleen McInnes is the group leader for CSIRO's climate extremes and projections group. (ABC News: Steven Schubert)
CSIRO
climate scientist Dr Kathleen McInnes said previous predictions
estimated sea level rises between 0.5m and 1m by the end of the century.
The
0.8m predicted sea-level rise quoted in the Victorian Government's
directive to councils is "towards the upper range" of those predictions,
she says.
But a report released last year by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change increased the predicted sea
level rise range to between 0.6m and 1.1m.
Dr McInnes said it coincided with data that showed sea level rises were accelerating.
"Sea levels rose about 1.8 millimetres per year over the 20th century," Dr McInnes said.
"But in the last 30 years, the rate of rise has increased to about 3.6mm per year."
Dr McInnes leads the CSIRO's climate extremes and projections group, which has contributed to the mapping of high-risk areas.
Publicly available mapping tools, such as Coastal Risk Australia, allow anyone to find out how their local area would fare under different sea-level rise scenarios.
Dr
McInnes said it was important for local communities to know whether
they were at risk so they could decide whether to invest in adaptation
strategies, such as infrastructure, to protect the coastline, or simply
retreat from the danger zone.
"Land subject to
inundation is land that is low-lying, that is potentially at risk from
inundation during extreme sea-level events or even potentially high-tide
events in the future," Dr McInnes said.
"We know that from our
projections … that we can expect a two to threefold increase in the
frequency of inundation events as a result of a projected sea-level
rise."
Sea level rises visualisation
Dr
McInnes says while the worst impacts will be felt during storm surges,
there might be some areas that will suffer more permanent flooding.
"If [the land] is low enough, it could be permanently inundated," she said.
"Parts
of Swan Bay [on the Bellarine Peninsula] could potentially become quite
affected by inundation, certainly high-tide inundation, in the future."
And it's not just regional areas.
Dr McInnes says Melbourne suburbs such as Elwood, Aspendale and Mordialloc are also at risk of more-regular flooding in future.
The insurance impacts of identifying risk
You may think an overlay such as this would have consequences for a property's insurance costs.
But
Insurance Council of Australia spokesman Campbell Fuller says overlays
that show future sea-level rises should have no impact on current
insurance premiums.
"Insurers price risks for the
duration of the policy, typically 12 months, and climate change is not a
component of premiums," he said.
And actions of the sea are one of the most common policy exclusions.
"However, measures that seek to anticipate and prepare for sea-level rises caused by climate change are positive," he said.
"Overlays
will help inform communities about the impact of climate change and may
encourage governments and property owners to invest in mitigation,
resilience and adaptation programs."
But what it means for property values is yet to be seen.
Many
of the submissions the City of Greater Geelong received from residents
spoke of a fear their property's value would be significantly decreased.
Councillor
Trent Sullivan says the overlay is about "taking a proactive attitude
towards protecting our coastal areas and communities" and is based off
scientific reports, hazard assessments and inundation mapping.
"We
all know how vulnerable our coastal communities are to climate change
and storm surge events, so this is an added layer of protection for our
residents," he said.
"This should reduce the risk to public safety, private property, agricultural losses and protects our residents."
'We don't want to move'
Ms Perrett worries her granddaughter Rachel's generation will not be able to enjoy the same carefree coastal lifestyle she had. ABC News: Steven Schubert
Ms
Perrett is resigned to the fact that her property's value may decrease
as the risk goes up in coming years, meaning her family's inheritance
may not be as valuable as it is now.
But the
dedicated community member, who heads a local environmental group, is
vice-president of the community association and previously sat on the
local coastal committee, says she just wants to make sure she's doing
everything in her power to address climate change.
"We're mindful that we won't be leaving much of a legacy to our children," she said.
"I
hate to think that [my granddaughter] won't get to enjoy the summers
that I had when I was her age growing up here and holidaying here — it
was just a very carefree lifestyle and very idyllic, swimming and
sailing and fishing and exploring the beach.
"I
certainly do have a lot of friends that are telling me, 'You should move
now'. [But] we don't want to move. We love our community. We're
probably more connected to our community than with anywhere we've lived
in our lives. So it's a very special place."
Ms
Perrett says she feels more needs to be done to encourage homeowners and
businesses across the region to reduce their carbon emissions.
"We can live our lives with as small a carbon footprint as possible," she said.
"It's all of our responsibility. We all make choices and, clearly, we need to solve the problems together."
New York Times Magazine - Text Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs Meridith Kohut Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Where will they go?
ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.
Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Meridith Kohut is an award-winning photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, who has documented global health and humanitarian crises in Latin America for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her recent assignments include photographing migration and childbirth in Venezuela, antigovernment protests in Haiti and the killing of women in Guatemala.
Early in 2019, a
year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had
to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five
years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his
last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks,
and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded.
Jorge
waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could
still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof
hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500
advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and
everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala,
his family might die, too.
Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the
United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta
Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and
dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents
have largely stayed.
Now, though, under a relentless confluence of
drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to
leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about
where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically
hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated
bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision
that confronted Jorge.
ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.
The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the
drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to
become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of
Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to
decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of
water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much
as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple
crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.
Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with
surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about
the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them,
hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the
Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The
result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration
the world has seen.
In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants,
three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black
nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four
goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family
would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10
p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would
wind up, or what they would do when they got there.
From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.
ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.
For most of human
history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of
temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food
production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting
north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50
years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined.
By 2070, the kind of
extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1
percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the
land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the
climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many
will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but
others will be forced to move on.
A 2017 study in Science Advances
found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just
going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India
and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of
humans.”
People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where
increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made
farming more difficult, the World Bank points to
more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East,
Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people
have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and
widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach
the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a
vast remapping of the world’s populations.
Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to
the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global
North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new
people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But
securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can
relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more
migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves
off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are
increasingly unlivable.
The best outcome requires not only good will and
the careful management of turbulent political forces; without
preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove
wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the
worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate
change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.
The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees
stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from
Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has
propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The
alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people
will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially
and politically, for the greater changes to come.
Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge
will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of
people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest
cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need
for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the
displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on
the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of
climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and
ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for
the first time, how people will move across borders.
We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and
economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model
projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but
that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate
changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million
migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next
30 years.
Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which
migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make
up as much as 5 percent of the total. If governments take modest action
to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move
from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and
2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming,
that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures
include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)
The model shows that the political responses to both climate change and migration can lead to drastically different futures.
As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete
numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible
futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many
climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false
precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any
discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more
potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering
human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.
In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on
whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted
— catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States
has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a
larger scale, with higher stakes. The only way to mitigate the most
destabilizing aspects of mass migration is to prepare for it, and
preparation demands a sharper imagining of where people are likely to
go, and when.
I. A Different Kind of Climate Model
In November 2007, Alan B. Krueger, a labor economist known for his
statistical work on inequality, walked into the Princeton University
offices of Michael Oppenheimer, a leading climate geoscientist, and
asked him whether anyone had ever tried to quantify how and where
climate change would cause people to move.
Earlier that year, Oppenheimer helped write the U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that, for the first
time, explored in depth how climate disruption might uproot large
segments of the global population. But as groundbreaking as the report
was — the U.N. was recognized for its work with a Nobel Peace Prize —
the academic disciplines whose work it synthesized were largely siloed
from one another.
Demographers, agronomists and economists were all
doing their work on climate change in isolation, but understanding the
question of migration would have to include all of them.
Together, Oppenheimer and Krueger, who died in 2019, began to chip away
at the question, asking whether tools typically used by economists might
yield insight into the environment’s effects on people’s decision to
migrate. They began to examine the statistical relationships — say,
between census data and crop yields and historical weather patterns — in
Mexico to try to understand how farmers there respond to drought.
The
data helped them create a mathematical measure of farmers’ sensitivity
to environmental change — a factor that Krueger could use the same way
he might evaluate fiscal policies, but to model future migration.
Their study, published in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
found that Mexican migration to the United States pulsed upward during
periods of drought and projected that by 2080, climate change there
could drive 6.7 million more people toward the Southern U.S. border. “It
was,” Oppenheimer said, “one of the first applications of econometric
modeling to the climate-migration problem.”
TABASCO, MEXICO. Migrants from Central America riding north on the Bestia freight rail line
The
modeling was a start. But it was hyperlocal instead of global, and it
left open huge questions: how cultural differences might change
outcomes, for example, or how population shifts might occur across
larger regions. It was also controversial, igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics,
who attacked the modeling effort as “guesswork” built on “tenuous
assumptions” and argued that a model couldn’t untangle the effect of
climate change from all the other complex influences that determine
human decision-making and migration.
That argument eventually found some
traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to
model precise migration figures.
But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to
this well established but amorphous threat seemed worth taking. In the
early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument
against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that
scientists shouldn’t traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice,
producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of
climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try
to steer away from that fate.
Trying to project the consequences of
climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly
provocative efforts. “If others have better ideas for estimating how
climate change affects migration,” he wrote in 2010, “they should
publish them.”
Since then, Oppenheimer’s approach has become common. Dozens more
studies have applied econometric modeling to climate-related problems,
seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change
and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works.
Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have
generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one.
As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate’s subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya;
Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants
brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were
bound up with the movement of just two million people. As the mechanisms
of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity,
water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement
comes to seem astronomically larger.
TABASCO. Bayron Coto (front) left his home in Honduras to support his family after a hurricane destroyed local maize, bean and coffee crops.
North Africa’s Sahel provides an example.
In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to
Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline
are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate
change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the
region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened
by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and
deforestation.
Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that
some 65 percent of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep
fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the
University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a
post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of
people.”
The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the
global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will
soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While
some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the
Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be
uprooted, the World Bank found.
If past patterns are a measure, many
will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat
waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without
air-conditioning will simply die.
If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of
people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating
the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with
the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show
high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the
Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China
and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta,
Egypt’s breadbasket.
Many coastal regions of the United States are also
at risk.
Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale
of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300
million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and
uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific
people in specific places. Now, though, new research on both fronts has
created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously.
A few years
ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City
University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a
next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the
future. The idea was to build on the Oppenheimer-style measure of
response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a
“gravity” model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of
destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants
might end up.
The resulting report, published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete.
The bank’s work targeted climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South
Asia and Latin America, focusing not on the emergency displacement of
people from natural disasters but on their premeditated responses to
what researchers call “slow-onset” shifts in the environment.
They
determined that as climate change progressed in just these three regions
alone, as many as 143 million people would be displaced within their
own borders, moving mostly from rural areas to nearby towns and cities.
The study, though, wasn’t fine-tuned to specific climatic changes like
declining groundwater. And it didn’t even try to address the elephant in
the room: How would the climate push people to migrate across
international borders?
CHIAPAS, MEXICO. Coto (right) hopping a train with other migrants.
In early 2019, The Times Magazine and ProPublica, with
support from the Pulitzer Center, hired an author of the World Bank
report — Bryan Jones, a geographer at Baruch College — to add layers of
environmental data to its model, making it even more sensitive to
climatic change and expanding its reach. Our goal was to pick up where
the World Bank researchers left off, in order to model, for the first
time, how people would move between countries, especially from Central
America and Mexico toward the United States.
First we gathered existing data sets — on political stability,
agricultural productivity, food stress, water availability, social
connections, weather and much more — in order to approximate the
kaleidoscopic complexity of human decision-making.
Then we started asking questions: If crop yields continue to
decline because of drought, for instance, and people are forced to
respond by moving, as they have in the past, can we see where they will
go and see what new conditions that might introduce? It’s very difficult
to model how individual people think or to answer these questions using
individual data points — often the data simply doesn’t exist.
Instead
of guessing what Jorge A. will do and then multiplying that decision by
the number of people in similar circumstances, the model looks across
entire populations, averaging out trends in community decision-making
based on established patterns, then seeing how those trends play out in
different scenarios.
In all, we fed more than 10 billion data points into our model. Then we
tested the relationships in the model retroactively, checking where
historical cause and effect could be empirically supported, to see if
the model’s projections about the past matches what really happened.
Once the model was built and layered with both approaches — econometric
and gravity — we looked at how people moved as global carbon
concentrations increased in five different scenarios, which imagine
various combinations of growth, trade and border control, among other
factors. (These scenarios have become standard among climate scientists
and economists in modeling different pathways of global socioeconomic
development.)
Only a supercomputer could efficiently process the work in its
entirety; estimating migration from Central America and Mexico in one
case required uploading our query to a federal mainframe housed in a
building the size of a small college campus outside Cheyenne, Wyo., run
by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where even there it
took four days for the machine to calculate its answers. (A more
detailed description of the data project can be found at propublica.org/migration-methodology.)
The results are built around a number of assumptions about the
relationships between real-world developments that haven’t all been
scientifically validated. The model also assumes that complex
relationships — say, how drought and political stability relate to each
other — remain consistent and linear over time (when in reality we know
the relationships will change, but not how). Many people will also be
trapped by their circumstances, too poor or vulnerable to move, and the
models have a difficult time accounting for them.
All this means that our model is far from definitive. But every
one of the scenarios it produces points to a future in which climate
change, currently a subtle disrupting influence, becomes a source of
major disruption, increasingly driving the displacement of vast
populations.
GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.
II. How Climate Moves People
Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera moved to the outskirts of San Salvador
six years ago, after her life in the rural western edge of El Salvador —
just 90 miles from Jorge A.’s village in Guatemala — collapsed. Now she
sells pupusas on a block not far from where teenagers stand
guard for the Mara Salvatrucha gang.
When we met last summer, she was
working six days a week, earning $7 a day, or less than $200 a month.
She relied on the kindness of her boss, who gave her some free meals at
work. But everything else for her and her infant son she had to provide
herself. Cortez commuted before dawn from San Marcos, where she lived
with her sister in a cheap room off a pedestrian alleyway. But her
apartment still cost $65 each month. And she sent $75 home to her
parents each month — enough for beans and cheese to feed the two
daughters she left with them. “We’re going backward,” she said.
Her story — that of an uneducated, unskilled woman from farm roots
who can’t find high-paying work in the city and falls deeper into
poverty — is a familiar one, the classic pattern of in-country migration
all around the world. San Salvador, meanwhile, has become notorious as
one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a capital in which gangs
have long controlled everything from the majestic colonial streets of
its downtown squares to the offices of the politicians who reside in
them.
It is against this backdrop of war, violence, hurricanes and
poverty that one in six of El Salvador’s citizens have fled for the
United States over the course of the last few decades, with some 90,000
Salvadorans apprehended at the U.S. border in 2019 alone.
Cortez was born about a mile from the Guatemalan border, in El Paste, a
small town nestled on the side of a volcano. Her family were jornaleros
— day laborers who farmed on the big maize and bean plantations in the
area — and they rented a two-room mud-walled hut with a dirt floor,
raising nine children there. Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by
climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador’s crop, slashing harvests
by 70 percent. Then drought and unpredictable storms led to what a
U.N.-affiliated food-security organization describes as “a progressive
deterioration” of Salvadorans’ livelihoods.
That’s when Cortez decided to leave. She married and found work as a
brick maker at a factory in the nearby city of Ahuachapán. But the gangs
found easy prey in vulnerable farmers and spread into the Salvadoran
countryside and the outlying cities, where they made a living by
extorting local shopkeepers. Here we can see how climate change can act
as what Defense Department officials sometimes refer to as a “threat
multiplier.” For Cortez, the threat could not have been more dire. After
two years in Ahuachapán, a gang-connected hit man knocked on Cortez’s
door and took her husband, whose ex-girlfriend was a gang member,
executing him in broad daylight a block away.
In other times, Cortez might have gone back home. But there was no work
in El Paste, and no water. So she sent her children there and went to
San Salvador instead.
SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.
For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend
is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon
farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded.
It’s in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure,
resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn
that the most severe strains on society will unfold. Food has to be
imported — stretching reliance on already-struggling farms and
increasing its cost. People will congregate in slums, with little water
or electricity, where they are more vulnerable to flooding or other
disasters. The slums fuel extremism and chaos.
It is a shift that is already well underway, which is why the World
Bank has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into
East African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population
has doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035.
In Mexico, the World Bank estimates, as many as 1.7 million people may
migrate away from the hottest and driest regions, many of them winding
up in Mexico City.
But like so much of the rest of the climate story, the
urbanization trend is also just the beginning. Right now a little more
than half of the planet’s population lives in urban areas, but by the
middle of the century, the World Bank estimates, 67 percent will. In
just a decade, four out of every 10 urban residents — two billion people
around the world — will live in slums. The International Committee of
the Red Cross warns that 96 percent of future urban growth will happen
in some of the world’s most fragile cities, which already face a
heightened risk of conflict and have governments that are least capable
of dealing with it.
Some cities will be unable to sustain the influx. In
the case of Addis Ababa, the World Bank suggests that in the second
half of the century, many of the people who fled there will be forced to
move again, leaving that city as local agriculture around it dries up.
Our modeling effort is premised on the notion that in these cities as
they exist now, we can see the seeds of their future growth.
Relationships between quality-of-life factors like household income in
specific neighborhoods, education levels, employment rates and so forth —
and how each of those changed in response to climate — would reveal
patterns that could be projected into the future. As moisture raises the
grain in a slab of wood, the information just needed to be elicited.
Under every scientific forecast for global climate change, El Salvador
gets hotter and drier, and our model was in accord with what other
researchers said was likely: San Salvador will continue to grow as a
result, putting still more people in its dense outer rings. What happens
in its farm country, though, is more dependent on which climate and
development policies governments to the north choose to deploy in
dealing with the warming planet. High emissions, with few global policy
changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador — just
like rural Guatemala — to empty out, even as its cities grow.
Should the United States and other wealthy countries change the
trajectory of global policy, though — by, say, investing in climate
mitigation efforts at home but also hardening their borders — they would
trigger a complex cascade of repercussions farther south, according to
the model. Central American and Mexican cities continue to grow, albeit
less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows
drastically, most likely concentrating poverty further. Far more people
also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped
and more desperate than ever.
ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.
People move to cities because they can seem
like a refuge, offering the facade of order — tall buildings and
government presence — and the mirage of wealth. I met several men who
left their farm fields seeking extremely dangerous work as security
guards in San Salvador and Guatemala City. I met a 10-year-old boy
washing car windows at a stoplight, convinced that the coins in his jar
would help buy back his parents’ farmland. Cities offer choices, and a
sense that you can control your destiny.
These same cities, though, can just as easily become traps, as the
challenges that go along with rapid urbanization quickly pile up. Since
2000, San Salvador’s population has ballooned by more than a third as it
has absorbed migrants from the rural areas, even as tens of thousands
of people continue to leave the country and migrate north. By
midcentury, the U.N. estimates that El Salvador — which has 6.4 million
people and is the most densely populated country in Central America —
will be 86 percent urban.
Our models show that much of the growth will be concentrated in the
city’s slumlike suburbs, places like San Marcos, where people live in
thousands of ramshackle structures, many without electricity or fresh
water. In these places, even before the pandemic and its fallout, good
jobs were difficult to find, poverty was deepening and crime was
increasing. Domestic abuse has also been rising, and declining sanitary
conditions threaten more disease. As society weakens, the gangs — whose
members outnumber the police in parts of El Salvador by an estimated
three to one — extort and recruit. They have made San Salvador’s murder
rate one of the highest in the world.
Cortez hoped to escape the violence, but she couldn’t. The gangs run
through her apartment block, stealing televisions and collecting
protection payments. She had recently witnessed a murder inside a
medical clinic where she was delivering food. The lack of security, the
lack of affordable housing, the lack of child care, the lack of
sustenance — all influence the evolution of complex urban systems under
migratory pressure, and our model considers such stresses by
incorporating data on crime, governance and health care. They are
signposts for what is to come.
A week before our meeting last year, Cortez had resolved to make the
trip to the United States at almost any cost. For months she had “felt
like going far away,” but moving home was out of the question. “The
climate has changed, and it has provoked us,” she said, adding that it
had scarcely rained in three years. “My dad, last year, he just gave
up.”
Cortez recounted what she did next. As her boss dropped potato pupusas
into the smoking fryer, Cortez turned to her and made an unimaginable
request: Would she take Cortez’s baby? It was the only way to save the
child, Cortez said. She promised to send money from the United States,
but the older woman said no — she couldn’t imagine being able to care
for the infant.
Today San Salvador is shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, and Cortez
is cooped up inside her apartment in San Marcos. She hasn’t worked in
three months and is unable to see her daughters in El Paste. She was
allowed a forbearance on rent during the country’s official lockdown,
but that has come to an end. She remains convinced that the United
States is her only salvation — border walls be damned. She’ll leave, she
said, “the first chance I get.”
ALTA VERAPAZ. Isabel Max Mez with her daughter Katerin Michel Xol Max. The girl has a skin infection that doctors say was caused by contaminated water.
Most would-be migrants
don’t want to move away from home. Instead, they’ll make incremental
adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city.
It’s only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders,
taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call “stepwise
migration.” Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing
into a foreign land — vulnerable to both its politics and its own social
turmoil — is an entirely different trial.
Seven miles from the Suchiate River, which marks Guatemala’s border with
Mexico, sits Siglo XXI, one of Mexico’s largest immigration detention
centers, a squat concrete compound with 30-foot walls, barred windows
and a punishment cell. In early 2019, the 960-bed facility was largely
empty, as Mexico welcomed passing migrants instead of detaining them.
But by March, as the United States increased pressure to stop Central
Americans from reaching its borders,
Mexico had begun to detain migrants
who crossed into its territory, packing almost 2,000 people inside this
center near the city of Tapachula. Detainees slept on mattresses thrown
down in the white-tiled hallways, waited in lines to use toilets
overflowing with feces and crammed shoulder to shoulder for hours to get
a meal of canned meat spooned onto a metal tray.
On April 25, imprisoned migrants stormed the stairway leading to a
fortified security platform in the center’s main hall, overpowering the
guards and then unlocking the main gates. More than 1,000 Guatemalans,
Cubans, Salvadorans, Haitians and others streamed into the Tapachula
night.
I arrived in Tapachula five weeks after the breakout to find a city
cracking in the crucible of migration. Just months earlier, passing
migrants on Mexico’s southern border were offered rides and tortas
and medicine from a sympathetic Mexican public. Now migrant families
were being hunted down in the countryside by armed national-guard units,
as if they were enemy soldiers.
Mexico has not always welcomed migrants, but President Andrés
Manuel López Obrador was trying to make his country a model for
increasingly open borders. This idealistic effort was also pragmatic: It
was meant to show the world an alternative to the belligerent
wall-building xenophobia he saw gathering momentum in the United States.
More open borders, combined with strategic foreign aid and help with
human rights to keep Central American migrants from leaving their homes
in the first place, would lead to a better outcome for all nations. “I
want to tell them they can count on us,” López Obrador had declared,
promising the migrants work permits and temporary jobs.
The architects of Mexico’s policies assumed that its citizens had the
patience and the capacity to absorb — economically, environmentally and
socially — such an influx of people. But they failed to anticipate how
President Trump would hold their economy hostage to press his own
anti-immigrant crackdown, and they were caught off-guard by how the
burdens brought by the immigration traffic weighed on Mexico’s own
people.
CHIAPAS. Juan Francisco Murcia (left), a climate migrant from Honduras, studying a map of shelters near northbound train routes.
In
the six months after López Obrador took office in December 2018, some
420,000 people entered Mexico without documentation, according to
Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Many floated across the Suchiate
on boards tied atop large inner tubes, paying guides a couple of dollars
for passage. In Ciudad Hidalgo, a border town outside Tapachula,
migrants camped in the square and fought in the streets. In a late-night
interview in his cinder-block office, under the glare of fluorescent
lights, the town’s director of public security, Luis Martínez López,
rattled off statistics about their impact: Armed robberies jumped 45
percent; murders increased 15 percent.
Whether the crimes were truly attributable to the migrants was a matter
of significant debate, but the perception that they were fueled a rising
impatience. That March, Martínez told me, a confrontation between a
crowd of about 400 migrants and the local police turned rowdy, and the
migrants tied up five officers in the center of town. No one was hurt,
but the incident stoked locals’ concern that things were getting out of
control. “We used to open doors for them like brothers and feed them,”
said Martínez, who has since left his government job. “I was
disappointed and angry.”
In Tapachula, a much larger city, tourism and commerce began to suffer.
Whole families of migrants huddled in downtown doorways overnight,
crowding sidewalks and sleeping on thin, oil-stained sheets of
cardboard. Hotels — normally almost sold out in December — were less
than 65 percent full as visitors stayed away, fearful of crime. Clinics
ran short of medication. The impact came at a vulnerable moment:
While
many northern Mexican states enjoyed economic growth of 3 to 11 percent
in 2018, Chiapas — its southernmost state — had a 3 percent drop in its
gross domestic product. “They are overwhelmed,” said the Rev. César
Cañaveral Pérez, who earned a Ph.D. in the theology of human mobility in
Rome and now runs Tapachula’s largest Catholic migrant shelter.
TAPACHULA, MEXICO. Young migrants eating breakfast at a shelter.
Models can’t say much about the cultural strain that might result from a
climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do
say is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as
they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply.
At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will
most likely see its own climate exodus. One in six Mexicans now rely on
farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in
poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability
per capita could decrease by as much as 88 percent in places, and crop
yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does
indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most
likely come from Chiapas.
Yet a net increase in population at the same time — which is what our
models assume — suggests that even as one million or so climate migrants
make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become
trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward in
their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current
stresses far worse.
Already, by late last year, the Mexican government’s ill-planned
policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising
resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively
sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with
nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets,
unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation.
It has angered many Mexican citizens, who have begun to describe the
migrants as economic parasites and question foreign aid aimed at helping
people cope with the drought in places where Jorge A. and Cortez come
from.
“How dare AMLO give $30 million to El Salvador when we have no services
here?” asked Javier Ovilla Estrada, a community-group leader in the
southern border town Ciudad Hidalgo, referring to López Obrador’s
participation in a multibillion-dollar development plan with Guatemala,
Honduras and El Salvador. Ovilla has become a strident defender of a new
Mexico-first movement, organizing thousands to march against
immigrants. Months before the coronavirus spread, we met in the sterile
dining room of a Chinese restaurant that he frequents in Ciudad Hidalgo,
and he echoed the same anti-immigrant sentiments rising in the U.S. and
Europe.
The migrants “don’t love this country,” he said. He points to
anti-immigrant Facebook groups spreading rumors that migrants stole
ballots and rigged the Mexican presidential election, that they murder
with impunity and run brothels. He’s not the first to tell me that the
migrants traffic in disease — that Suchiate will soon be overwhelmed by
Ebola. “They should close the borders once and for all,” he said. If
they don’t, he warns, the country will sink further into lawlessness and
conflict. “We’re going to go out into the streets to defend our homes
and our families.”
SAN MATEO, MEXICO. A joint forces operation including Mexican National Guard soldiers, federal police officers and immigration agents detaining migrants during a raid on a train.
One afternoon last summer, I sat on a black pleather
couch in a borrowed airport-security office at the Tapachula airfield to
talk with Francisco Garduño Yáñez, Mexico’s new commissioner for
immigration. Garduño had abruptly succeeded a man named Tonatiuh Guillén
López, a strong proponent of more open borders, whom I’d been trying to
reach for weeks to ask how Mexico had strayed so far from the mission
he laid out for it.
But in between, Trump had, as another senior government official told
me, “held a gun to Mexico’s head,” demanding a crackdown at the
Guatemalan border under threat of a 25 percent tariff on trade. Such a
tax could break the back of Mexico’s economy overnight, and so López
Obrador’s government immediately agreed to dispatch a new militarized
force to the border. Guillén resigned as a result, four days before I
hoped to meet him.
Garduño, a cheerful man with short graying hair, a broad smile and
a ceaseless handshake, had been on the job for less than 36 hours. He
had flown to Tapachula because another riot had broken out in one of the
city’s smaller fortified detention centers, and a starving Haitian
refugee was filmed by news crews there, begging for help for her and her
young son. I wanted to know how it had come to this — from signing an
international humanitarian migrant bill of rights to a mother lying with
her face pressed to the ground in a detention center begging for food,
in the space of a few months. He demurred, laying blame at the feet of
neoliberal economics, which he said had produced a “poverty factory”
with no regional development policies to address it.
It was the system —
capitalism itself — that had abandoned human beings, not Mexico’s
leaders. “We didn’t anticipate that the globalization of the economy,
the globalization of the law … would have such a devastating effect,”
Garduño told me.
It seemed telling that Garduño’s previous role had been as Mexico’s
commissioner of federal prisons. Was this the start of a new, punitive
Mexico? I asked him. Absolutely not, he replied. But Mexico was now
pursuing a policy of “containment,” he said, rejecting the notion that
his country was obligated to “receive a global migration.”
No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate,
increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to
breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when
still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River
and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming —
that between now and 2050, nearly nine million migrants will head for
Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate
change alone.
Before leaving Mexico last summer, I went to Huixtla, a small town 25
miles west of Tapachula that, because it sat on the Bestia freight rail
line used by migrants, had long been a waypoint on Mexico’s superhighway
for Central Americans on their way north. Joining several local police
officers as they headed out on patrol, I watched as our pickup truck’s
red and blue lights reflected in the barred windows of squat
cinder-block homes. Two officers stood in back, holding tight to the
truck’s roll bars, black combat boots firmly planted in the cargo bed,
as the driver, dodging mangy dogs, navigated the town’s slender
alleyways.
The operations commander, a soft-spoken bureaucratic type named José
Gozalo Rodríguez Méndez, sat in the front seat. I asked him if he
thought Mexico could sustain the number of migrants who might soon come.
He said Mexico would buckle. There is no money from the federal
government, no staffing to address services, no housing, let alone
shelter, no more good will. “We couldn’t do it.”
Rodríguez had already been tested. When the first caravan of thousands
of migrants reached Huixtla in late 2018, throngs of tired, destitute
people — many of them carrying children in their emaciated arms — packed
the central square and spilled down the city’s side streets. Rodríguez
and his wife went through their cupboards, gathering corn, fried beans
and tortillas, and collected clothing outgrown by their children and
hauled all of it to the town center, where church and civic groups had
set up tents and bathrooms.
But as the caravans continued, he said, his good will began to
disintegrate. “It’s like inviting somebody to your place for dinner,” he
said. “You’ll invite them once, even twice. But will you invite them
six times?” When the fourth caravan of migrants approached the city last
March, Rodríguez told me, he stayed home.
In the center of town, the truck lurched to a stop amid a busy market,
where stalls sell vegetables and toys under blue light filtered through
plastic tarps overhead. A short way away, five men sheltered from the
searing heat under the shade of a metal awning on the platform of a
crumbling railway station, never repaired after Hurricane Stan 14 years
earlier. Rodríguez peppered the group — two from Honduras, three from
Guatemala — with questions. Together they said they had suffered the
totality of misfortune that Central America offers: muggings, gang
extortion and environmental disaster. Either they couldn’t grow food or
the drought made it too expensive to buy.
“We can’t stand the hunger,” said one Honduran farmer, Jorge Reyes, his
gaunt face dripping with sweat. At his feet was a gift from a
shopkeeper: a plastic bag filled with a cut of raw meat, pooled in its
own blood, flies circling around it in the heat. Reyes had nowhere to
cook it. “If we are going to die anyway,” he said, “we might as well die
trying to get to the United States.”
EL PASO. People waiting to enter the United States at a Customs and Border Protection point of entry.
Reyes had made his decision. Like Jorge A., Cortez and millions of
others, he was going to the U.S. The next choice — how to respond and
prepare for the migrants — ultimately falls to America’s elected
leaders.
Over the course of 2019, El Paso, Texas, had endured a crush of people
at its border crossings, peaking at more than 4,000 migrants in a single
day, as the same caravans of Central Americans that had worn out their
welcome in Tapachula made their way here. It put El Paso in a delicate
spot, caught between the forces of politically charged anti-immigrant
federal policy and its own deep roots as a diverse, largely Hispanic
city whose identity was virtually inextricable from its close ties to
Mexico. This surge, though, stretched the city’s capacity. When the
migrants arrived, city officials argued over who should pay the tab for
the emergency services, aid and housing, and in the end crossed their
fingers and hoped the city’s active private charities would figure it
out. Church groups rented thousands of hotel rooms across the city,
delivered food, offered counseling and so on.
Conjoined to the Mexican city of Juárez, the El Paso area is the
second-largest binational metroplex in the Western Hemisphere. It sits
smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, a built-up oasis amid a
barren and bleached-bright rocky landscape. Much of its daily work force
commutes across the border, and Spanish is as common as English.
Downtown, new buildings are rising in a weary business district where
boot shops and pawnshops compete amid boarded-up and barred storefronts.
The only barriers between the American streets — home to more than
800,000 people — and their Juárez counterparts are the concrete viaduct
of a mostly dry Rio Grande and a rusted steel border fence.
EL PASO. Last year, the city endured a crush of people at its border crossings — peaking at 4,000 people in a single day.
To some migrants, this place is Eden. But El Paso is also a place with
oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate
crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of
the year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every
two days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car
crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs — already a third of some
residents’ budgets — will get pricier, and warming will drive down
economic output by 8 percent, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable
as the places farther south.
In 2014, El Paso created a new city government position — chief
resilience officer — aimed, in part, at folding climate concerns into
its urban planning. Soon enough, the climate crisis in Guatemala — not
just the one in El Paso — became one of the city’s top concerns. “I
apologize if I’m off topic,” the resilience chief, Nicole Ferrini, told
municipal leaders and other attendees at a water conference in Phoenix
in 2019 as she raised the question of “massive amounts of climate
refugees, and are we prepared as a community, as a society, to deal with
that?”
Ferrini, an El Paso native, did her academic training as an architect.
She worries that El Paso will struggle to adapt if its leadership, and
the nation’s, continue to react to daily or yearly spikes rather than
view the problem as a systematic one, destined to become steadily worse
as the planet warms. She sees her own city as an object lesson in what
U.N. officials and climate-migration scientists have been warning of:
Without a decent plan for housing, feeding and employing a growing
number of climate refugees, cities on the receiving end of migration can
never confidently pilot their own economic future.
For the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has largely choked off legal
crossings into El Paso, but that crisis will eventually fade. And when
it does, El Paso will face the same enduring choice that all wealthier
societies everywhere will eventually face: determining whether it is a
society of walls or — in the vernacular of aid organizations working to
fortify infrastructure and resilience to stem migration — one that
builds wells.
EL PASO. A mother and daughter from Central America, hoping for asylum, turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
Around the world, nations are choosing walls. Even before the pandemic,
Hungary fenced off its boundary with Serbia, part of more than 1,000
kilometers of border walls erected around the European Union states
since 1990. India has built a fence along most of its 2,500-mile border
with Bangladesh, whose people are among the most vulnerable in the world
to sea-level rise.
The United States, of course, has its own wall-building agenda —
literal ones, and the figurative ones that can have a greater effect. On
a walk last August from one of El Paso’s migrant shelters, an
inconspicuous brick home called Casa Vides, the Rev. Peter Hinde told me
that El Paso’s security-oriented economy had created a cultural barrier
that didn’t exist when he moved here 25 years earlier.
Hinde, who is
97, helps run the Carmelite order in Juárez but was traveling to
volunteer at Casa Vides on a near-daily basis. A former Army Air Forces
captain and fighter pilot who grew up in Chicago, Hinde said the United
States is turning its own fears into reality when it comes to
immigration, something he witnesses in a growing distrust of everyone
who crosses the border.
That fear creates other walls. The United States refused to join 164
other countries in signing a global migration treaty in 2018, the first
such agreement to recognize climate as a cause of future displacement.
At the same time, the U.S. is cutting off foreign aid — money for
everything from water infrastructure to greenhouse agriculture — that
has been proved to help starving families like Jorge A.’s in Guatemala
produce food, and ultimately stay in their homes. Even those migrants
who legally make their way into El Paso have been turned back, relegated
to cramped and dangerous shelters in Juárez to wait for the hearings
they are owed under law.
There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to
a changing climate than to migrate. It is the obvious progression the
earliest Homo sapiens pursued out of Africa, and the same one the Mayans
tried 1,200 years ago. As Lorenzo Guadagno at the U.N.’s International
Organization for Migration told me recently, “Mobility is resilience.”
Every policy choice that allows people the flexibility to decide for
themselves where they live helps make them safer.
But it isn’t always so simple, and relocating across borders
doesn’t have to be inevitable. I thought about Jorge A. from Guatemala.
He made it to the United States last spring, climbing the steel border
barrier and dropping his 7-year-old son 20 feet down the other side into
the California desert. (We are abbreviating his last name in this
article because of his undocumented status.) Now they live in Houston,
where until the pandemic, Jorge found steady work in construction,
earning enough to pay his debts and send some money home. But the
separation from his wife and family has proved intolerable; home or
away, he can’t win, and as of early July, he was wondering if he should
go back to Guatemala.
And therein lies the basis for what may be the worst-case scenario: one
in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome
migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated,
closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat
counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping
more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human
life.
In that scenario, the global trend toward building walls could have a
profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death
toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But
in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the
conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will
bring.
JUÁREZ, MEXICO. José Cruz and his daughter Yakelin (center), climate migrants from Honduras, have waited months in a shelter for their asylum request to be processed.
If this
happens, the United States and Europe risk walling themselves in, as
much as walling others out. And so the question then is: What are
policymakers and planners prepared to do about that? America’s
demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a
productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest
in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth
alone doesn’t overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and
exacerbating inequalities.
At the same time, the United States and
other wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by
funding development that modernizes agriculture and water
infrastructure. A U.N. World Food Program effort to help farmers build
irrigated greenhouses in El Salvador, for instance, has drastically
reduced crop losses and improved farmers’ incomes. It can’t reverse
climate change, but it can buy time.
Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the
scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds,
in some circles the topic has become taboo.
This spring, after
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive
study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet’s
population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche
for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study’s authors, told me
that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the
peer-review process and that he felt pushed to “understate” the
implications in order to get the research published. The result:
Migration is only superficially explored in the paper. (A spokeswoman
for the journal declined to comment because the review process is
confidential.)
“There’s flat-out resistance,” Scheffer told me, acknowledging what he
now sees as inevitable, that migration is going to be a part of the
global climate crisis. “We have to face it.”
Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom
line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration
and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up,
poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could
help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take
fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against
migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will
surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater
suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it
— makes a difference.
The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that
with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will
be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of
years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of
its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people
harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that
something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective
shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different
attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat,
beating on those that are trying to climb in.”
ALTA VERAPAZ. An Indigenous agricultural worker, Martin Yat Chen, on farmland that is too dry to plant in anymore.
