The Century Of Climate Migration Why We Must Plan For The Great Reversal Immigration

The world is already seeing twice as many days where temperatures exceed 50 degrees Celsius than 30 years ago – this level of heat is deadly for humans and also extremely problematic for buildings, roads and power stations. Makes an area unlivable. This explosive planetary drama demands a dynamic human response. We need to help people move from risk and poverty to safety and comfort – to build a more resilient global society for the benefit of all. Large populations will need to migrate, and not just to the nearest city, but across continents. Those living in regions with more tolerable conditions, especially nations in northern latitudes, will need to accommodate millions of migrants while they themselves adapt to the demands of the climate crisis. We will need to create entirely new cities near the planet’s coldest poles, on land that is rapidly becoming free of ice. Parts of Siberia, for example, already have temperatures of 30C for months at a time. Get the Guardian’s award-winning in-depth reads sent straight to you every Saturday morning Arctic forests are burning, with large flames engulfing Siberia, Greenland and Alaska. Even in January, peat fires were burning in the Siberian cryosphere, despite temperatures below -50 C. These zombies ignite year-round in peat underground, in and around the Arctic Circle, only to erupt in massive fires raging in the boreal forests of Siberia, Greenland, Alaska and Canada. In 2019, colossal wildfires destroyed more than 4 million hectares of Siberian taiga forest, burning for more than three months and producing a cloud of soot and ash as large as the countries that make up the entire European Union. Models predict that fires in boreal forests and Arctic tundra will increase up to fourfold by 2100. Wherever you live now, immigration will affect you and your children’s lives. It is predictable that Bangladesh, a country where a third of the population lives along a sunken, low-lying coast, is becoming uninhabitable. (More than 13 million Bangladeshis – nearly 10% of the population – are expected to have fled the country by 2050.) But in the coming decades, rich nations will also be hit hard. This upheaval occurs not only at a time of unprecedented climate change but also at a time of human demographic change. The world’s population will continue to grow in the coming decades, perhaps reaching 10 billion in the 2060s. Most of this increase will be in the tropical regions most affected by climate catastrophe, causing people there to flee northwards . The global north faces the opposite problem – a “very heavy” demographic crisis, in which a large aging population is supported by a very small labor force. North America and Europe have 300 million people over the traditional retirement age (65+), and by 2050, the old-age economic dependency ratio is projected to be 43 older people per 100 workers aged 20–64. Cities from Munich to Buffalo will begin competing with each other to attract immigrants. An aerial view of the village of Fairbourne in Gwynedd, north Wales, which is expected to be abandoned by 2045. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP The coming migration will include the world’s poorest fleeing deadly heat waves and failed crops. It will also include the educated, the middle class, the people who can no longer live where they planned because it is impossible to get a mortgage or property insurance. because employment has moved elsewhere. The climate crisis has already uprooted millions in the US – in 2018, 1.2 million were displaced by extreme conditions, fires, storms and floods. by 2020, the annual toll had risen to 1.7 million people. The US now averages a $1 billion disaster every 18 days. More than half of the western US is facing extreme drought conditions, and farmers in Oregon’s Klamath Basin are talking about the illegal use of force to open the floodgates for irrigation. At the other extreme, deadly flooding has stranded thousands of people from Death Valley to Kentucky. By 2050, half a million existing U.S. homes will be on land that floods at least once a year, according to data from Climate Central, a collaboration of scientists and journalists. Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles has already been allocated $48 million in federal tax dollars to relocate the entire community due to coastal erosion and sea level rise. In Britain, the Welsh villagers of Fairbourne have been told their homes will have to be abandoned at sea as the entire village is set to be ‘decommissioned’ in 2045. Larger coastal towns are also at risk. Consider that the Welsh capital, Cardiff, is predicted to be two-thirds underwater by 2050. The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that there could be as many as 1.5 billion environmental migrants in the next 30 years. After 2050, this number is expected to soar as the world warms further and global population increases to its projected peak in the mid-2060s. The question for humanity becomes: what does a sustainable world look like? We will need to develop an entirely new way of feeding, feeding and sustaining our lifestyles while reducing atmospheric carbon levels. We will need to live in denser concentrations in fewer cities, while reducing the associated risks of overcrowding, such as power outages, sanitation problems, overheating, pollution and infectious diseases. At least as difficult, however, will be the task of overcoming the idea that we belong to a particular land and that it belongs to us. We will need to assimilate into global diverse societies, living in new, polar cities. We will need to be ready to move again when needed. With each degree of warming, about 1 billion people will be pushed out of the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. We are running out of time to manage the coming turmoil before it becomes overwhelming and deadly. Immigration is not the problem. is the solution. How we manage this global crisis, and how humanely we treat each other as we migrate, will be key to whether this century of turmoil unfolds smoothly or with violent conflict and needless death. Properly managed, this upheaval could lead to a new global commonwealth of humanity. Immigration is our way out of this crisis. Migration, whether from disaster to safety or to a new land of opportunity, is deeply intertwined with cooperation – it is only through our extended partnerships that we can migrate, and it is our migrations that have forged today’s global society. Immigration made us. The anomaly is our national identities and our borders. The idea of keeping foreigners out using borders is relatively recent. States were much more concerned with preventing people from leaving than preventing them from arriving. They needed their work and their taxes. Some may think that flags, anthems and an army to protect your territory are necessary to develop a sense of nationhood. But in reality, the credit must go to a successful bureaucracy. It required greater government intervention in people’s lives and the creation of a broad systemic bureaucracy to operate a complex industrial society and these also forged national identity in its citizens. For example, Prussia began paying unemployment benefits in the 1880s, which were initially issued in a worker’s home village, where the people and their circumstances were known. But it was also paid to people where they immigrated for work, which meant a new layer of bureaucracy to establish who was Prussian and therefore entitled to benefits. This resulted in citizenship documents and controlled borders. As governments exercised more control, people received more government benefits from their taxes and more rights, such as voting, which created a sense of ownership in the state. It became their nation. Nation-states are an artificial social structure based on the mythology that the world is made up of distinct, homogeneous groups that occupy separate parts of the planet and claim the primary allegiance of most people. The reality is much more confusing. Most people speak the languages of many groups, and ethnic and cultural pluralism is the norm. The idea that an individual’s identity and well-being is primarily tied to that of an invented ethnic group is far-fetched, even if it is assumed by many governments. Political scientist Benedict Anderson famously described nation-states as “imagined communities.” An Afghan family moving from a drought-stricken area in the country’s Badghis province in 2021. Photo: Hoshang Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images It is not surprising that the nation-state model so often fails – there have been around 200 civil wars since 1960. However, there are many examples of nation-states that work well despite being made up of different groups, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Tanzania, or nations created by global migrants such as Australia, Canada and the USA. To some extent, all nation-states have been formed from a mixture of groups. When nation-states falter or fail, the problem is not diversity itself, but sufficient formal inclusion – equality in the eyes of the state, regardless of what other groups a person belongs to. An insecure government allied with a particular group, which it favors over others, causes resentment and turns one group against others – this results in people retreating into alliances of trust based rather on kinship. A democracy mandated by formal participation by its people is generally…

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