Climate Exodus: How Many People Will Be Displaced?
A special series of newsletters leading up to my 1 May open online presentation
This question reflects one of the great known unknowns of the 21st century: with all species on the move upward in elevation (1m/year) and poleward in direction (1700m/year), it is entirely plausible to predict large-scale human migration that matches those dynamics.
Like the famous quote from Papa Hemingway regarding how bankruptcy tends to happen? (“Gradual, then suddenly”), we should expect this South-to-North migratory wave to continue growing incrementally until any number of tipping points converge in various low-latitude regions (e.g., Latin America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, S/SE Asia). At that point, the floodgates will be breached.
What we can logically project is this:
More than half the world’s population currently resides in my Middle Earth band extending 30 degrees north and south of the equator. Historically, the 27th parallel north was humanity’s civilizational sweet spot (think, Mesopotamia). Now, most nations along that parallel are facing severe water insecurity that grows far worse with each passing year — inexorably depopulating many of them as a result.
That collective Middle Earth population will swell to roughly 5 billion souls come 2050.
Over the next half century — at least, those Middle Earth regions will become increasingly subject to temperature and precipitation ranges long-associated with the Saharan Desert — a profoundly underpopulated region for obvious reasons.
As a lot of these Middle Earthers have recently moved into global middle-class status (i.e., significant-enough amount of household spending on non-basics to qualify as consumers in the eyes of Northern businesses), when climate change threatens their new lives, we can expect profound political anger and even desperation from people who are naturally loath to slip back into poverty. They will demand their governments do something/anything about it — a revolutionary situation that renders societies vulnerable to strongman rule (globally to the advantage of the present regimes in Russia, China, and Iran).
Climate change will force large numbers of people off land rendered too damaged, too deprived, or too expensive to cultivate. In developing economies, anywhere from 50-75% of the population work the land.
Those displaced rural folk will — at first — head to the closest cities within their nations, further stressing urban economics and politics and creating — per Karl Marx — great potential for revolutionary developments.
History indicates that most of these internally displaced will be absorbed into informal (black market) economic activities: imagine the worst sort of gig economy in which you as a worker/consumer/citizen are left completely vulnerable to both corporations and criminal networks that prey on you — like how most undocumented workers are presently exploited in the US.
As these internally displaced find their lot to be unimproved or even worsened — safety-wise — by their move into cities, history says a significant portion of them will, under the right duress, abandon their failed state for the next one over. This goes without saying in those cases when the states veer either hard Right or hard Left, further worsening the situation and possibly triggering civil strife/wars (think of the flow of people out of Venezuela in recent years).
That desperate step may be repeated several times until these displaced people decide that their best hope is to head into the North for real (e.g., North America, Europe, Russia). The perfect example here is the now flood-like flow from South America through Panama’s Darien Gap corridor with Colombia.
The North, relatively underpopulated (by density) relative to the South, and facing rapid demographic aging and even collapse in certain cases, will be ironically blessed by an expansion of habitable/arable lands that will be roughly proportional to the similar loss of habitable/arable lands across Middle Earth. This development will prove to be a natural attractor to these displaced populations, as it has throughout human history.
As fragile Middle Earth nation-states suffer such depopulation pressures, they will become less able to feed themselves as farms are abandoned and cities swell with the impoverished.
These states will also become targets of sanctions and other forms of international vilification by Northern states frantic to stop the northward flow of “invading” climate migrants “poisoning the blood” of the native population
Moreover, when those states become identifiably “failed,” they become popular targets for military interventions by Northern powers looking to “stem this threat at the source” after their various “walls” fall to stop them. These interventions will oftentimes be cynically packaged as anti-drug operations, because, as American history has amply displayed, anti-immigrant fervor is often repackaged in this manner to conceal the underlying racism.
All such antagonistic Northern responses will only increase local instability across these Middle Earth nations, exacerbating debilitating depopulation flows that only further agitate Northern powers in a vicious cycle.
All of this will become incredibly corrupting for the involved Northern states, leading to their own devolution toward strongman rule, xenophobia, and a profound militarization of borders.
So, in the end, we’re back to the question of how many will be displaced by climate change.
Back of the envelope says:
5B at risk
Of that, two-thirds most at risk because they’re coming off the land (say, 3B of the total 5B)
Let’s say one billion crowd into those nations’ cities (2B left)
Let’s say one billion move to the next nation over (1B left)
So let’s then say that it’s not implausible to project 1B head north.
A relevant quote from Al Gore on the subject:
“If we don’t take action, there could be as many as one billion climate refugees crossing international borders in the next several decades,” he said. “Well, a few million has contributed to this wave of populist authoritarianism and dictatorships and so forth. What would one billion do? We can’t do this. We could lose our capacity for self-governance.”
As I have said throughout this series: we know what is coming, and what is coming is big — more than big enough to warrant a national grand strategy designed to better shape and/or deflect certain very destabilizing and ruinous outcomes for the US and our hemisphere.
If all that makes sense to you and you’d like to explore this further, then please register for Throughline Inc.’s 1 May open online roundtable on the subject of my book (America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse) and its vision for a future worth creating.
Go here to register for the 1 May presentation.
Sign up to take the America’s New Map MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at edX
