Where will the climate refugees go?

King Tide (Trailer) from Juriaan on Vimeo.

This is not something that we can continue to talk about as happening in the future as if planning for it can be put off. The world has already seen close to half a million people affected by climate change in ways that have made them have to move from their homes and homelands due to sea level rise, drought, and water scarcity which has also effected agriculture. With events becoming more severe and pronouced as the fires In Russia, the flooding in Pakistan and now Australia and severe droughts as we now see in much of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, what does happen when a land is so devastated by continuing climate change that its inhabitants can no longer live there? Where do they go?How does it effect their culture?

This particular video is from a documentary called King Tide and deals with the people of Tuvalu, a small island nation that is already seeing the effects of rising sea levels. In climate conference after climate conference however, the effects of climate change on water have been continually ignored. This even though much of these effects revolve around water and the hydrologic cycle being interfered with by the human actions of fossil fuel use, deforestation, unsustainable agricultural practices (irrigation), dams, water waste, privitization and pollution resulting in sea level rise, glacier melt affecting water scarcity, floods, drought, stronger storms, erratic rainfall, etc.

I don't think it can be stressed enough based on what we are now seeing taking place globally that planning for the future regarding climate refugees is of paramount importance. We can no longer afford to act as though this is going to go away. It isn't. The socio-economic impacts alone of millions of refugees with no place to call home and no where that wants them aside from the inability to provide for them in a world where potable water and available land is shrinking are huge and cannot wait until the floods completely wash out a country or drought dries it into desert. Lives will be lost. This goes beyond politics. This truly is the moral challenge of our generation.

Floods worsen in Australia: