Conflict

While some nations commit to a lot of talking – but very little action – to reduce their carbon emissions, and others try – and fail – to adapt their most at-risk cities to hotter, drier conditions, there is another looming specter of disaster no one wants to talk about: the migration of billions of climate refugees. 

For huge swathes of the most densely populated parts of the world, local conditions are already becoming too extreme for people to live in, and there is no way to adapt to those conditions. In fact, we don’t even know the full extent of those conditions, or if there will be any leveling off of the warming before humans go extinct… The long-term outlook is quite bleak, but even in the short term, people will have to move away from the worst areas in order to survive.

Given the extent of the acceleration we see with climate change, over the next few years we can expect things to get much worse than they are now. Hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are going to make many currently highly populated places lethal to live in. Seeking to escape the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge numbers of people will need to seek new homes.