Podcast
Questions and Answers
What was the primary reason Jorge A. decided to leave Guatemala?
What was the primary reason Jorge A. decided to leave Guatemala?
- Repeated crop failures due to drought and flooding. (correct)
- Increased gang violence and insecurity in his village.
- Political instability in the region.
- A desire for better economic opportunities in the United States.
What long-term impact is climate change expected to have on rainfall patterns in some parts of Guatemala?
What long-term impact is climate change expected to have on rainfall patterns in some parts of Guatemala?
- Rainfall will remain the same, but become more erratic.
- Rainfall will increase by 60%.
- Rainfall will decrease by 60%. (correct)
- There will be no significant change in rainfall patterns.
According to the study mentioned, what percentage of the Earth's land surface could be covered by extremely hot zones by 2070?
According to the study mentioned, what percentage of the Earth's land surface could be covered by extremely hot zones by 2070?
- One third (33%)
- Nearly 5%
- Nearly a fifth (20%) (correct)
- Less than 1%
What potential benefit does the article suggest migration could bring to the global North?
What potential benefit does the article suggest migration could bring to the global North?
What is one potential consequence of wealthy nations sealing their borders to climate migrants?
What is one potential consequence of wealthy nations sealing their borders to climate migrants?
According to the model discussed in the article, what factor most significantly impacts the amount of climate-driven migration?
According to the model discussed in the article, what factor most significantly impacts the amount of climate-driven migration?
What was the main purpose of the climate-migration model developed by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica?
What was the main purpose of the climate-migration model developed by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica?
What key factor did Oppenheimer and Krueger use to model future migration patterns from Mexico to the United States?
What key factor did Oppenheimer and Krueger use to model future migration patterns from Mexico to the United States?
What is the primary concern regarding the Sahel region of North Africa in relation to climate migration?
What is the primary concern regarding the Sahel region of North Africa in relation to climate migration?
How have climate scientists' estimations of displacement from rising tides changed?
How have climate scientists' estimations of displacement from rising tides changed?
What was the focus of the World Bank's study regarding climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America?
What was the focus of the World Bank's study regarding climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America?
What is 'stepwise migration,' as described in the article?
What is 'stepwise migration,' as described in the article?
What actions did President Andrés Manuel López Obrador initially take regarding Mexico's borders?
What actions did President Andrés Manuel López Obrador initially take regarding Mexico's borders?
What was the effect of Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on trade with Mexico?
What was the effect of Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on trade with Mexico?
What concept did Francisco Garduño Yáñez use to express why Mexico had strayed so far from its mission for more open borders?
What concept did Francisco Garduño Yáñez use to express why Mexico had strayed so far from its mission for more open borders?
What is El Paso's position related to the climate crisis?
What is El Paso's position related to the climate crisis?
What action has the United States refused to take in regards to global migration?
What action has the United States refused to take in regards to global migration?
What did Marten Scheffer acknowledge as he published the explosive study estimating that one-third of the planet's population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization?
What did Marten Scheffer acknowledge as he published the explosive study estimating that one-third of the planet's population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization?
What is the potential impact of closing borders while simultaneously limiting development aid?
What is the potential impact of closing borders while simultaneously limiting development aid?
What is one action that the U.N. World Food Program has taken to help farmers?
What is one action that the U.N. World Food Program has taken to help farmers?
Flashcards
Climate Migrants
Climate Migrants
Migration driven primarily by the effects of climate change, such as drought, floods, and crop failures.
Threat Multiplier
Threat Multiplier
The idea that climate change can intensify existing social, economic, and political issues, such as poverty, violence, and instability.
In-Country Migration
In-Country Migration
Refers to the gradual movement of people from rural areas to urban centers, often driven by the search for better economic opportunities.
Stepwise Migration
Stepwise Migration
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Urban Resilience
Urban Resilience
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Stinting on Development
Stinting on Development
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Migration
Migration
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El Niño
El Niño
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Desertification
Desertification
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Urbanization
Urbanization
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Jornaleros
Jornaleros
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Containment
Containment
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Study Notes
- A large percentage of people have historically lived in areas with specific temperature ranges suitable for food production.
- As the planet warms, these regions are shifting, potentially causing entire nations to lose their agricultural capabilities.
- The lack of ability to produce food, otherwise known as starvation, could force mass migrations.
- In early 2019, Jorge A. decided to leave Guatemala due to increasingly challenging farming conditions.
- Jorge's crops failed because of a five-year drought followed by a devastating flood, leading to financial ruin.
- Faced with starvation, Jorge felt leaving the country was his only option to protect his family.
- Many residents of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, traditionally remained despite other Guatemalans migrating north, but are now starting to leave because of drought, floods, bankruptcy, and starvation.
- In Alta Verapaz, half the children experience chronic hunger, leading to stunted growth and health issues, as families face the same difficult decisions as Jorge.
- The weather anomaly, El Niño, thought to be the source of harsh growing conditions, is predicted to escalate with global warming.
- Projections indicate rainfall could decrease by 60% and water replenishment could drop by 83% in Guatemala.
- By 2070, staple crop yields in Jorge's region may decline by nearly a third.
- Hundreds of millions of people may be displaced as their lands become unsustainable, resulting in the largest global migration in history.
- Jorge and his son packed minimal belongings and left Guatemala, using money from his father's pawned goats to pay for transit.
- A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates the Earth could face a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than in the last 6,000 years.
- By 2070, extremely hot zones could cover a fifth of the Earth's land, potentially displacing one in three people.
- A 2017 Science Advances study suggests that temperatures by 2100 in some regions could make being outside for even a few hours deadly.
- The World Bank reports over 8 million people have moved from Southeast Asia toward the Middle East, Europe, and North America due to unpredictable rainfall and drought.
- Millions of rural people have migrated toward coastal cities in the African Sahel due to drought and crop failures.
- Large-scale migration can benefit both the migrants and their host countries, especially as Northern nations face demographic decline.
- Northern nations have a choice to either accept more migrants from warming countries or seal their borders, risking instability and conflict, according to the United Nations.
- Anti-immigrant sentiment has led to nationalist governments rising to power around the world as refugees migrate into Europe and the United States;
- Alternatively, governments are preparing for significant changes by proactively understanding and planning for future migrations.
- ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine partnered to model migration patterns in Central America using climate and economic data.
- The model projects rising migration regardless of climate change; however, the amount of migration significantly increases as climate changes.
- In extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants will head toward the U.S. border over the next 30 years.
- Climate-driven migrants could make up as much as 5% of the total migrant population.
- With modest climate action, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the U.S. between now and 2050.
- With unabated emissions, that number could rise to over a million people.
- Globalization with open borders could lead to 1.5 million migrants arriving annually from Central America and Mexico by 2050.
- Hardening U.S. borders could slow economic growth in Central America, increase poverty, and trap tens of millions of people.
- The models aim to provide insights into possible futures and highlight the potential human suffering if countries close their borders.
- Alan B. Krueger and Michael Oppenheimer began researching the quantification of climate change's role in displacement in 2007, with Krueger asking Oppenheimer if anyone had ever tried to quantify how and where climate change would cause people to move.
- Oppenheimer and Krueger's 2010 study found that Mexican migration to the U.S. increased during droughts and projected that climate change could drive 6.7 million more people to the U.S. border by 2080.
- The study was one of the first applications of econometric modeling to the climate-migration problem.
- Oppenheimer's approach has since become common, with numerous studies using econometric modeling.
- Climate is often an exacerbating factor in migration, contributing to food and water scarcity, and heat-related issues.
- Climate change has subtle fingerprints almost everywhere, from drought and its affect on pre-war Syria tensions to crop losses and the Arab Spring.
- In North Africa's Sahel, population growth and environmental decline are on a collision course, with a fear that Africa's transition into a post-climate-change civilization "leads to a constant outpouring of people."
- The World Bank projects South Asia will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity, potentially uprooting 17 million to 36 million more people.
- Climate scientists have been underestimating future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with a likely toll of some 150 million globally.
- Climate geographers are building next-generation tools to establish plausible migration scenarios with new data, including a measure of response to the environment and a "gravity" model.
- A 2018 World Bank report determined that 143 million people would be displaced within their own borders in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America due to climate change.
- ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine hired geographer Bryan Jones to add environmental data to its model, making it sensitive to climatic change within Central America and Mexico.
- The model uses existing data sets on political stability, agricultural productivity, food stress, water availability, social connections, and weather to understand human decision-making.
- In all, more than 10 billion data points were input into the model, and relationships were tested to see if the model's projections matched historical precedents.
- The results point to a future where climate change becomes a major source of disruption, driving the displacement of vast populations.
- Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera moved to San Salvador six years ago, after her life in rural El Salvador collapsed, now working six days a week selling pupusas..
- Her story is the classic pattern of in-country migration around the world from an uneducated woman from farm roots who can't find work in the city and falls deeper into poverty.
- San Salvador has become one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and 1 in 6 of El Salvador's citizens have fled for the United States over the course of the last few decades.
- Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador's crop, slashing harvests by 70%, leading to a deterioration of Salvadorans' livelihoods.
- 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.
- Cortez went to San Salvador because there was no work and no water in El Paste.
- As people run short of food and abandon farms, they move toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded.
- The World Bank has raised concerns about the 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 that as many as 1.7 million people may migrate away from the hottest and driest regions, many of them winding up in Mexico City.
- By the middle of the century, the World Bank estimates that 67% of the planet's population will live in urban areas.
- The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that 96% 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.
- A migration model is premised on the notion that in these cities, there are relationships between quality-of-life factors like household income, education levels, and employment rates that can be projected into the future.
- Under every scientific forecast for global climate change, El Salvador gets hotter and drier, and a migration model was in accord that San Salvador will continue to grow as a result, putting still more people in its dense outer rings.
- High emissions, with few global policy changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador to empty out, even as its cities grow.
- If the United States and other wealthy countries change the trajectory of global policy by hardening their borders, Central American and Mexican cities will continue to grow, albeit less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows drastically.
- With hardened borders and lack of development, far more people also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped and more desperate than ever, according to migration models.
- Since 2000, San Salvador's population has ballooned as it has absorbed migrants from the rural areas, even as tens of thousands of people continue to leave the country and migrate north.
- The U.N. estimates that El Salvador will be 86% urban by midcentury, with much of the growth concentrated in the city's slumlike suburbs.
- Cortez had resolved to make the trip to the United States at almost any cost because "The climate has changed, and it has provoked us,".
- Most would-be migrants don't want to move away from home and will make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city, only crossing borders when those places fail them.
- This process of migrating, that researchers call "stepwise migration," is the main process that drives migration.
- Seven miles from the Suchiate River, which marks Guatemala's border with Mexico, sits Siglo XXI, one of Mexico's largest immigration detention centers.
- In early 2019, the 960-bed facility was largely empty, but by March, Mexico had begun to detain migrants after the United States increased pressure, packing almost 2,000 people inside the center.
- On April 25th, 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.
- Mexico has not always welcomed migrants, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was trying to make his country a model for increasingly open borders after he took office in December 2018 when some 420,000 people entered Mexico without documentation.
- The architects of Mexico's policies assumed that its citizens had the patience and the capacity to absorb such an influx of people, but they failed to anticipate how President Donald Trump would hold their economy hostage to press his own anti-immigrant crackdown.
- The town director of public security relayed that armed robberies jumped 45% and murders increased 15%; these were only counted after migrants traveled to this city.
- Tourism and commerce began to suffer in Tapachula in March 2018.
- Chiapas's gross domestic product had a 3% drop as conditions deteriorated.
- Models can't say much about the cultural strain that might result from a climate influx, but that over the next two decades, and if climate emissions continue as they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply, even as Mexico faces climate change and a possible Mexican exodus.
- Models assume that even as 1 million or so climate migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become trapped in transit in southern Mexico.
- The Mexican government's ill-planned policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising resentment and hate months before the coronavirus spread.
- A community-group leader named Javier Ovilla Estrada in the southern border town Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, echoed the same anti-immigrant sentiments rising in the U. S. and Europe.
- Garduño had abruptly succeeded a man named Tonatiuh Guillén López, a strong proponent of more open borders, after Trump held a gun to Mexico's head, demanding a crackdown at the Guatemalan border under threat of a 25% tariff on trade.
- Globalization of the economy has produced a "poverty factory" with no regional development policies to address it, and as such the system, which is capitalism itself, had abandoned human beings, not Mexico's leaders.
- Mexico was now pursuing a policy of "containment" and rejected the notion that his country was obligated to "receive a global migration.".
- Our model suggests that between now and 2050, nearly 9 million migrants will head for Mexico's southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.
- Mexico cannot sustain the number of migrants who might soon come because there is no money from the federal government, no staffing to address services, no housing, let alone shelter, and no more goodwill.
- If we are going to die anyway, we might as well die trying to get to the United States.", speaking with a Honduran Farmer named Jorge Reyes.
- After traveling from the camps in Tapachula, political forces pressured the United States into accepting these migrants after they passed through El Paso, Texas.
- The migrants created a strain on the city's capacity as they arrived because officials argued over who would pay the tab for the emergency services, aid, and housing.
- El Paso is also a place with oppressive heat and very little water, a front line in the climate crisis, and thus the city created a new government position titled chief resilience officer aimed, in part, at folding climate concerns into its urban planning.
- 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.
- Around the world, nations are choosing walls after El Paso had to deal with a flood of migrants, 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
- During a walk away from Casa Vides, Rev. Peter Hinde mentioned that there had been a cultural barrier that never existed when he moved here 25 years earlier, speaking on how fearful the US is with the growing immigration numbers.
- The United States is turning its own fears into reality when it comes to immigration, witnessing a growing distrust of everyone who crosses the border.
- There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to a changing climate than to migrate, speaking with Lorenzo Guagnano at the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration, said "Mobility is resilience.".
- The basis of the worst-case scenario is one with which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome migrants but also fail to help them at home.
- 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.
- 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. This ensures a more stable and peaceful world.
- The window for action is closing and that 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.
- 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.
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