TITLE: Extreme weather is turning many into climate migrants: How does it feel to face leaving home?
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/12/19/extreme-weather-is-turning-many-into-climate-migrants-how-does-it-feel-to-face-leaving-hom
EXCERPT: Returning to Tuvalu between her studies in New Zealand “keeps me grounded” says Kalita Titi Homasi, “it refreshes my mind, refills my energy.”
There’s no place like home, but Titi’s Pacific island country is at risk of becoming uninhabitable by 2050 as sea levels rise. At 23-years-old, she has felt temperatures and droughts increase, seen beaches retreat and fishers forced further out - beyond the safe barrier of the reef - as coral bleaching makes fish scarcer.
We’re over 8,000 miles from her home now, speaking on the sidelines of the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai. The conference failed to deliver the phaseout of fossil fuels which would have given low-lying island nations like Tuvalu a chance to retain and reclaim more land.
While letting polluters slip through its fingers with one hand, COP did create a new loss and damage fund with the other. This extends the scope of climate finance to promote “equitable, safe and dignified human mobility in the form of displacement, relocation and migration…”
Leaders of climate vulnerable countries have been wasting no time in making their contingency plans. For two very recent examples: the Marshall Islands has just completed a five-year project - remarkable in the breadth of its community involvement - to create a national adaptation or “survival plan”.
And Tuvalu has signed a deal with Australia to enable its people to move there. “I like to think of it as a bridge, to connect the opportunities that we Tuvaluans aren’t able to get,” says Titi, a biomedical science student at Victoria University of Wellington. “Australia is a bridge and even if people choose to go, I feel like they will always have the need to return.”
The government won’t make people walk across this bridge - and couldn’t even if it tried. “If you ask anyone on the island, [the prospect of moving is] hard for them to understand. It’s hard for them to absorb, and it’s hard for you to explain to them. It’s just a whole different level of stubbornness,” she says, “the attachment is real.”
The Falepili Union - named after the Tuvaluan term for neighbours who choose to live in close houses - establishes a special visa arrangement for Tuvaluans to live, work and study in Australia. It also earmarks another AUD 16.9 million from Australia for its much smaller neighbour’s coastal adaptation efforts.
The deal has been criticised by some for the security advantages that Australia gets in return. Simon Kofe - Tuvalu’s former foreign minister whose video speech knee-deep in the sea caught the world’s attention in 2021 - has said it encroaches on Tuvalu's sovereignty and needs to be renegotiated.
“No agreement is perfect,” Kamal Amakrane, head of the UN-partnered Global Centre for Climate Mobility (GCCM) tells Euronews Green, “but it sets us on the right trajectory for where we should be.”
“There is no word of migration,” he explains. “There is no word of relocation. And there is no word of protection or asylum. It’s [about] climate mobility pathways, in dignity and sovereignty.”
TITLE: This Country Is Responsible For Less Than 1% Of Global Emissions. Climate Change Is Tearing It Apart Anyway.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mongolia-climate-economy-change-nomads_n_65832f9de4b04da98425795f
EXCERPT: Mongolia, a nation where a population the size of Houston dwells on land more than double the size of Texas, is undergoing a mass internal migration.
Debt-strapped nomads unable to make it on the steppe anymore cart their belongings to the open ridges on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, set up their homes, and become part of densely populated yurt favelas called “ger districts” that overlook the city. Without connections to infrastructure or electrical lines, the more than 850,000 residents now living in these unplanned neighborhoods ringing the capital rely on pit latrines that flood homes with raw sewage and burning coal to stay warm and cook food.
The cultural tragedy of Mongols abandoning an ancient way of life en masse comes as the country seems destined by geographical fate for a growing role in global affairs. A democracy rich in minerals needed for new energy technologies, Mongolia is nevertheless landlocked between the world’s two great authoritarian superpowers, dependent on Russia for energy, China for buyers of its copper and coal, and either one for access to anything too big to be flown into the country.
Mongolia has in recent months made deals with Western countries to mine the lithium and rare earths needed for electric cars, part of Ulaanbaatar’s “third neighbor” policy to cultivate friendships beyond its borders. In April, the U.S. government outlined a new five-year plan for giving Mongolia more development aid. In August, President Joe Biden announced a “strategic partnership” between the U.S. and Mongolia to work together on everything from mining to the military, part of a broader effort to strengthen America’s ties to countries on China’s borders. Vice President Kamala Harris brokered a new air travel deal with the Mongolian government, establishing the first direct flights between Ulaanbaatar and the U.S. starting next year. The route could lay the groundwork for shipping cargo by air to circumvent the two countries that control all land routes into Mongolia. The Kremlin and Beijing are taking notice and dangling their own offers.
“This is going to be one of the most important elections in our history,” said Bayan-Altai Luvsandorj, the head of the Mongolia branch of the British charity Save the Children.
While rarely ranked alongside South Korea, Taiwan and other Asian democracies with close ties to the U.S., Mongolia has nevertheless established what the watchdog group Freedom House considers one of the freest and most open electoral systems on the continent. With such a tiny population and vast potential for mining fortunes, Mongolia has long been discussed as a future Qatar of minerals, one of the richest per capita nations in the world.
Instead, however, the mining money has enriched an elite few whose ties to government officials secured contracts — or has gone missing from government coffers altogether. Corruption scandals roiled the nation just before the COVID-19 pandemic. As Mongolian voters prepare to go to the polls in June for the next national election, growing majorities tell pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Now, with extreme weather tearing apart families and the country’s meager internal infrastructure, Mongolia is struggling to get “enough interest” from the U.S. and other rich nations whose emissions are causing global warming, said Tserendulam Shagdarsuren, the director general of climate change and policy planning at the national Ministry of Environment.
“It is the duty of those countries” to help places like Mongolia, whose emissions make up a fraction of 1% of the worldwide total, deal with the cascading effects of increasingly extreme weather, she added.
In essence, Tserendulam said, leaning forward in her chair in the conference room of a hotel near the parliament building one evening in late October, Americans should care more about what’s happening here.
“Mongolia is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change,” she said.
TITLE: About 3 million Americans are already "climate migrants," analysis finds. Here's where they left.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-america-3-million-migrants-first-street-nature/
EXCERPT: Climate change is already forcing millions of people around the world to leave their homes to seek refuge from the rising seas, devastating droughts and the other effects of global warming. But that migration is also happening within the U.S. as extreme weather makes parts of the country virtually inhospitable, according to a new analysis.
About 3.2 million Americans have moved due to the mounting risk of flooding, the First Street Foundation said in a report that focuses on so-called "climate abandonment areas," or locations where the local population fell between 2000 and 2020 because of risks linked to climate change.
Many of those areas are in parts of the country that also have seen a surge of migration during the past two decades, including Sun Belt states such as Florida and Texas. Such communities risk an economic downward spiral as population loss causes a decline in property values and local services, the group found.
"There appears to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood level population change," Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the First Street Foundation, said in a statement.
He added, "The downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition, and commercial viability both positively and negatively."
Climate abandonment areas exist across the U.S., even in some of the nation's fastest-growing metro areas, according to the study, which was published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications journal.
About 513 counties saw their populations grow at a faster-than-average pace during the last two decades, yet they also included neighborhoods that lost population in areas of high flooding risk, the analysis found.
Most of those areas are concentrated in three regions:
· Gulf Coast of Texas
· Mid-Atlantic region between Washington, D.C., and New Jersey
· Most of coastal Florida
The most affected municipality is Bexar County in Texas, which includes San Antonio. Between 2000 and 2020, the county added more than 644,000 new residents, yet still lost population in about 17% of its Census blocks, according to First Street. (In urban areas, Census blocks are smaller areas that resemble city blocks, although in rural areas they can be quite large and be defined by natural features like rivers.)
Other counties with the largest share of population migration due to flooding risk include Will County, Illinois, and El Paso County in Texas, the study found.
The analysis also examines which regions of the U.S. could face climate migration in the coming decades, and, perhaps surprisingly, Midwestern states including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio face some of the highest risks, the study found.
That may seem counterintuitive, Porter noted in an email to CBS MoneyWatch. But the reason is due to the forecast that coastal areas will likely remain appealing, despite climate risk, to people searching for better jobs.
"In many coastal cities, we see that the draw, or "pull," of the amenities and economic opportunity in the region is stronger than the "push" from flood risks, he noted. But "downward migration" is likely to occur in the Midwest and Northeast because these regions don't have the same attraction for people who are relocating, he noted.
Extreme weather in the form of increased flooding and massive wildfires is particularly affecting people's homes. Across the U.S., nearly 36 million properties — one-quarter of all U.S. real estate — face rising insurance prices and reduced coverage due to high climate risks, First Street found in an earlier analysis this year.