Published: June 28,2017
An estimated 2 billion people be displaced from their homes by 2100 due to climate-driven rising seas, a new study says.
Roughly one-fifth of the world's population may become climate change refugees, according to Cornell University. The majority of those will be people who live on coastlines around the world, including about 2 million in Florida alone.
“We’re going to have more people on less land and sooner that we think,” lead author Charles Geisler, professor emeritus of development sociology at Cornell, said in a press release. “The future rise in global mean sea level probably won’t be gradual. Yet few policymakers are taking stock of the significant barriers to entry that coastal climate refugees, like other refugees, will encounter when they migrate to higher ground.”
The researchers looked at a United Nations report that estimates the world's population will be 9 billion by 2050 and 11 billion by 2100.
The Cornell report noted that by 2060, about 1.4 billion people will need to relocate to escape rising seas levels.
“The colliding forces of human fertility, submerging coastal zones, residential retreat, and impediments to inland resettlement is a huge problem. We offer preliminary estimates of the lands unlikely to support new waves of climate refugees due to the residues of war, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary productivity, desertification, urban sprawl, land concentration, ‘paving the planet’ with roads and greenhouse gas storage zones offsetting permafrost melt,” Geisler said.
A family on a raft approaches a boat at flood affected area in Jamalpur.(Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Other concerns noted in the paper are intensifying storm surges that will drive sea water further inland, ruining fertile land needed to feed billions.
The paper will be published in the July issue of the journal Land Use Policy and offers solutions and proactive adaptations in places like Florida, which has the second-largest coastline in the U.S. Geisler noted that state and local officials already have plans in place for a “coastal exodus.”
(MORE: U.S. Vulnerable to Worst of Extreme Sea Rise)
The study comes on the heels of another study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with findings compiled by University of Siegen (Germany) researcher Sönke Dangendorf, as well as scientists from Spain, France, Norway and the Netherlands. In the study, the researchers' analysis suggests the long-warned acceleration in sea level rise is no longer imminent – it's already underway.
According to the study, sea levels rose at about 1.1 millimeters annually, or 0.43 inches per decade, before 1990, but from 1993 to 2012, seas rose at a much higher annual rate: 3.1 millimeters every year, or 1.22 inches per decade. It may seem like a small rise, but it's alarming to scientists that the rate has tripled in a relatively short period of time.
Just recently President Donald Trump told the mayor of Tangier Island, Virginia, not to worry about rising seas despite evidence that the island that is home to 700 is sinking. After appearing on CNN about the island's plight, Mayor James "Ooker" Eskridge received a phone call from the president, who reassured the mayor that the island "has been here for hundreds of years, and will be here for hundreds more."
MORE: King Tides
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