America's first "climate refugees" head for higher ground

2016-05-03T13:33:00-04:00

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems. One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change.

"The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees."

Precisely determining who qualifies as a "climate refugee" is a notoriously difficult challenge. While the UN Refugee Agency estimates 22 million people were displaced by "disasters brought on by natural hazard events," evidence linking, for example, the civil war raging in Syria and Iraq with a prolonged drought would up that number.

In short, it's difficult to clearly isolate environmental factors, which tend to happen on large temporal and geographic scales, from sociopolitical causes of mass displacement, which are often more visible.

In any case, while a sizable chunk of the American government still doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change, its citizens are already being displaced because of its effects....

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America's first "climate refugees" head for higher ground