Where the Rubber Meets the Road - Climate Migration - Central America

Imagine Central America empty. Not exactly empty but heavily depopulated. Think of it as climate change for the Americas.

It's been coming for a while, several years in fact. A variety of plagues from gang violence to devastating severe weather events and food shortages has resulted in Central Americans in their hundreds trying to find refuge in the United States.

Heat waves, droughts, crop failures and worse have left Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua particularly hard hit. Governments in those countries have urged their people to fight famine by eating iguanas, creatures that are sometimes the family pet. That was four years ago. Recent reports indicate even the iguana are now depleted.

What to do, what to do? Central America is one region expected to be among the first to be hit by "climate departure."

2020 - 2023 that's the predicted arrival date of what's being called "climate departure." Think of it as the abrupt transition from "old climate" - the climate you've known all your life - into a "new climate." One of the hallmarks of this new climate is that every year of the new climate will be hotter than the hottest year ever experienced in the old climate. There won't be any cool years, only very hot years.

Climate departure is supposed to set in first in areas such as the Caribbean, Central America and in equatorial regions elsewhere. Insufferable heat will be one problem but heat brings any number of knock-on effects - severe weather events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration; disease and pest problems; disruption of freshwater resources, on and on and on. If you haven't been following conditions across Central America you should know that they're already on the ropes, have been for years. Here, here, and here.

Recently The Guardian reported that environmental degradation is pushing Central American migrants to Donald Trump's border.

The average temperature in Central America has increased by 0.5C since 1950; it is projected to rise another 1-2 degrees before 2050. This has a dramatic impact on weather patterns, on rainfall, on soil quality, on crops’ susceptibility to disease, and thus on farmers and local economies. Meanwhile, incidences of storms, floods and droughts on are the rise in the region. In coming years, according to the US Agency for International Development, countries in the northern triangle will see decreased rainfall and prolonged drought, writ large. In Honduras, rainfall will be sparse in areas where it is needed, yet in other areas, floods will increase by 60%. In Guatemala, the arid regions will creep further and further into current agricultural areas, leaving farmers out to dry. And El Salvador is projected to lose 10-28% of its coastline before the end of the century. How will all those people survive, and where will they go?

...Violence and environmental degradation are inextricably linked, and both lead to mass migration. An unstable planet and ecosystem lends itself to an unstable society, to divisions, to economic insecurity, to human brutality. When someone’s home becomes less and less livable, they move elsewhere. Wouldn’t each and every one of us do the same? 

This week, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer published a series of pieces about the impacts of climate change in the Guatemalan highlands, where farmers are struggling to grow crops that they have been farming there for centuries. “In most of the western highlands,” Blitzer wrote, “the question is no longer whether someone will emigrate but when.” A few years ago, I reported from Guatemala’s dry corridor, several hours away from where Blitzer was reporting, where persistent drought had decimated the region’s agriculture, and particularly the coffee crop, on which roughly 90% of local farmers relied. It was a wildly different landscape from the one Blitzer described, but it faced the same problem: if you live in an agricultural zone, come from a long line of farmers and can’t reliably harvest your crops any more, what else is there to do but leave? 

Camilo Mora, who heads the climate science team at the University of Hawaii that formulated the "climate departure" theory, understands from first-hand experience the link between hunger and violence. Born in Columbia he lived through it.

In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world.And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

Donald Trump, as is his bent, is determined to worsen the plight of these climate migrants and those who haven't yet fled their homelands. His knee-jerk response to the flood of asylum seekers at the US border is to cut humanitarian aid to the countries these refugees were compelled, for the sake of survival, to flee. What do we expect them to do, stay at home and watch their kids die? Who would do that? Would you? I wouldn't.

What makes this all the more outrageous is the behaviour of the petro-states to the catastrophe that greenhouse gases are inflicting on these "little brown people" who, to us, don't matter.  Their lives are already precarious, even hellish, but we, in pursuit of ever more carbon fuel revenue can and will make it fiendishly worse.   Fiendish - that's a fitting appellation for Rachel and Jason; Ford, Moe and Horgan, and the leaders of all three major federal parties.

This migration could reach a breaking point by the early to mid-2020s as climate departure hits the stay-behind Hondurans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Salvadoreans.

UPDATE: Canada closes door on asylum seekers.

It those Central Americans are looking for asylum in Canada, they had better invest in airline tickets. The federal government is changing Canadian asylum law to disqualify migrants who have already applied for asylum in another country. If you somehow make it into the States and claim asylum, you won't be able to travel to Canada for a better shot at being allowed to stay.

"There Was No Rain"

Climate change refugees are on the march and they're coming not just from Africa or the Middle East or some low-lying atoll in the South Pacific, they're migrating poleward in the Americas too.

Todd Miller went to southern Mexico to interview climate migrants. Where are they from? Where are they headed? Given the dangers, why?



When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the Beast”), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north toward the United States.

...

 When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been neither crops, nor a harvest, nor food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’s “dry corridor” planted their seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.

For Central America, this was not an anomaly. Not only had the region been experiencing increasing mid-summer droughts, but also, as the best climate forecasting models predict, a “much greater occurrence of very dry seasons” lies in its future. Central America is, in fact, “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, as University of Arizona hydrology and atmospheric sciences professor Chris Castro told me. And on that isthmus, the scrambling of the seasons, an increasingly deadly combination of drenching hurricanes and parching droughts, will hit people already living in the most precarious economic and political situations. Across Honduras, for example, more than76% of the population lives in conditions of acute poverty. The coming climate breakdowns will only worsen that or will, as Castro put it, be part of a global situation in which “the wet gets wetter, the dry gets drier, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Everything gets more extreme.”

...

“Although the exact number of people that will be on the move by mid-century is uncertain,” wrote the authors of the report In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, “the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before.” And here’s the sad reality of our moment: for such developments, the world is remarkably unprepared. There isn’t even a legal framework for dealing with climate refugees, either in international law or the laws of specific countries. The only possible exception: New Zealand’s “special refugee visas” for small numbers of Pacific Islanders displaced by rising seas.

The only real preparations for such a world are grim ones: walls and the surveillance technology that goes with them. Most climate-displaced people travelling internationally without authorization will sooner or later run up against those walls and the armed border guards meant to turn them back. And if the United States or the European Union is their destination, any possible doors such migrants might enter will be slammed shut by countries that, historically, are the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluters and so most implicated in climate change. (Between 1850 and 2011, the United States was responsible for 27% of the world’s emissions and the countries of the European Union, 25%.)

...

I was just east of Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora, a mere 25 feet from the U.S.-Mexican border. I could clearly see the barrier there and a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a green-striped truck looking back at me from the other side of the divide. Perhaps a quarter mile from where I stood, I could also spot an Integrated Fixed Tower, one of 52 new high-tech surveillance platforms built in the last two years in southern Arizona by the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Since that tower’s cameras are capable of spotting objects and people seven miles away, I had little doubt that agents in a nearby command and control center were watching me as well. There, they would also have had access to the video feeds from Predator B drones, once used on the battlefields of the Greater Middle East, but now flying surveillance missions in the skies above the border. There, too, the beeping alarms of thousands of motion sensors implanted throughout the U.S. border zone would ring if you dared cross the international divide.

Only 15 years ago, very little of this existed. Now, the whole region -- and most of this preceded Donald Trump’s election victory -- has become a de facto war zone. Climate refugees, having made their way through the checkpoints and perils of Mexico, will now enter a land where people without papers are tracked in complex, high-tech electronic ways, hunted, arrested, incarcerated, and expelled, sometimes with unfathomable cruelty. To a border agent, the circumstances behind the flight of those three Honduran farmers would not matter. Only one thing would -- not how or why you had come, but if you were in the United States without the proper documentation.

Climate change, increased global migration, and expanding border enforcement are three linked phenomena guaranteed to come to an explosive head in this century. In the United States, the annual budgets for border and immigration policing regimes have already skyrocketed from about $1.5 billion in the early 1990s to $20 billion in 2017, a number that represents the combined budgets of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During that period, the number of Border Patrol agents quintupled, 700 miles of walls and barriers were constructed (long before Donald Trump began talking about his “big, fat, beautiful wall”), and billions of dollars of technology were deployed in the border region.

Such massive border fortification isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. In 1988, when the Berlin Wall fell, there were 15 border walls in the world. Now, according to border scholar Elisabeth Vallet, there are 70. These walls generally have risen between the richer countries and the poorer ones, between those that have the heavier carbon footprints and those plunged into Parenti’s “catastrophic convergence” of political, economic, and ecological crises. This is true whether you’re talking about the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia.

As Paul Currion points out, even some countries that are only comparatively wealthy are building such “walls,” often under pressure and with considerable financial help. Take Turkey. Its new “smart border” with drought-stricken and conflict-embroiled Syria is one of many examples globally. It now has a new tower every 1,000 feet, a three-language alarm system, and “automated firing zones” supported by hovering zeppelin drones. “It appears that we’ve entered a new arms race,” writes Currion, “one appropriate for an age of asymmetric warfare, with border walls replacing ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles].”

India is typical in constructing a steel wall along its lengthy border with Bangladesh, a country expected to have millions of displaced people in the decades to come, thanks to sea level rise and storm surges. In these years, with so many people on the move from the embattled Greater Middle East and Africa, the countries of the European Union have also been doubling down on border protection, with enforcement budgets soaring to 50 times what they were in 2005.

The trends are already clear: the world will be increasingly carved up into highly monitored border surveillance zones. Market projections show that global border and homeland security industries are already booming across the planet. The broader global security market is poised to nearly double between 2011 and 2022 (from $305 billion to $546 billion). And, not so surprisingly, a market geared to climate-related catastrophes is already on the verge of surpassing $150 billion.

This is the world that Gwynne Dyer described a decade ago in his book, "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival As the World Overheats." In it, the author describes how the Pentagon plans to militarize America's coasts and land borders (to the south anyway). He also notes that American military planners are looking at ideas such as robotic, free fire killing zones where, out of sight and out of mind, would be migrants will be slaughtered.

It's fair to say that many Americans, perhaps most, are already conditioned, pre-disposed to see the brown peoples to their south as a peril. Trump tells them these illegals are rapists and worse. The time-honoured steps to dehumanize a targeted group are well underway and they're finding a receptive audience.

Also bear in mind what is happening in American society. The nation is being fractured, left (or what passes for left down there) and right. Some claim the American people haven't been so deeply divided since the Civil War. Social cohesion is being undermined and, to some extent, deliberately. The US has the highest rates of inequality - of wealth, income and opportunity - among the developed nations. There is a gaping divide between the plutocracy on one side and the precariat on the other. Some see in this the emergence of a true aristocracy and the evolution of a state of neo-feudalism. White supremacists and fascists now march freely through America's streets. These shifts do not a welcoming society engender.

Another powerful factor that will come into play will be the climate change plight that will be experienced by the American people across the southern states. Climatically everything is worsening. Severe storm events, hurricanes and tornadoes of worsening intensity. Severe weather events, floods and droughts, of increasing frequency, duration and intensity. The depletion of once abundant groundwater resources. Worsening heat events and fires. Sea level rise, storm surges and saltwater inundation. America is facing the real prospect of dealing with an internally displaced population, IDPs. In a country with America's standard of living that can be a hugely costly burden on the state, especially one that is now in the process of being defunded through tax "reform" and other bleed off mechanisms. If the society has to struggle to resettle its own IDPs, how likely is it to be welcoming to climate migrants from other lands?

New Zealand - Australia's Climate Change Lifeboat

Australia is somewhat ahead of the global average for climate change temperature rise.  The country just passed the 1C mark.   There's obviously plenty more heat on the way in the future, just as there is everywhere else from existing atmospheric greenhouse gases, not even counting the additional GHGs we'll be adding to the stack over the next decades. 

When you're a country that has always prided itself for its "sunburnt beauty" there's not much percentage in going from unbearably hot to unsurvivably hot. 

The 1C milestone was the focus of  a report released today by Australia's national science agency, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and its Bureau of Meteorology.

New Zealand climate scientist Dr Jim Salinger, author of the new book Living in a Warmer World, said the report showed Australia continued to be ``the burning, drying continent''.
 
The duration and intensity of heatwaves and days above 40C continued to increase, and temperatures were projected to increase with more hot days and fewer cold days, he said.
 
With continued drying in parts of the southern half of Australia, droughts were projected to increase.
 
"With such trends I would expect to see a reverse in migration across the Tasman, with increasing numbers of Australians coming to New Zealand," he said.
 
"This is as the climate of continental Australia becomes very harsh."

And a tip of the hat to Australian Green party senator, Scott Ludlam, for delivering this slightly scathing assessment of Aussie denialist prime minister, Tony Abbott.

“Just as the reign of the dinosaurs was cut short to their great surprise, it may be that the Abbott government will appear as nothing more than a thin, greasy layer in the core sample of future political scientists drilling back into the early years of the 21st century.”

In other fun climate change news for Australians, the CSIRO reports that warming waters are expected to trigger massive increases in the numbers of lethal jellyfish.

CSIRO research scientist, Dr Lisa-ann Gershwin, says more research is needed into the jellyfish. She warned higher ocean temperatures from global warming may stimulate jellyfish to breed faster, grow faster and live longer.

"What you don't want happening is that all of a sudden it's a huge problem and no one sees that coming," she said.

Symptoms of an irukandji jellyfish sting include severe pain, vomiting, anxiety and in rare cases can cause pulmonary oedema (fluid in the lungs), hypertension or toxic heart failure that can be fatal.
A box jellyfish sting can be fatal in as little as three minutes.

Move Along Now - Preparing for Climate Migrants

It's already happening.   Our world is being divided into countries from which people are fleeing and countries to which they're fleeing.   These people doing the fleeing are climate migrants, people forced out of their homelands by impacts such as water shortages, agriculture collapse or sea level rise.

The world's governments and relief agencies need to plan now to resettle millions of people expected to be displaced by climate change, an international panel of experts said on Thursday.

Resettlement related to large infrastructure development projects has been occurring for decades, with some estimates of up to 10 million people a year, said the report's lead author, Alex de Sherbinin.

Planning for millions of refugees will be challenging, but it is vastly better than the alternative, de Sherbinin said by telephone from The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.

"Are we just going to respond to the next 911 (emergency) call that comes out, or are we going to actually anticipate some of these things and in so doing hopefully avert the 911 call to some extent and maybe save some money in the process?" he said.

Some countries, such as the United States, face a potential double-whammy of coping with internally displaced Americans needing relocation from drought or inundation areas while simultaneously dealing with massive illegal migration from Central Americans forced out of their homelands.

Now They're Coming Through Greece

African migrants, alright let's be honest - 'climate migrants', are now seeking the safety of Europe by travelling through Turkey into Greece.   The European Union responded to Greek's plight this week by sending special EU border teams to help Greek authorities stem the influx of migrants.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

 
It is the first time that a rapid-intervention border team has been deployed to an EU member state since the Frontex teams were created in 2007.

Frontex agreed to send the team of 175 officials last month after Greece asked the EU agency for help because of the increasing number of refugees - mainly from Africa and Afghanistan - attempting to cross the border to find their way into the EU.
  Personnel and equipment from Germany, Romania, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Denmark will be deployed along the border. The mission is expected to last for two months and efforts will focus on policing a previously unguarded 12-kilometre river border between the towns of Nea Vyssa and Orestiada.

The Greek daily Kathimerini said more than 30,000 migrants had entered the EU across the narrow stretch of river. Frontex recorded a sixfold increase there in the number of immigrants trying to enter Greece in the second quarter of this year.

More people are trying to cross via Turkey because a previously used route from Libya to Italy was closed last year by a controversial bilateral agreement which allows Italian vessels to turn back migrants' boats caught at sea.

Europe has a long-running problem of migrants from west Africa who have fled north, many of them because rapacious European fishing fleets have collapsed the fish stocks in their local waters.

An Armada of Migrant Boats

Canadians haven't given a lot of thought to what we should do with migrants crossing the oceans to show up on our shores in boats.

It is something we had better start thinking about because we could be seeing far more of it in the next decade or two.

The Vietnamese boat people fled Communist persecution.   The Tamil boat people fled apparent Sri Lankan persecution.   The coming waves of boat people might not be political refugees at all but, instead, climate migrants fleeing homelands that have become uninhabitable.

The Americans are coming to realize that it's not just their common border with Mexico that needs to be watched, it's their coastlines too all along the south.   So, what does that hold in store for those countries considered best-positioned to endure the throes of climate change, in particular Canada?  In 20 years from now Canada might be viewed as paradise to those in many parts of the world who can muster up the money necessary to obtain a spot in the hold of a tramp steamer.

Are we going to follow the current practice and simply let them in no matter how many they turn out to be?   What if the Americans decide to dump their migrant problems on us?  The Americans will have their hands full dealing with internally displaced Americans from the drought-stricken south and low-lying coastal regions.   They won't be interested in greeting masses of climate migrants from Central and South America.

I don't know what the answers are to this vexing problem but my children's generation will have to make some tough decisions.  One thing I do know is that it'll be much harder for them to uphold traditional principles that suddenly become vastly more expensive, even threatening.

Is Climate Migration a Universal Human Right?

Now this is a touchy subject for us in the West - climate migration - the mass migration of people from regions rendered less habitable or even uninhabitable by global warming-driven climate change.

Mark my words, this is where our humanitarian self-image is going to collide with reality.

Here's how the United Nations Humanitarian Affairs office puts it:

Specialists studying the likelihood of population movements due to climate change effects offer widely divergent predictions. But most agree policymakers must understand that migration is a vital coping mechanism for at-risk populations and must do more to help destination hubs prepare.

“Migration and mobility are always seen as exceptions but they are the norm. Mobility helps people get out of poverty,” said Cecelia Tacoli, senior researcher with London-based NGO the International Institute for Environment and Development. “If people affected by climate change lack access to resources or need to diversify their income sources, this lack should be [addressed] rather than be seen as a problem.”

In moderate to severe-climate change scenarios, mass migration invokes the 'overloaded lifeboat' dilemma. Do we allow the masses to clamber aboard the lifeboat and, if so, how many or do we simply beat them with the oars to save ourselves? You may find that a silly notion but it is expected to be addressed in the Pentagon's upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review. Gwynne Dyer in his latest book, Climate Wars, says some American military leaders foresee a day when America will transform its border with Mexico into a free-fire kill zone.

And it's not just keeping Central and South Americans out that's driving this scenario. It's the prospect of an America struggling with its own, home grown mass displacement and resettlement due to coastal inundation and inland groundwater exhaustion. Even a moderate climate-change scenario could see America with its hands full simply accommodating internal climate migration.

It's the troubling realities of climate migration that will probably leave the West unwilling to discuss measures to actually facilitate or speed up migration. I think that's where we're going to find the real depth of our humanitarianism.