Climate Change Could Threaten Up To 2 Billion Refugees By 2100

Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University, spent much of his career researching where poor people go when rich corporations swoop in and buy the land out from under their feet.

In this August 2016 photo, a family on a raft approaches
 a boat in a flooded area of Jamalpur, Bangladesh.

But his focus began to shift in 2005, after observing how storm surges tainted farmland in Bangladesh with salt water. Later that year, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, submerging communities once believed to be safe behind levees and dikes. As floodwaters inundated Vietnam’s Mekong Delta last year, Geisler’s new worldview came into sharp relief.

The rising sea, he surmised, is the one displacement force more powerful than greed.

Geisler began collating climate and demographic research, and came to a dire conclusion: By the year 2100, rising sea levels could force up to 2 billion people inland, creating a refugee crisis among one-fifth of the world’s population.

Read the Huffington Post story by Alexander C. Kaufman - “Climate Change Could Threaten Up To 2 Billion Refugees By 2100.”