Gardi Sugdub is a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast that is jammed from end to end with housing for about 1,300 members of the indigenous Guna people. The island is sinking beneath rising waters as the planet warms. So Panama has built an inland housing development for the entire population.
They’ll move into their pristine new homes this month. If only all climate migration could be so simple. President Joe Biden signed an executive order last week making it harder for people to seek asylum at the U.
S.-Mexico border, the latest gambit in a political war over immigration that has divided the country for decades. But as with many effects of a changing climate, we might someday look back on the era that gave us routine election-year migrant-caravan panic and Donald Trump’s big, beautiful wall as “the good old days.
” As temperatures rise around the globe, so will heat waves, droughts, floods, pandemics and other natural disasters along with shortages of food and water and conflicts over resources. By the nightmare logic of climate change, the countries least responsible for pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and heating the planet will bear the brunt of these impacts. And such countries also tend to have the least wealth, infrastructure and social fabric to protect their people.
In fact, after just 1.3 degrees Celsius of global warming over preindustrial averages, the countries with the most refugees, asylum seekers and other uprooted people already te.