Climate Migration is getting worse and quicker than expected!
It is increasingly apparent that of all the devastating consequences of global warming /climate change, changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions, wildfires, floods, droughts and fatal heatwaves— the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important and ignored. Droughts regularly threaten food crops across the globe, while deadly floods inundate towns and cities from Denver to Dubai!
Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending most roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. The ever growing cost to ameliorate the affects will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo. Florida's climate exodus has already begun.
Over the past few years, the residents of the Florida Keys have been forced to confront a difficult truth that will affect millions of Americans before the end of the century. Their present calamity offers a glimpse of our national future. A definite rise in average sea levels over the past decade has contributed to an increase in tidal flooding, hurricanes and lightning storms leaving some roads and neighborhoods inundated with salt water for months at a time.
According to Business Insider "The term "climate migration" is an attempt to explain why people leave one place in favor of another; it assigns motivation to movements that may be voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent. Yet even if the primary cause for migration is clear, there are still countless other factors that influence when, where, and how someone moves in response to a disaster. It's this messiness that is reflected in the word "displacement": the migratory shifts caused by climate change are as chaotic as the weather events that cause them."
In South Florida, another two feet of sea level rise is expected by 2040, and seven feet of sea rise by 2100 is likely and will be catastrophic. If these forecasts come to pass , the sea levels will displace about 1,000,000 residents in Miami-Dade County and make a large portion of the county uninhabitable.
All across the country people on the coast are seeking ways to protect themselves from sea rise like building sea walls. The tragic irony of this situation is what Orrin Pilkey an emeritus professor of geology at Duke University in North Carolina has tried to warn people about. For years, Pilkey has been arguing, based on evidence that he and many others gathered, that building sea walls to protect the beaches actually destroys them! To keep high tides and storm surges out of basements and living rooms, seawalls and revetments are constructed. But this prevents the natural shifting of beach sands—and the sand ends up eroded by wave action and washed out to sea. Soon, the beachfront has no beach—and imported sand, sometimes from an expanding black market—is brought in to rebuild the beach. And the cycle resumes—except now, that process is being exacerbated by rising sea levels. This cycle has been ongoing for years in places like Nantucket MA and Miami FL.
Miami-Dade County exhausted its offshore sand supply in 2014, forcing Miami Beach to rely on sand trucked in from Central Florida, where mines are scattered along an inland sand deposit called the Cypresshead Formation. "Eventually, people are going to migrate, Pilkey says. The question is, are we going to retreat inland in a rational manner or are we going to maintain a “business-as-usual” mentality and only flee at the last minute, in panic and disarray? There’s a tug-of-war between real estate interests (which don’t want to lost the value of developed land, no matter what it costs to keep it dry) and others who see the expense of trying to maintain the status quo as just too costly. That battle is already playing out in places like Miami."
According to mainstream news Florida has had a population boom over the past several years, with more than 700,000 people moving there in 2022, and it was the second-fastest-growing state as numbers reached up to one million new arrivals as of July 2023, according to Census Bureau data. While there are some indications that migration to the state has slowed from its pandemic highs. What they haven't told you is that the majority of new arrivals aren't retirees seeking a peaceful golden years retirement golfing by the beach. They are ethnic minorities from around the world. Florida is home to the third-largest Latino electorate in the United States, or 3.1 million people.
But while hundreds of thousands of new migrant and ethnic Latino residents have flocked to the state on the promise of beautiful weather, no income tax and lower costs, nearly 500,000 left in 2022, according to the most recent census data. Contributing to their move was a perfect storm of soaring insurance costs, a hostile political environment, worsening traffic and extreme weather, according to interviews with more than a dozen recent transplants and longtime residents who left the state in the past two years.
Climate has had a great impact on the cost of living in Florida as well. "Jodi Cummings, who moved to Florida from Connecticut in 2021. “I thought Florida would be an easier lifestyle, I thought the pace would be a little bit quieter, I thought it would be warmer. I didn’t expect it to be literally 100 degrees at night. It was incredibly difficult to make friends, and it was expensive, very expensive.”
“Because of Indigenous culture, rapidly expanding green infrastructure that does not require tearing down of an existing oil based paradigm by 2060 so-called (black) Sub-Saharan Africa will not see as many internal climate migrants as the North African desert regions already being impacted and causing the demographic change in Europe; East Asia and the Pacific will see upwards of 49 million climate refugees; South Asia, 40 million; North Africa conservatively 30 million; Latin America, 25 million; and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 15-25 million.” (Black Coral Inc Research team)
Britain is among Europe's demographic exceptions: It is predicted to become Europe's most populous country by 2060 thanks to immigration. The Joint Research Centre and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis launch a joint report on the future demographics of the EU. The average life expectancy at birth in the EU for Indigenous Europeans is now about 81 years – 9 years more than the global average, and it’s expected to grow by two years every decade even as their birthrates fall. This trend also means that in 2050, about 25-35% of the EU’s indigenous population will be over age 65, compared to 20% today.
The EU will also boast an even better educated labor force in the future, with as much as 59% of the labor force now largely immigrant achieving post-secondary education compared to 35% today. Though better educated, the EU's future labor force will be smaller. This means that European workers will need to support more dependents in the future, putting EU social systems under increased pressure.
If all EU member states reached the labor force participation rates of the highest performing ones,(which is highly unlikely) the dependency ratio in 2050 could remain the same as 2024. Getting a higher share of the population into work is essential because if not nations will be required to import more immigration labor of course corporate bottom line profits will not suffer because immigrants are paid much less than indigenous citizens. At the current European declining fertility rates most likely caused by the impacts of climate and corporate pollution, relying on EU demographic indigenous growth will not be enough to meet future challenges.
In short because of colonization's destabilization tactics and Petro-pharmaceutical caused climate migration, the EU is a destination region for international migration, thus immigration becomes an influential factor on demographic developments. Migration levels can have a large influence on the total population size and the size of the labor force. At the same time, it cannot substantially slow down ageing and can only improve the dependency ratio. Factors that will influence these trends of a large elderly population requiring caregivers are the volume of immigrants from third countries, their level of education, their integration into the labor market and society at large.
The significant emigration of working-age European anxiety ridden because of the inclusivity reliance on North African labor requires also has lead to accelerated population ageing and the loss of mostly skilled workers, thereby adding to the unwelcome burden on social security systems that historically tried to ignore migrant populations. Nationals of European Union countries enjoy full access and portability of benefits immediately after moving from one member country to another. Third-country nationals, however, are granted only long-term residence and access to core social protection benefits after five years of residence in a member country.
Finally, the report looks at the global picture, and finds that global population growth will continue, especially in Africa and Asia. White Europeans represent 9% of the world population and that is plummeting. This is not just across a global aggregate but they compose a shrinking proportion of the population in their own nations.
The promotion of education was formerly a UN incentive promoted to achieve more moderate population growth and development success in non white majority nations. Achieving such goals depends, in particular, on giving girls access to education while simultaneously promoting independence from a nuclear family cultural paradigm, especially promoting the economic incentives of adhering to birth control centered family planning as a key goal. The statistic constantly promoted to Europeans is that the world population will reach 9.6 billion people in 2060 when white populations will be less than 9%. Most demographers say that western European countries will have minority white populations by 2050.
In the USA in the country’s major metropolitan areas. The results are alarming: 33 million residents live in neighborhoods that experience intense heat, face high energy costs, and house vulnerable residents least able to cope with these impacts. As these spaces become increasingly gentrified the racial makeup of these urban communities is changing and the effects of warming will be more pronounced in the changed demographics of these formerly highly ethnic enclaves. Most prominent will be a decrease in births due to life in a Hot Zone.
With the number of extreme weather days predicted to get worse—this analysis is another sobering reminder of the urgency to adapt to new climate realities. Temperature can change the equilibrium or non-equilibrium density of the population, the quasi-equilibrium temporal patterns exhibited by population density (e.g., oscillations), and/or the potential for a population to exist at all and this is more pronounced in populations without eumelanin. Black communities and cities like Brockton Massachusetts are increasingly adding green spaces to their communities as a way to combat climate heating and protect the ecosystem as well as lower incidences of depression and crime. Exposure to green spaces has been linked to: improved physical and mental well-being. reduced levels of stress. enhanced brain function and alleviating suicidal ideation and severe depression.
Green areas like community urban farms and gardens, tree planting, rooftop gardens, green cooling spaces and parks reduce exposure to airborne pollutants that may negatively influence neural plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to adapt when faced with positive and negative stimuli. This capability is often altered in mental conditions such as depression. Time in nature or green spaces gives human beings a boost of happiness that keeps them going all day. One study by The Greener Communities Fund (a collaboration from NHS Charities) revealed that eight in ten of us (80%) find spending time in green spaces makes us healthier and more energetic, as well as feeling better physically and mentally!
Comments