DISPLACED PEOPLE

It’s not just Earth that suffers. Ever heard the term "environmental refugee"?  Get used to it. Anyone physically displaced by the effects of global warming is an environmental refugee, and in your lifetime you’ll see the effects of it firsthand.

Hurricane Katrina may or may not have been a product of global warming. That’s beside the point. It showed us that environmental disasters don’t just happen to the Third World. They happen right here in North America. It showed us what happens when you don’t prepare for the inevitable.
 
The IPCC predicts hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by global warming by the year 2080. But “displaced” is such a clinical term. Really, it means families are forced to leave their homes, their livelihoods, their histories. Rising oceans will obliterate parts of Southern India, Bangladesh and coastal China. Communities on the islands of Tuvalu—which lie only 50 cm above sea level—have already been forced to abandon their homes, evacuated to nearby New Zealand. Other coastal communities will battle flooding river deltas.

Rising water alone won’t do all the damage. Millions of people will be forced to relocate because they won’t have enough water to irrigate their crops. They won’t have enough water to drink. The Himalayan glaciers, which supply water for 5 million people, will melt within 40 years. What happens when 5 million people don’t have access to potable water? In Asia alone, the IPCC projects that as many as 1 billion people could be affected by freshwater scarcity by 2050. In parts of the world where population growth is surging as standards of living increase, water scarcity poses formidable problems.
 
Africa, where internal strife and a massive HIV/AIDS pandemic continue to place unimaginable stresses on the continent's inhabitants, is also expected to see decreased agricultural yields of up to 50 per cent, severe flooding, and prolonged droughts. In the Nile Delta alone, 15% of agricultural land is expected to flood, leaving 6 million people with neither food nor a livelihood.

By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people will face increased water shortages in Africa. Where will they go?

If you’re one of those people shaking their heads and secretly thinking, but that’s there, and I’m here, here’s your wake-up call. Anything can happen when people face desperate, life-changing circumstances. Canada could become a sanctuary for thousands, if not millions, of refugees. It's time to think, how can we accommodate that? And if we can’t, if our own resources are stressed to the max, then what happens?