[ More than 1.2 million Americans are currently displaced from
their homes because of climate change impacts—including increasingly
severe storms, wildfires, and flooding.] [[link removed]]

CLIMATE CHANGE IS TRIGGERING A NEW REFUGEE CRISIS—INSIDE THE US  
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Salote Soqo, Joshua Leach
September 22, 2021
Common Dreams
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_ More than 1.2 million Americans are currently displaced from their
homes because of climate change impacts—including increasingly
severe storms, wildfires, and flooding. _

An exploded restaurant is seen with all debris after heavy rain and
storm from remnants of Hurricane Ida in Manville, New Jersey, United
States on September 7, 2021. , (Photo : Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency
via Getty Images)

 

THE HEADLINES IN RECENT weeks read like signs of an impending
apocalypse. Sixteen years to the day since Hurricane Katrina slammed
into New Orleans, the Louisiana coast was again battered by Hurricane
Ida, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the state. Wildfires
in California have blanketed the western U.S. with smoke, prompting
mass evacuations. In New York, floodwaters poured into the subway
and through the windows of basement apartments
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As the Environmental Protection Agency recently reported
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climate change will continue to disproportionately impact people of
color, a startling fact that illustrates some worrying patterns.

While scientists and journalists are quick to point out that no single
disaster can be traced directly to climate change, one thing is clear:
storms, wildfires, floods, and related hazards are all becoming more
frequent and severe as the planet warms. The worse these climate
impacts become, the more people will be forced to move between
borders, destabilizing fragile countries and contributing to the rise
of xenophobic politicians who undermine the tenets of an inclusive
society. Widespread drought and crop failure in Central America, for
instance,
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to force people to pull up stakes and make the dangerous journey north
to the United States, and far-right politicians have been quick to
exploit their suffering to capitalize on misguided fears of
immigration.

But here's the thing: climate-forced displacement isn't just something
happening in foreign countries. Instead, it's increasingly occurring
here at home, and already forcing hundreds of thousands of Americans
to flee their homes, in many cases permanently. As the Environmental
Protection Agency recently reported
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climate change will continue to disproportionately impact people of
color, a startling fact that illustrates some worrying patterns. Most
noticeably, these communities will bear the brunt of environmental
racism as they are forced to engage with a federal government that
does little to prioritize funding to help these communities adapt,
rebuild, and/or relocate. 

When U.S. politicians discuss the possibility of "climate migration,"
many think of people being forced to abandon their homes in small
island nations or desert countries due to rising sea levels or severe
droughts. While these problems are real—and call for political
action grounded in human rights—an exclusive focus on international
migration can be misleading. After all, as the World Bank has noted
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majority of climate-related displacement occurs inside—not
between—national boundaries.

The United States, in this regard, is no exception. More than 1.2
million Americans
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currently displaced from their homes because of climate change
impacts—including increasingly severe storms, wildfires, and
flooding. Looking at the past decade, the numbers become even more
startling. The United States has been hammered by at least 910
ecological disasters in the last 10 years, with nearly 8 million
people
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their homes as a result. Recent reporting suggests that some 50
million Americans
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be affected by climate migration in the decades ahead.

These impacts are felt by Americans from all walks of life, from
inhabitants of beach
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in places like the Outer Banks, North Carolina, to residents of inland
California and the Pacific Northwest being forced to flee their homes
or change their daily lives because of deadly wildfires
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historic heatwaves
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As with other natural hazards, these effects fall hardest on people
already deprived of resources. No one is truly "safe" from climate
change, but the impact will hit some communities harder than others.

A case in point is the experience of Americans Indians and Alaska
Natives. Of all U.S. residents, Indigenous people—like other
communities of color—have often contributed least to the climate
crisis in terms of net fossil fuel consumption. Yet,
Indigenous communities from Alaska to Louisiana
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borne the brunt of first-wave climate migration in the United States
due to the inundation of low-lying coasts, shoreline erosion, and the
melting of the Arctic permafrost.

Historically, genocide, settler violence, and forced assimilation
policies uprooted generations of Indigenous people from their
ancestral homes. Many of these communities survived and even
flourished in spite of these attacks; now they face a renewed threat
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the form of a climate crisis they did so little to cause.

The Alaska Native village of Kivalina, for example, currently sits on
land to which the federal government forced them to relocate to in
the 1950s
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that land is melting beneath their feet. The village has been
negotiating with the federal and state governments for years about the
need to relocate yet again, but so far policymakers have not provided
the resources that would enable them to do so.

The Biden administration can and should take immediate steps to help
respond to climate migration that is already happening—both abroad
and inside the U.S.

The administration should begin by listening to the communities
already facing climate displacement. A number of these frontline
communities have crafted concrete policy recommendations
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the administration and Congress, including increased federal funding
for adaptation-in-place and relocation, and addressing racial
disparities in the distribution of federal disaster relief funds.

Biden can also act on his own to solve a problem that internal
government watchdogs first raised more than a decade ago. In 2009, the
Government Accountability Office warned that there is currently no
lead federal agency
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climate displacement when it occurs. Biden could remedy this by
creating a new Cabinet-level position or interagency working group to
shoulder this task.

Figuring out how to help people being forced out of their homes by
climate change won't be easy, but it's a problem we need to confront
head-on. Our country's most historically dispossessed communities are
already being hit. Left unaddressed, increasingly large parts of the
U.S. will soon be as well. 

_Salote Soqo is the Senior Partnership Officer for Climate Justice and
Crisis Response at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. 
Joshua Leach is the Public Policy and Communications Strategist at the
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee._

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