The final draft of a UN compact on migration published July 11 recognized the existence of climate refugees specifically for the first time, The Thomson Reuters Foundation reported Thursday. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration acknowledged climate change as a cause of migration, both due to extreme weather and “slow onset events” […]
While there are predictions that climate change will displace masses of people in the near future—an Environmental Justice Foundation study reported on by The Guardian put the number in the tens of millions within the next decade—some have indicated that the climate refugee crisis has already begun. The Syrian civil war has been linked to […]
Much of the discussion around climate refugees has focused on movement between countries, with the Syrian refugee crisis serving as a chilling preview of the global exodus to come. But a new report released by the World Bank on Monday honed in on the problem of internal displacement, finding that as many as 140 million […]
Bangladesh was No. 6 on the Long Term Climate Risk Index of countries most affected by climate change from 1997 to 2016. The United Nations contents that climate change disproportionately impacts women, since they are more likely to be poor and dependent on local resources. It is hopeful, then, that the UN’s Green Climate Fund […]
By Adam Lynch Marámellys Castro-Pérez is a Puerto Rican refugee living in Orlando with her husband and twins after the one-two punch of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Maria, in particular, scrubbed the island clean of electricity, working toilets and phone service. It dragged Castro-Pérez’s world into the dark ages and pitted the island’s modern, cosmopolitan […]
Behind barbed-wire fences at this camp in northern Jordan, about 33,000 Syrians—half of them children—exist uneasily, housed in rows of rudimentary shelters that barely protect them from the winter cold. Drinking water must be brought in daily by dozens of tanker trucks or pumped from desert boreholes that overexploit Jordan’s largest groundwater basin. As in […]
By Joe Sandler Clarke and Unearthed reporters From the finest American journalism chronicling the worst excesses of the Trump administration to international stories showing the impact of climate change on the developing world, here are the stories we wish we had written this year. On our changing climate Alaska’s permafrost is no longer permanent – […]
In Jordan’s arid southern desert, just outside the port city of Aqaba, environmental engineers are working to mitigate the threat of climate change to the country’s agriculture sector. A high-tech farming initiative led by the Sahara Forest Project aims to use sustainable technology and an abundance of Red Sea saltwater to grow crops in the […]
By Alex Kirby For all of us, as 2017 proves to be one of the three warmest years on record, climate change presents a greater risk of sickness or death than it did four decades ago, the United Nations says. And for some of the world’s poorest people, the consequences of unpredictable weather caused by […]