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America’s Climate Refugees

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The United States now officially has climate change refugees that the government is paying to move.

One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.

“We’re going to lose all our heritage, all our culture,” lamented Chief Albert Naquin of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, the tribe to which most Isle de Jean Charles residents belong. “It’s all going to be history.”

Around the globe, governments are confronting the reality that as human-caused climate change warms the planet, rising sea levels, stronger storms, increased flooding, harsher droughts and dwindling freshwater supplies could drive the world’s most vulnerable people from their homes. Between 50 million and 200 million people — mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen — could be displaced by 2050 because of climate change, according to estimates by the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security and the International Organization for Migration.

“The changes are underway and they are very rapid,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell warned last week in Ottawa. “We will have climate refugees.”

But the problem is complex, said Walter Kaelin, the head of the Nansen Initiative, a research organization working with the United Nations to address extreme-weather displacement.

“You don’t want to wait until people have lost their homes, until they flee and become refugees,” he said. “The idea is to plan ahead and provide people with some measure of choice.”

The Isle de Jean Charles resettlement plan is one of the first programs of its kind in the world, a test of how to respond to climate change in the most dramatic circumstances without tearing communities apart. Under the terms of the federal grant, the island’s residents are to be resettled to drier land and a community that as of now does not exist. All funds have to be spent by 2022.

The Louisiana story, which like most things climate change, is an example of how climate change combines with other factors to exacerbate contemporary problems. In this case, climate change combines with the channeling of the Mississippi River so that sediment flows into the Gulf and a century of petroleum companies running channels through the swamps that allow seawater to eat away at the low-lying land to finish off much of southern Louisiana. Given the unique history and culture of the area, not to mention it’s amazingly diverse wildlife, this is a real tragedy. That it is happening to Native Americans and Cajuns shows how climate change, like other natural disasters, will often disproportionately affect the poor. The next group of people likely to be directly affected to the point of relocation are also Native Americans, this time in Alaska. This is hardly a coincidence.

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