United Nations climate report warns of huge effects on civilization

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a report on how humans will be affected deeply by climate change. David Wrathall is an associate professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. And he was a lead author for the chapter on poverty and sustainable development. Wrathall joins us to share how the changing climate will continue to alter migration patterns and impact economies around the world.

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Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: Yesterday, the IPCC, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released its latest report. It was written by almost 300 researchers from around the world. It focuses on the ways in which climate change is affecting, and will increasingly affect, human life with fires, floods and droughts, with famine and disease and with displacement, migration and the conflicts that follow. Some increased warming is already baked into our global system. Human decisions right now will determine how much worse everything will get done. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was very clear about the choice before us: delay, he said, means death. David Wrathall is one of the lead authors of a chapter in the new report. It’s focused on poverty, livelihoods and sustainable development. Wrathall is an associate professor in OSU College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

David Wrathall: Hi Dave. It’s great to be with you.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. If there’s one theme that runs throughout a lot of the chapter you worked on and is embedded in a lot of the other ones as well, it’s how unevenly distributed the worst effects of climate change are going to be, just huge differences in terms of vulnerability and adaptation. Can you give us a sense for those differences?

Wrathall: Yeah, that’s right. My role in the report was as a chapter lead author for the chapter called Poverty Livelihoods and Sustainable Development, and this was the chapter that covered the implications of climate change for the poorest societies and countries on earth. One of the key ways that this is a problem, climate change for the poorest, is that many folks derive their livelihoods from a stable environment like farmers, fishermen, ranchers, foresters. They need a stable set of conditions. What climate change is doing is making this a little less predictable, and in some cases completely unpredictable. So you don’t know how much you’re going to be able to harvest from your crops. Livelihoods are the cornerstone of development. If you can’t depend on livelihoods, then one generation can’t be better off than the next. So, planning for the future for many societies is really coming into question. That’s the problem in a nutshell.

Miller: What you’re talking about is not even the worst-case scenario in some senses. The worst is that people would simply be unable to live in certain places because they are underwater or way too hot or are too frequently the sites of serious natural disasters. What places are most likely to become uninhabitable?

Wrathall: Gosh, yeah, the subject of my own research is the question of shifting habitability when people make the determination that they can’t live in a place and to consider that climate change is rendering our planet uninhabitable. That really makes you stop and think. And so yes, when we look ahead to the year 2100, we have a lot more confidence that we will encounter these basic challenges to habitability. The places that are their most difficult to inhabit are the places where there is greatest instability. So, you can imagine a coastline – it’s very difficult to build a stable human settlement and derive stable livelihoods with the shifting coastline with sea level rise and all sorts of hazards associated with sea level rise, changing tides, coastal erosion, etc. This is going to be a challenge for coastal communities everywhere.

The other problem, as you mentioned, is temperature. We’re starting to enter this period in which places that have been densely inhabited by human populations are really reaching a threshold for the survival of the human body. Our bodies like a certain temperature range. And then of course, for all of the organisms that we rely on for crops and livestock, we need a certain set of environmental conditions and we’re going to start exceeding these thresholds in the coming decades and definitely by 2100. So we can think of places where this is most exaggerated: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, India and countries in that region of the world. This could be a real challenge. The other side of the coin to questions of habitability are human migration. Those people are going to have to look for other places to go. Of course, one of my roles in the IPCC was coordinating the treatment of human migration across the entire report, thousands and thousands of mentions of migration and the possible implications, all the possible forms that migration can take. That was another one of my roles in this report, and there’s a lot more we have to say on this now.

Miller: Well, I want to dig deeper into migration in just a bit, because it’s a huge question that ties into questions about national borders and responses to refugees. It’s a gigantic question. But I want to stick with some of your earlier work just for a second. You’ve done research in Peru and in Honduras, both coastal places, but also mountainous places in the case of Peru. I’m curious what your biggest takeaways were in terms of human choices and human actions.

Wrathall: You know, it’s really surprising. This goes back to what I said at the beginning: we think about the environmental conditions that are suitable for human life and really comes down to livelihoods. If we can’t earn a living somewhere, then we can’t live in that place. And so people can tolerate really, really unstable environmental conditions, but it comes back to being able to earn a living, being able to generate income, feed a family and do so predictably. That’s the basic problem. But aside from that, people need to look out for their physical security, the safety of their bodies and their families. Also, we need to think about the ways that people act at higher levels of social organization in order to address and manage risk. So some problems, like coastal problems, require coordination across large groups of people. You can’t build a seawall on your own, not one that’s going to withstand sea level rise. That takes a lot of coordination over decades, perhaps. To counter some of the migration that we’re expecting, definitely it’s going to be a group effort and we’re going to have to learn to work together in ways we haven’t before. Then in some instances where we reach limits of our ability to adapt, we have to consider community relocation – sort of a resettlement program for people who aren’t going to be safe. I’m simplifying here, and there’s a lot to say on all of this, but this is also an incredible challenge that is coming. There are people who are unwilling or unable to move just because of their circumstances. It’s very costly to migrate – socially costly, economically costly – and so people without resources may require this sort of coordination that takes place at a higher level with people working together in communities and countries.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of migration or displacement or just human movement, the global scale of it, that’s likely, say at 2°C increase or that’s now the consensus of what’s likely at the end of the century? How many millions or billions of humans are we talking about?

Wrathall: This is the most frequently asked question: how many people are going to migrate as a result of climate change? And the answer of course is it depends on what we do. It depends on how fast we reduce emissions. The scope of the problem is totally within our control now. And the answer is, the faster we get a handle on it, the fewer migrants we might be able to expect.

Miller: That’s been true for a number of decades now during which policymakers have gotten very clear messages from scientists, but globally we have not listened as a species and so emissions continue to rise. Obviously that’s not news to anybody who’s listening and as you and others have noted some extra warming is already baked in. So, I guess I’m wondering what we are already looking at.

Wrathall: Still, it’s very hard to predict. The framework for making a decision about when to migrate is dependent on a lot of things when climate changes are the forcing factor. There’s a range of agency baked into this, so not everybody is forced. Some people – the early movers – might move before and they might not associate their movements with climate change, for example. People who might have decided to move to the Sierras in California might decide to move to Oregon instead because of the prospects for forest fires, the changing prospects. But on the other hand, we might have people who are forced to move. These are displaced people. We know that, in every region on Earth, people are already moving with a range of agency involved in their choices about migration. Even in Oregon here, there’s estimated around 4,000 people displaced in moving as a result of recent forest fires. And this is to say nothing of people who would be moving for other reasons. So it’s happening everywhere. It’s very difficult to quantify, but we could say that, if I had to give my measured expert opinion, there’s going to be a lot of migration. We’re going to meet each other in new ways as we never have before as a result of climate change. Humanity is going to be introduced to itself.

Miller: And often conflicts happen when humanity is introduced to itself. I don’t know that it is inevitable, but it has been one of the constants that when people see outsiders. They don’t always react well. How much conflict is possible directly as a result of these migrations?

Wrathall: This is interesting, and here I’m going to push back on you a little bit. We have very little evidence that migration causes conflict. Migration can be a consequence of conflict when there’s lots of instances of people displaced by war. But when we adequately plan for migrants, it is almost in every instance,a net benefit for both migrants and the host communities. So this is one of the key issues here, when people come migrating because of climate change, they’re going to need housing and jobs, they’re going to need infrastructure, education, health care. If we can adequately plan for future migrants, then migration is a net positive to everybody. But if we find ourselves in a situation where we haven’t planned, then we can encounter problems. We can see rapid urbanization or healthcare systems or education systems stressed out by unanticipated populations. But rising to a level of conflict has not been seen yet. A lot of effort went into separating out the questions of climate migration and conflict in this report just because there is a lack of evidence that this is actually the case. It tends to be a narrative that we have in our minds rather than a picture of reality.

Miller: Well, I guess the narrative that I had in my mind, and I appreciate the push back, but let me just further explain what I was fearing, which was based on what you’ve said and what others have said, that huge numbers of people from, say, Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia would be forced out of their homes and would try to go to cooler, less likely-to-be-inundated places in richer, whiter areas. And I guess I was imagining that those richer whiter countries would say, we don’t want you.

Wrathall: Well, how to respond to this? We find ourselves in the United States amidst a debate about migration. And in fact, I’ve done quite a lot of research in Central America on the causes of migration in Central America about why people are moving locally within Central America as a result of instability and climate change, and why people are leaving the region and what it looks like when they arrive in the United States. I have done some research ongoing on this stuff for the last 15 years or so. And again, what I want to assert here is that the outcomes are much more in our control than we would think. When we can plan and prepare for migration, the outcomes are much better for both migrants and host communities. We can imagine times in the past when there have been great numbers of migrants. We think about the era of Ellis Island, the migrants moving to the United States in the mid and late 1800s as well as after World War 2, the huge population displacements and redistribution that happened as a result of conflict. We had systems for managing those migrants and we can do the same now.

Miller: Increasingly personally, I’m finding the disconnect between the kind of calm, rational, careful conversations that you and I are having right now and then the not at all unlikely doomsday scenarios that I also am reading about, about the possibility of of actual mass migration and refugee crises because we aren’t planning for them and because xenophobia and fear take over, the possibility of widespread ecosystem collapse or of tipping points that could be here sooner than then we had once thought. With the disconnect between the calmness we have right now and those doomsday scenarios, I’m having a harder and harder time to deal with. I’m curious how you do it.

Wrathall: I am trying to find the right words. One way of framing this report is that it is bad news. It’s terrifying and it’s scary. And this is at a time when we’re pretty sick of bad news with the pandemic, with war. Climate change is already here, and it’s going to get worse if we fail to act. But on the other hand, this is good news. We know what’s wrong and we know what we can do. And it’s just a matter of seeing it, knowing it, accepting it and prioritizing. Once upon a time on the IPCC, we used this endpoint of 2100 as the sort of the benchmark to compare our circumstances with.  2100 was some distant point in time and we could think about all the physical changes in the climate system that would happen between now and then. But that’s not so remote. I have a child who is of an age that he could live to see the year 2100. So, this isn’t such a remote problem. This is a problem for us and our children and our grandchildren. I work with students at Oregon State who are in this age range that could live to see this day. This is their world and they understand it. They accept it. They prioritized it. I see this every day. We’ve assessed the impacts [and] the potential for impacts that we’ve already seen. We look at future risk and we look at climate action instances when we are responding to climate change. As we’ve assessed, climate action for its success and for its failure, one of the things we see over and over and over again is the need for leadership. I see this among young people today and it gives me a lot of hope. So, you were speaking of terror and what it is where we can find our hope. I find it in the people whose problem this will be and I know that they’re going to rise to the occasion. I see it in my students.

Miller: David Wrathall, thanks very much for your time today.

Wrathall: Thank you.