FT - "Never-Ending Dickensian Shantytowns Bulging W. Jobless Young Men From Rival Ethnic Groups"

[hatrack]

EDIT

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that “the gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration”. Robert Kaplan’s 1994 article in The Atlantic magazine, “The Coming Anarchy”, foresaw that “The Environment” would become “the national-security issue of the twenty-first century”. Water shortages, deforestation, rising sea levels and so on would fuel migration and group conflicts, he wrote. President Bill Clinton passed the article around the White House.

Add on desertification and 50C heatwaves, and we’re now entering a version of Kaplan’s dystopia. Nobody knows how many “climate migrants” there are today, or will be later, says Dina Ionesco of the United Nations Migration Agency. (The World Bank calculates more than 140 million by 2050, though such estimates are inevitably very rough.) Many people hit by climate change won’t want to move. Others won’t be able to afford to. But lots will go. The question is where to.

The place to witness the future is today flood-prone Bangladesh, where 165 million people inhabit a territory the size of Iowa. As sea levels rise, coastal Bangladeshis are moving to the capital Dhaka. That’s one reason why the city’s population has more than quadrupled over the past 30 years to about 17 million. In short, like Okies fleeing Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl to California in the 1930s, or the poor of New Orleans heading for Houston after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, today’s climate-encouraged migrants are mostly moving inside their own country. It’s cheaper than emigrating, they probably speak the language, they can get help from friends and relatives and they don’t need visas.

But the megacities they are moving to are already overstrained, often because they’re struggling with climate change themselves. Cape Town, for instance, is running out of water while simultaneously taking in migrants from the even drier, impoverished Eastern Cape. In Bangladesh, the political scientist Tasneem Siddiqui told National Geographic: “Everything is in Dhaka, and people are all coming to Dhaka. And Dhaka is collapsing.” This is what Kaplan foresaw in 1994: never-ending Dickensian shanty towns, bulging with jobless young men from rival ethnic groups, each one of them determined to send pennies home to hungry relatives in the countryside.

EDIT

https://www.ft.com/content/e6d5f064-1baa-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4

[abqtommy]

1. snark on: Oh, if only the wise people of the world and government leaders had foreseen all

the ramifications of climate change and developed plans that would avert such disasters! snark off
Instead of having people who care in control we have leaders who drag us from disaster to disaster,
purposely and knowingly.

[Hestia]

2. Click on link for current pics of Victoria Falls running dry

https://www.euronews.com/2019/12/10/victoria-falls-runs-dry-see-how-the-worst-drought-in-a-century-is-hitting-the-tourist-attr

[progree]

3. "Bangladesh, where 165 million people inhabit a territory the size of Iowa."

It's hard to even try to imagine this. And flood-prone and so much of it is barely above sea level.