wildfires – Climate Justice Now

Drought, Migration, and Climate Change: When Hope Runs Dry

Francesca Von Krauland Global Future November 8, 2020November 8, 2020climate change, drought, migration, precipitation, wildfires

The World Health Organization defines a drought as “a prolonged dry period in the natural climate cycle that can occur anywhere in the world.” While widespread and naturally occurring, droughts impact certain regions far more drastically than others, and they do so with rapidly increasing frequency and intensity due to climate change. Rising temperatures elevate rates of soil moisture evaporation, which in turn decreases plant cover that could capture rainfall in dry areas. Climate change alters precipitation patterns, causing less rainfall overall in certain regions, and also affecting snowpack and melt, which diminishes the water supply. Areas that are already relatively dry, like the subtropics, will in coming years experience worsening droughts, while relatively wet places like the tropics will experience increased precipitation.

While some of the areas impacted by worsening drought conditions are located in the developed world, like the United States Southwest, most impacted regions are South and Southeast Asia—countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia, and Laos, which are under the monsoon climatic zone. In Indonesia, 92% of the country experienced drought due to El Niño last year, impacting nearly 50 million people. Water scarcity impacts 40% of the world’s population.

Severe droughts, exacerbated by global warming conditions, affect every aspect of society, including the agricultural industry, transportation, energy, and public health. Droughts decimate the growth of crops like wheat, soybeans, and corn, some of which are necessary to support livestock and some are necessary for human consumption. This results in food price instability, social unrest, and famine. Droughts are costly for the transportation sector because a certain water level in waterways is necessary for transport barges to effectively ship goods, and water levels drop in droughts. Roads also crumble from prolonged exposure to dry heat, deteriorating crucial infrastructure. Electric grids strain under increased demand during heat waves, and the availability of hydroelectric power decreases during droughts. Yet perhaps the most alarming human impact of droughts is in public health.

Image from the World Health Organization

Droughts in less developed areas can disturb local health services due to a lack of water, which is especially troubling considering the worsening in various health conditions that droughts lead to in effected populations. The WHO reports that droughts can cause:

malnutrition due to the decreased availability of food, including micronutrient deficiency, such as iron-deficiency anaemia
increased risk of infectious diseases, such as cholera, diarrhea, and pneumonia, due to acute malnutrition, lack of water and sanitation, and displacement
increased health risk in people already impacted by lung diseases, like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or by heart disease, due to lower air quality in connection with wildfires and dust storms from droughts.
psycho-social stress and mental health disorders

In many cases, the above conditions make certain regions unlivable. Thus droughts exacerbated by global warming contribute to the growing problem of climate migration. Up to 700 million people are at risk of being displaced by droughts alone within the next ten years—a number that contributes to the total of migrants fleeing other climate disasters and political instability. The UN reports that “new displacement patterns, and competition over depleted natural resources can spark conflict between communities or compound pre-existing vulnerabilities.” In this way, people displaced by climate issues can be categorized as refugees and receive the international protections entitled to this group. The overlap between climate migrants and those traditionally thought of as refugees is significant, with many people displaced by political and other conflicts facing a secondary displacement because they live in climate change “hotspots.” As long as droughts and other climate issues persist and worsen, such groups cannot return to their home areas, sometimes putting a strain on regional political relations and the distribution of resources. Migration itself can have a negative environmental impact, with refugee settlements built for temporary usage being an unsustainable model of community building.

While it is people in developing countries who most directly experience the effects of climate change, it is the developed world—places like Europe and the United States, which caused much of the environmental degradation that contribute to the rising number of climate disasters. As the cause of these interconnected issues, it should be the responsibility of top-emitting countries to aid governments struggling with the effects of climate change—whether that entails supporting programs to combat the droughts and other such events directly, financing repairs, or giving aid to climate refugees. There are several ways that the effect of droughts in particular can be mitigated: conserving water and enhancing water efficiency in city plans, making available alternative water supplies, planting drought-resistant crops, and increasing energy efficiency in buildings so that less water-cooled power is used to begin with. However, many of these are much more feasible in places like the Southwest U.S. than in rural Indonesia, for example, and all present only superficial solutions to a complex problem.

Worsening droughts are an economic, political, and environmental issue, but most of all, it is a human one—a problem that will continue to take and disrupt lives with alarming rapidity until the underlying cause of climate change is addressed. Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would simultaneously address each of the contributing factors not only to drought conditions, but also to wildfires and hurricanes, and to so many other destructive forces. Substantial progress in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement is the only humane way forward.

Orange Skies

Francesca Von Krauland COVID-19, Global Future November 1, 2020November 1, 2020climate change, economy, natural disasters, pandemic, sustainability, wildfires

There’s something unsettling about the virus, this seemingly inescapable, omnipresent, insidious force that keeps us locked in our homes. Some people almost wished for a tangible enemy, something obvious and terrifying but at the very least visible, so that they could justify the sacrifices and fear. The universe granted that wish in a very 2020 way—wildfires swept the west coast with the same force that the Australian wildfires did way, way back in January of this year. Suddenly, the sky was like something out of Dante’s Inferno, and you could taste the smoke particles floating in the air even through a face mask. The landscape matched the gathering feeling of apocalypse, and new numbers, like 4 million burned acres, joined the statistics we sing ourselves to sleep with: 45.1 million global COVID-19 infections, 230,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States eight months and counting of using the phrase ‘unprecedented times.’ An article written by Stanford University student Nestor Walters on the wildfires poses the question: “How many more times do we need to hear words like trying, tumultuous or challenging as adjectives to times before we accept that these are simply the times we live in?”

No one can escape it—not the wildfires, not the pandemic, and not climate change. Rozzi, an American pop singer, released a ballad called “Orange Skies” about the wildfires in her hometown of San Francisco. She said of the song, “Despite the massiveness of the issue, I knew I wanted to make the song personal – because of course the underlying issue itself is personal. Climate change isn’t some mythical thing happening to other people, in other places – it’s happening right now, right outside our doors.”

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk reports 7,348 wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and heatwaves over the past 20 years. These natural disasters resulted in the deaths of 1.23 million people, affecting a total of 4.2 billion people, and caused $2.97 trillion in global economic losses. Most effected are China and the United States. The report unequivocally links these events to the rising global temperature as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, and finds that any improvements to disaster response or climate adaptation will be “obsolete in many countries” if climate change, the source of the problem, is not immediately addressed.

So how does climate change cause forest fires? National Geographic explains that as temperatures rise due to climate change, the hot air “soaks up water from whatever it touches—plants (living or dead) and soil, lakes and rivers. The hotter and drier the air, the more it sucks up, and the amount of water it can hold increases exponentially as the temperature rises; small increases in the air’s heat can mean big increases in the intensity with which it pulls out water.” In California, the rise in temperature is about 3 degrees Fahrenheit, far above the global average of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat combines with parched forest material, which is even dryer due to a persistent drought more intense than any for the past 1,200 years, producing the ideal conditions for a fire to consume forests, in addition to all of the settlements that have increasingly encroached among traditionally undeveloped lands.

Some preventive measures exist, though actual implementation by governments and industry varies. In Australia, nomadic aboriginal groups used to practice surface vegetation burning to prevent outbreaks of fire. Though indigenous populations can no longer engage in that tradition, the method is still emulated by local governments. Urban planning in Australia—where the 2019/2020 season was the hottest on record and driest for 120 years—must prevent expansion into flammable wildland areas, include vegetation-free zones around properties, use fireproof building materials, and plan evacuation and rescue routes in advance. In California, controlled burning of dry brush and excess debris is a common practice, though it contributes to air pollution. Currently, timber companies and biomass industries do not substantially support the state’s fire prevention strategy, so reducing costs of thinning projects would create better incentives for participation on an industry level. Additionally, as in Australia, building codes should emphasize fire-resistance and developing into high-risk areas should be banned. As a whole, these measures could reduce short term damage, but would address only the symptoms of the problem, rather than the problem itself. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, and the warming of the Earth slows, these practices will not suffice.

Economically, the stakes are high for leaders to respond effectively. California Governor Gavin Newsom announced investments in the CAL FIRE air fleet, early wildfire warning technologies, fire detection cameras, and permanent firefighting positions, along with related crisis counseling, legal services, and housing and unemployment assistance for people affected by the fires. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, on the other hand, was widely criticized for his slow response to the wildfires, though he did expressly link them to climate change—a link that the Australian Finance Minister denied. Though Australia has pledged to reduce its emissions by between 26 and 28% within the next decade, a UN report noted that few of the Conservative government’s policies are designed to reach this target. Studies on the economic impact of wildfires on affected areas show that “large wildfires lead to instability in local labor markets by amplifying seasonal variation in employment over the subsequent year” and that rural areas in particular struggle to recover. Even without the pandemic-induced recession, effects last months and even years in places like rural Oregon. Short term economic gains as local laborers rebuild are overshadowed by the slow economic growth that follows as tourism, logging, and other essential industries drop.

It’s been an overwhelming year, but the pandemic, the wildfires, and climate change are nothing new. We are experiencing the colliding effects of problems we as a global society created and then ignored, until a virus halted civilization and the skies turned orange. The problem isn’t invisible, it’s in everything: it’s the fuel that runs the world we are literally watching burn. But we still have time, just a tiny bit of time, to turn things around, and to lower our emissions by switching to renewable energy, and to rebuild a post-pandemic society sustainably. Nestor Walters puts it best: “We don’t own the past or future; all we have is now. We can’t let hope take away our now, or we’ll find ourselves looking out the window one morning, wondering if the sky used to be blue.”

Featured Image from Bloomberg