Title:	Governing Climate Induced Migration and Displacement
Authors:	Andrea C. Simonelli
Keywords:	Displacement
Issue Date:	2016
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	Climate change is a topic most often broached by environmental scientists and its effects discussed in terms of animal populations and atmospheric events. The quintessential image accompanying this discussion is the sad-looking polar bear on a lonely iceberg. However, its direct effect on human life is yet to garner such attention. Many do not yet associate the consequences for wildlife with similar consequences for humanity. A changing climate will affect how people are able to use their environment as the locations of arable land and water supplies will shift. In some places, sea level rise and desertification will forcibly displace current human populations. How the world seeks to deal with this shift is yet to be seen. Climate change is also publically discussed in terms of sterile statistics. What tends to be missing is how climate change relates to humanity as a whole. What does a 2 degree Celsius rise in temperature mean in the life of the average person? Can that person conceive of what X tons of carbon in the atmosphere looks like? Without a direct relationship to its effect on humans, these estimates cannot be fully understood. They are vague descriptors at best and useless at worst. Gigatons of invisible gasses cannot be adequately internalized by the minds of most people; it is too abstract. In addition, a rise in temperature effects the whole globe, but with a wide variance across regions, longitudes, and zones of habitation. Thus, how can climate science be connected to the changes seen in individuals’ daily lives? This is a difficult challenge and even more so in countries where climatic effects are less visible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a source intended to parse out these effects in the Working Group II Assessment Reports “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. Each report contains a “Summary for Policy Makers”, which is an annotated version with more accessible language and summarized results designed for those who are not scientists in the formal sense. Its language describes the risks and changes to the natural environment, but with minimal emphasis on how climate affects humanity. This means that any reader needs to be able to extrapolate in order to further connect how the likelihood of climate trends will affect specific human sectors. The report suggests generalities over regions and time which need to be specified further in order to completely connect the earth’s physical and biological changes to human activity. Science can only estimate the future in general terms. The Summary proposes some examples of major projected proposed impacts by sector. Table 1.1 presents an annotated version which focuses on climate trends that the IPCC identify and their likelihoods in both the Assessment Reports 4 and 5 (AR4 and AR5) from 2007 and 2013 respectively
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/54178
ISBN:	978-1-137-53866-6
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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