Climate Change Formula: Rising Sea Levels + Coastal Megacities = Forced Migration | Parag Khanna

Climate Change Formula: Rising Sea Levels + Coastal Megacities = Forced Migration

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Global warming is no longer the problem of our children. Many of us will still be here in 30 to 40 years to feel the blistering heat and deal with the ensuing problems. The weather, of course, is one of them. Changes of just a few degrees lead to less water, and farmers struggling to successfully grow their crops to harvest.

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PARAG KHANNA:

Dr. Parag Khanna is Managing Partner of FutureMap. His books include "The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict & Culture in the 21st Century" (2019). He is also author of "The Second World" (2008), "How to Run the World" (2011), and "Connectography" (2016). He is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Parag Khanna:  If global temperatures rise four degrees Celsius above the 1990 baseline temperature level used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, and that may happen by 2040, 2050 or around that time based on present temperature sort of rise trajectory. That would have a very devastating impact on global food production. Right now the countries of the world that are the largest food producers such as the United States, Brazil, China, India, Australia – if the temperature rise by four degrees Celsius several decades from now it could be that the food production is generally wiped out in many of those geographies because of desertification, crop failure and so forth. Already there’s a lack of sufficient water irrigation and fresh water supply for agriculture in Australia. We see water tables falling in the western United States and so forth. Meanwhile if temperatures do rise to that degree and in fact temperatures rise the fastest in the northern latitudes of the world and the southern latitudes in other words at the poles. Whereas sea levels rise fastest at the equator. And so what we’ll find is that in a world that’s four degrees Celsius warmer a large amount of the world’s food production is predicted to take place in today’s Canada and Russia.

Now Canada and Russia are the two largest countries in the world by geographic territory. But they are also perhaps ironically two of the world’s most depopulated countries. Their populations are very small and very concentrated in very, very small areas. Most of the Canadian population for example lives very close to the United States border. And most of Russia’s population lives west of the Euro mountains very close to Eastern Europe. Whereas about six-sevenths of Russia’s territory, this vast geography known, a large chunk of it is known as Siberia for example is largely uninhabited. But if you project forward where food will be grown in a world that is that much warmer in fact these depopulated areas of Canada and Russia may be the world’s breadbaskets. The problem is there’s no people. And so of course we would have to think about who are the people who are going to live there? Might we need to have population transfers and mass migrations for people to work in the agricultural sector or to develop the agribusiness industries of these countries to feed the planet.

Because after all it will not be the United States and Canada, the United States and China and India and Australia and Brazil that are feeding the world. It’ll be Canada and Russia that are feeding the world. So the food supply chain on a global basis is going to shift and move and become much more dependent on these northern geographies. And so this is the prediction that a number of scientists have made and that’s of course going to require a significant rethinking of the meaning of political geography when we depend so much on just two countries for our food.

The second great megatrend of the twenty-first century besides global connectivity of infrastructure is mass urbanization. The rate at which people are moving into cities has never been so rapid. And it’s happening all over the world, particularly in developing countries – in Africa, in south Asia, in East Asia. On an aggregate basis most of the world’s population already lives in cities and may people predict that will grow to two-thirds of the world population by just the year 2030 or 2035. And in Asia which is a microcosm if you will for this phenomenon worldwide, the populations are clustering around the oceans coasts. So we are much more a global urban coastal network civilization, right. In other words mankind lives on the ocean’s coasts in megacities on all the conti...

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