Victoria Milko and Julie Watson
Associated Press
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — The walls of Saifullah’s north Jakarta home are lined like tree rings, marking the annual height of floodwaters — about 4 feet above the wet dirt floor.
Saifula, who uses only one name like many Indonesians, sends family and friends to live with them when the water level gets too high. He guarded the house until the water could be drained using a makeshift pump. If the pump stops working, he will use the bucket or wait until the water recedes.
“It’s normal here,” said Saifula, 73. “But this is our home. Where should we go?”
As the world’s fastest sinking major city, Jakarta shows how climate change can make more places uninhabitable. With a third of the city expected to be submerged in the next few decades — in part due to the rise of the Java Sea — the Indonesian government is planning to relocate its capital to the island of Borneo, some 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) northeast. As many as 1.5 million civil servants.
It’s a tall order and part of a massive population movement expected to accelerate in the coming years.
Rising sea levels, droughts, heat and other climate disasters could displace 143 million people from their homes over the next 30 years, according to a report released Monday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In Asia, governments are already scrambling to respond.
A third of the world’s migrants today come from Asia, and the region has the highest number of people displaced by extreme weather, mainly storms and floods, the report said. With the countryside vacant and megacities such as Jakarta at risk, scientists predict the need for migration waves and planned relocations will only grow.
“At all levels of global warming, some currently densely populated areas will become unsafe or uninhabitable,” the report said.
It is estimated that as many as 40 million people in South Asia will be forced to relocate over the next 30 years due to water shortages, crop failures, storm surges and other disasters.
Rising temperatures are particularly worrying, said Chris Field, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who chaired the UN report in previous years.
“There are relatively few places on Earth that are too hot to live right now,” he said. “But it’s starting to look like in Asia, there may be more of this in the future, and we need to think hard about the implications.”
While the Biden administration has looked into the idea, no country specifically offers asylum or other legal protections for people displaced by climate change.
People are leaving their homes for a variety of reasons, including violence and poverty, but what’s happening in Bangladesh shows that climate change also plays a role, said Amali Tal, founder of Climate Refugees.
Scientists predict that by 2050, as many as 2 million people in the low-lying country will be displaced by rising sea levels. More than 2,000 migrants have arrived in its capital Dhaka every day, many fleeing coastal towns.
“You can see people actually moving. You can actually see more and more disasters. It’s tangible,” Tal said.
If countries like the United States and European countries act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero, the flow of migrants will slow, she said. Others say richer countries with more emissions should offer humanitarian visas to people from disproportionately affected countries.
According to the UN report, tackling climate migration will be a major policy issue in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America for decades to come. Most people will move from rural areas to cities, especially in Asia, where two-thirds of the population could be in cities in 30 years.
“It’s basically people migrating from rural areas and then maybe squatting in a slum somewhere,” said Abhas Jha, practice manager in the World Bank’s South Asia Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management Unit.
Vittoria Zanuso, executive director of the Council of Mayors on Migration, a group of global city leaders, said immigration does not necessarily cause a crisis.
In northern Dhaka, for example, officials are building shelters for climate migrants and improving water supplies. They’re also working with smaller cities to designate them as “climate havens” that welcome immigrants, Zanusso said.
The influx of new labor has provided small cities with opportunities for economic growth, she said. It would also prevent migrants who might have fled villages threatened by rising seas from seeking refuge in cities with scarce water supplies, and essentially “trade one climate risk for another”.
Helping cities prepare for the influx of immigrants will be key in the coming years, she said: “They’re on the front lines.”
Watson reported from San Diego. Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.
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