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As disasters displace more people around the world, our connection to place becomes more tenuous. <\/p>\n
Climate change is personal. It is not abstract. The warming climate impacts our economies<\/a>, influences our politics<\/a> and culture<\/a>, threatens the food we eat <\/a>and the water we drink<\/a>; it even affects our love lives<\/a>. <\/p>\n As climate change<\/a> accelerates and extreme heat and climate disasters displace more people around the world, the crisis is increasingly disrupting our fundamental sense of where we belong and what we consider home.<\/p>\n We saw that last summer, in Maui, Hawaii, when the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century leveled the historic town of Lahaina, killed more than 100 people, and displaced thousands of residents from their homes.<\/p>\n In the immediate wake of the disaster, many families sheltered in hotels and resorts along the fringes of the burn zone, all to be displaced again<\/a> a few months later when tourists returned to the city. We\u2019re nearly a year out from the devastating fire and the recovery has intersected with an ongoing housing crisis that still leaves many Maui residents without stable housing. <\/p>\n Millions more have experienced the same over the last two decades. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, an annual average of 21.5 million<\/a> people have been forcibly displaced, on average, each year since 2008 by weather-related events such as floods, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures. <\/p>\n \u201cEach of these statistics is a man, woman, or child whose life has been destroyed, who has lost home, family, and friends. Said goodbye \u2014 perhaps forever \u2014 to relatives who are too old or sick to make an arduous journey to safer locations,\u201d said UN commissioner Filippo Grandi in late October<\/a>. <\/p>\n Those numbers are only expected to grow. According to the international think tank the Institute for Economics & Peace, as many as 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally<\/a> by 2050 due to climate change and natural disasters<\/a>.<\/p>\n In sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the World Bank<\/a> estimates that climate change will displace more than 140 million people within their home countries by 2050. For example, more than 1 million Somalis were displaced<\/a> by drought over a short period of a few months in 2022. The dire drying of the country, combined with devastating floods and ongoing conflict in the region, caused many families to be uprooted from their villages. <\/p>\n \u201cThese are alarming figures of some of the most vulnerable people forced to abandon the little that they had to head for the unknown,\u201d the Norwegian Refugee Council\u2019s Somalia Country Director, Mohamed Abdi, told the UN Refugee Agency. <\/p>\n All around the world, the climate crisis is disrupting our connection to place, our sense of home.<\/p>\n Currently, an extreme drought has enveloped much of southern Africa. More than 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe are, according to aid groups in the region, facing food scarcity and many families are going hungry. Ongoing drought has \u201cscorched crops that tens of millions of people grow themselves and rely on to survive, helped by what should be the rainy season,\u201d the AP reported<\/a>. \u201cThey can rely on their crops and the weather less and less.\u201d <\/p>\n The southern Africa drought has reached Botswana and Angola, Cambia and Malawi, where in 2023 Cyclone Freddy displaced thousands of people in the small country. <\/p>\n These back-to-back crises highlight a stark contrast between the people moving in front-line nations most vulnerable to rising seas, climate disasters, and displacement and those who move for amenities such as sunny days and warm winters. Particularly in the United States, there\u2019s a lot of sun-drenched magical thinking that continues to drive the movement of people searching for their ideal homes and climate while betting against the odds of climate change and access to water<\/a>. <\/p>\nAll of our lives are intertwined with the natural world, but the changing climate\u2019s effects are not felt equally<\/h3>\n