The Future (33 page)

There are also often negative consequences in countries where large numbers of migrants are leaving. Chief among them is the problem caused by a brain drain when highly trained professionals—such as doctors and nurses—leave their countries of origin, in part because their skills make it much easier for them to find lucrative employment and
higher standards of living in developed countries. When middle-class families migrate, there is often diminished support in their countries of origin for continued investments in public goods like education and health care. At the same time, the increasing percentage of migrant and domestic minority populations in developed countries has sometimes appeared to weaken the social contract supporting the provision of public goods—particularly public education—when phenomena such as white flight to private schools
results in less support for public school budgets.

Nevertheless, many destination countries have adopted policies designed to attract higher-skilled migrants. And the need for low-wage workers in many developed countries with smaller than optimal workforces has also led to a significant expansion of temporary worker programs—particularly in the
United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Colleges and universities have also significantly increased their recruiting of migrant students from foreign countries.

Many of the nations and regions from which migrants originate also experience some positive benefits, particularly in the form of remittances, especially from migrants leaving lower-middle-income countries. The remittances sent by migrants back to their families
totaled $351 billion in 2011 and are projected to reach $441 billion in 2014.

The amount of remittances sent back to their communities of origin by internal migrants is believed to be much larger. In China, internal migrants from rural areas send an average of $545 per year
back home from the cities where they work. In Bangladesh, the Coalition for the Urban Poor calculates that migrants from rural areas to the capital city of Dhaka routinely send back home
as much as 60 percent of their income.
Indian migrants from the poor states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal routinely send money orders from Mumbai back to their home communities in amounts that make up the
majority of money flowing into those three states.

Alongside the flows of international and internal migrants are growing numbers of refugees. According to the international treaty on refugees, the definition of a refugee is someone who, unlike a migrant, leaves his or her country of origin due to the fear of violence or persecution. Almost 44 million people around the world have been forced from their nations of origin by conflict or persecution—of which 15.4 million are classified as refugees—and another 27.5 million people have been displaced by violence and
persecution to new communities within their own country.

The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, notes that 70 percent of current refugees have been in that status for more than five years, and as a result, “
it’s becoming more and more difficult to find solutions for them.” Twelve million among them are stateless,
meaning they have no place to go home to. In the last five years, for the first time,
more refugees moved to cities than to refugee camps. While equal numbers of migrants traveled to developed and developing countries,
80 percent of refugees live in poor regions of the world.

All of the large source countries for refugees are mired in violent conflicts, including Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Myanmar, Colombia, and Sudan. The two largest source
countries for refugees are Afghanistan and Iraq. The ill-fated decision by the United States in 2002 to invade Iraq—thus prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan as well, by prematurely removing troops that had encircled Osama bin Laden—has had a cascading impact on the entire region, flooding neighboring countries with refugees.

The three million Afghans displaced by the war in their home country have fled
mostly to Pakistan (1.9 million) and Iran (one million). The 1.7 million refugees from
Iraq have also gone mostly to neighboring countries. Indeed, according to the
World Development Report
, more than three quarters of refugees worldwide
are hosted in nations neighboring their country of origin. The largest number are now living in Asia and the Pacific (2 million—most of them in South Asia), Sub-Saharan Africa
(2.2 million—403,000 of them in one country, Kenya!), and the
Middle East and North Africa (another 1.9 million).

However, more than 1.6 million refugees, the vast majority of them Muslim, have found their way to Europe, further exacerbating xenophobic tensions and increasing fears of radicalization of poorly assimilated young Muslim populations living in Europe;
Muslims already make up 5 percent of Europe’s population. The surge of international migrants from North Africa and South Asia into Europe has also triggered a renewal of xenophobia, even in countries previously known for their commitment to tolerance. In several European countries, the combination of economic stress and the growing numbers of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, has disrupted the political balance as extreme right-wing and
nativist groups exploit the public’s uneasiness.

T
HE FASTEST GROWING
new category of refugees is climate refugees. Although they are not legally classified as refugees (because the definition in the Refugee Protocol requires that the source of their motivating fear be violence or persecution from other people), they are nevertheless routinely described as refugees because their migration is not voluntary. In the U.N.’s
State of the World’s Refugees
report from June 2012, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon noted that the traditional causes of forced displacement, “conflict and human rights abuses,” are now “increasingly intertwined with and compounded by other factors,” many of them related “
to the relentless advance of climate change.”

Israel announced a major national plan last May on climate change that included a recommendation to build “sea fences” near its maritime borders on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, linked with impassable barriers on its land borders, in order
to protect against a predicted wave of climate refugees. “Climate change is already here and requires comprehensive preparations,” said
Israeli environmental protection minister Gilad Erdan. “The lack of water, warming and sea level rise, even if it will occur on a different schedule, will bring migration movements from all impoverished regions to every place
where it is possible to escape this,” the study noted.

One of the two leaders of the team authoring the report, Professor Arnon Soffer of the University of Haifa’s Geography Department, added, “The migration wave is not a problem for the future. It is today,
it is going on now.… It will just increase from day to day.” Noting that European navies prevent most boats with migrants from reaching Europe, he said they are forced to go elsewhere, but “in India they shoot, in Nepal
they shoot, in Japan they shoot.” The team noted that climate refugees are expected from Africa, where approximately 800 lakes have dried up completely in the last decade, including the former largest lake in Africa, Lake Chad, which mobilized
many climate refugees eastward into the Darfur region.

Persistent droughts and desertification in Somalia have also contributed to the violent conflict there. Other climate refugees attempting to migrate to Israel are expected from Jordan, the
Palestinian territories, Syria, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. In addition, still more internal climate refugees are expected from the Negev, from which many Bedouins have already moved to cities in the center of Israel. Soffer added, “If we want to keep Israel a Jewish state, we will have to defend ourselves from what I call ‘climate refugees,’
exactly as Europe is doing now.”

U.S. assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell recently wrote that the impact of climate change on Africa and South Asia, including “the expected decline in food production and fresh drinking water, combined with the increased conflict sparked by resource scarcity,” is likely to produce “a surge in the number of Muslim immigrants to the European Union (EU),” doubling Europe’s Muslim population within the next twelve years, “and it will be much larger if, as we expect, the effects of climate change
spur additional migration from Africa and South Asia.”

A few years ago, I visited the southernmost extremity of the European Union, Spain’s Canary Islands, just off the coast of West Africa. I found many conversations dominated by concerns of residents about the surge of refugees attempting to migrate by boat from Africa to their most convenient point of entry into the European Union. In some years, more than 20,000 Africans have attempted
the dangerous journey across to the Canaries.

Over the next century, the global community can expect millions of climate refugees. Almost 150 million people now live in low-lying areas only
one meter or less higher than the current sea level. For each additional meter of sea level rise, roughly 100 million more people will be forced to
abandon the places they call home. And this number, of course, does not include refugees from desertifying dryland areas.

The dimensions of the climate crisis are described in
Chapter 6
,
along with the difficult but cost-effective and necessary responses. What is clear now, however, is that even with global warming in its early stages, the growth of human civilization is already pressing hard against limitations that are complicating our ability to provide the essentials of life for billions of people.

For example, where topsoil and groundwater are concerned, there is a disconnect between the frenzied rate of exploitation of both these resources on the one hand, and the extremely slow rate with which either resource can be regenerated on the other. Renewable groundwater aquifers fill back up, on average, at the
rate of less than one half of one percent per year. Similarly, topsoil regenerates naturally—but at the agonizingly slow rate of
approximately 2.5 centimeters every 500 years.

In just the last forty years, the overexploitation of topsoil has led to the loss of a significant amount of
productivity on almost one third of the arable land on Earth. Without urgent action, the majority of the Earth’s topsoil could be severely degraded or lost before the end of this century. In China, topsoil is being lost fifty-seven times faster than this natural replacement process; in Europe seventeen times faster. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it is being lost in the United States
ten times faster than it can be replenished. Ethiopia is now losing almost two billion tons of topsoil every year to rain washing the
erodible soils down the steep slopes of its terrain.

In the case of groundwater, the nearly total depletion of some important aquifers and the sharply dropping levels of others have now focused the attention of experts in many countries on the future of this resource. The doubling of the global withdrawal rate over the last half century—and the projection that withdrawals will continue to increase at an even faster pace—
have many experts beginning to get very worried. In many areas, the withdrawals from aquifers now far exceed the rate of replenishment;
many aquifers are now falling several meters per year.

I
T IS AS
if we are willfully blind to the basic underlying reality of our relationship to the Earth’s limited resources. But this seeming blindness is reinforced by the world’s principal method of accounting for natural
resources, which treats their use as income rather than withdrawals from capital. This is, in the words of economist Herman Daly, “a colossal accounting error.… At least we should put the
costs and the benefits in separate accounts for comparison.”

The basic distinction between operating income and withdrawals from capital is crucial, whether one is accounting for a company or a nation. In the words of a classic accounting text, if this distinction is misunderstood and improperly made, it leads to “
practical confusion between income and capital.” Another seminal accounting text notes that “net income of an entity for any period is the maximum amount that can be distributed to its owners during the period and still allow the entity to have the same net worth at the end of the period as at the beginning.… In other words, capital must be maintained before an entity can earn income.” This same principle
holds true for nations and for the world as a whole. In recognition of this principle, the U.N. Statistical Commission in 2012 adopted a
“system of environmental-economic accounts” as a step toward integrating environmental externalities. In 2007, the European Union launched its “beyond GDP” initiative, and is due to release an assessment by all member states of their “natural capital” in 2014.

When Simon Kuznets warned in 1937 that misuse of GDP would make us vulnerable to such accounting errors and could lead to a form of willful blindness, he noted that conflicts over resources might well exacerbate the risk inherent in the admittedly flawed design of his elaborate accounting system:

In an example of the precise problem Kuznets was anticipating, today—all around the world—calculations about the impact of groundwater
withdrawals are often at “
the center of conflict of opposing social groups.” Often, officials in regions where water supplies are shared with other regions or countries—and whose farms and businesses would be disrupted by any change in water allocations—have strong incentives to minimize the seriousness of the problem—putting off for the future a problem they would rather not deal with in the near term. It’s an all too familiar challenge for anyone who works on global warming.