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All together, one out of every 10 people on the planet lives in a coastal zone less than 33 feet above sea level. If higher seas and extreme weather render these areas uninhabitable, more than 630 million people could be left searching for safer ground. Yet no place in the world is equipped to deal with mass population movements or can accommodate millions of climate refugees. Fragile countries already stretched to their limits could be pushed past the breaking point into complete state failure. As British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett warned the U.N. Security Council, the risk of massive economic disruption and “migration on an unprecedented scale” make climate change a true security threat.
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Already the exodus has begun. On Vanuatu’s Tegua island in the South Pacific, a coastal village of 100 people has been relocated inland as erosion and rising seas raised the underground water table, flooding dwellings and overflowing pit toilets. Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands, with maximum elevation 5 feet above sea level, are set to transplant their 2,000 residents, 10 families at a time, to Bougainville Island, a four-hour boat ride away. The Maldives and Kiribati, both under siege by the inland creep of the tides, have plans to move people from the more vulnerable small islands to larger islands.
Beyond small islands, river deltas are particularly at risk. Category-3 Cyclone Nargis made this clear when it hit Burma’s Ayeyarwady Delta in May 2008. The storm brought fierce winds and a 12-foot storm surge that killed 135,000 people and damaged 9,000 square miles (23,500 square kilometers), including over 60 percent of the country’s rice fields. More than 2 million people felt the impact; five months after the event, close to half of them were still relying on food aid.
Vietnam is directly exposed to sea level rise, with some 18 million people — one fifth of the population — living in the susceptible Mekong Delta. The production of more than half the country’s rice and most of its fish and shrimp depends on seasonal flooding in this area; the risk, however, is that higher seas could alter the regular flooding regime, expanding the area inundated with salty water and rendering cropland unusable. A 3-foot rise in sea level would cover close to half the delta’s land area. Since 2000, when the worst flooding in at least two generations raised the Mekong waters more than 16 feet, the Vietnamese government has embarked on a program to resettle at least 33,000 families out of the most flood-prone areas.
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