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For Egypt’s Nile Delta, a 3-foot rise in sea level could displace close to 8 million people and flood 12 percent of the country’s agricultural area. Natural barriers to the encroaching sea are being lost because the Aswan Dam blocks sediment deposits that otherwise would sustain the delta. Salty ocean water already makes its way onto farmland, hampering wheat production. Concrete barriers line the harbor of the ancient city of Alexandria, but they cannot always keep the waves at bay.
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Higher seas could also prove disastrous for densely populated Bangladesh’s 161 million residents, many of whom already suffer from annual flooding. A 3-foot sea level rise would submerge close to half the country’s rice fields and displace tens of millions of people. India has built a fence on the border with Bangladesh to stave off illegal migration, but if the rise of the ocean is not stopped, concrete and barbed wire are unlikely to prevent the flows of climate migrants.
While small islands and low-lying developing countries seem the likely first fronts for environmental evacuation, industrial countries are not immune. Hurricane Katrina, which hit the already-subsiding Louisiana coast in late August 2005 with heavy winds and a 28-foot storm surge, forced the evacuation of close to 1 million residents of New Orleans and the surrounding area. Of those who left, more than 200,000 never returned. They took up permanent residence elsewhere, becoming the first major wave of U.S. climate refugees.
Following Katrina, a $125 billion disaster, major U.S. population centers have largely dodged the bullet of tropical storms. In September 2008, Hurricane Gustav urged the temporary evacuation of New Orleans before it changed course and softened its blow. Hurricane Ike, a storm remarkable in size and wind speed, fortunately weakened before making U.S. landfall, but still ravaged Galveston, Texas. The two storms arrived after tearing through Cuba (long a paragon of evacuation and return), damaging more than 440,000 homes and temporarily displacing more than 1 million people.
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