Join Bob Henson and attribution science experts for a webinar on Friday, May 3 at 12 p.m. Eastern. Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our newsletters. Stay in the know about climate impacts and solutions. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Yale Climate Connections “A climate-driven migration has already begun,” writes climate change journalist Abrahm Lustgarten in his must-read book, “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” which I reviewed in my previous post. And few places in the U.S. will likely see more climate migrants than Atlanta, which lies close to coastal areas of the Southeast U.S. where sea level rise can be expected to displace millions of people this century. Through the eyes of Jairo Garcia, former director of climate policy at the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience, Lustgarten tells Atlanta’s climate change story. Every city will face enormous climate-change-related challenges in the coming decades, and Atlanta has been more proactive than most U.S. cities at confronting climate change. However, the city is drastically unprepared to deal with both a changing climate and a huge increase in population, Lustgarten writes. By the 2040s, the Atlanta metro area could grow by 50%, from 5.8 million people to 9 million - even without the extra influx of people climate change migration might bring. Past global climate-related migrations suggest that people prefer to change their lives as little as possible and stay as close to home as they can by moving to a nearby urban area. Lustgarten cites a 2017 study by Mathew Hauer of the University of Georgia, which predicted that over 320,000 climate refugees could be expected to move into Atlanta by 2100 from a hypothetical 1.8-meter sea level rise. The only U.S. cities likely to see more sea-level-rise-driven climate migrants are Austin, Texas (over 800,000 migrants) and Orlando, Florida... |