Extreme Weather Will Displace 200 Million People Within 20 Years Li Cohen - CBS News
go to original June 11, 2022

Catastrophic flooding displaced more than 40,000 people in South Africa in April. This month, a record-breaking hurricane killed at least 11 people in Mexico. And according to one disaster relief organization, the impacts of extreme weather events such as these are only going to get worse.

Sanj Srikanthan, CEO of the international group ShelterBox, which provides essentials to people impacted by conflict and natural disasters, told Reuters that, on average, 11.3 million people have lost their homes over the last five years because of climate change-related disasters.

"So if you extrapolate that over the next 20 years, 200 million people are going to lose their homes," Srikanthan said. "And that's obviously conservative because that number is increasing and the issue is that the system that we exist in, ShelterBox, to respond to these kind of disasters wasn't designed for this kind of volume."

What Srikanthan describes is climate migration, the forced relocation of people due to climate change. And it's something that is already being seen around the world, and that experts and officials have repeatedly warned will get worse.

In the fall of 2020, for example, roughly 10,000 people attempted to migrate to North America from Central America after two catastrophic storms — Hurricanes Eta and Iota, made landfall two weeks and 15 miles apart. Nearly 600,000 people in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua were displaced. This past April, catastrophic flooding in South Africa killed 448 people and displaced more than 40,000 more.

Srikanthan said that it's essential for the world to "address the fact that the world is getting warmer and we could do something about it." He said that there needs to be more resilient housing and that aid should be pre-positioned more effectively.

"If we don't do those things we are not going to be able to keep up," he said.

Read the rest at CBS News

Related: 7 Ways to Manage Climate Anxiety (EcoWatch)

Related: Why Mental Health Is a Priority for Action on Climate Change (World Health Organization)

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