Relocation problems related to global warming are already happening. Every where, even before the current warming, people have historically fought over resources when ever one side has less access to water, fuel, food, medicine and more.
Africa has several conflicts currently raging over resources. In Nigeria, it is mostly over oil. In the Congo and Rwanda it is over water and mineral rights, as well the fuel, and threatened habitat for sustaining wildlife. In the Cote D’Ivoire and Liberia, refugees in the hundreds of thousands are fleeing and relocating
with civil unrest, and severe shortages of everything, including shelter. In East Africa, a food crisis continues to keep Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia in a desperate struggle.
Africa is a true hot spot influenced by shortages due to plundered forests, desertification, failed crops, use of damaging farming techniques, continued burning of carbon fuels, and over population all threaten stability there. It has been said if there was this much war and refugee unrest in Europe it would surely be labeled as World War III.
Yet Africa is by no means the only place struggling with shortages. Food prices are up world wide, water access is getting more difficult in desert regions, and water wars are already underway in parts of Europe, the Americas, and India.
In the Middle East the shortages have been presented more along the lines of human rights. Although oil always figures into any picture of global conflict, it is secondary to the corrupt regimes and despotism that saw so many public uprisings in the “Arab Spring.”
In Europe and America a crises of manufacturing has loomed, with China providing so many outsourced jobs, and westerners experiencing a shortage of credit. The populace of Europe and America still suffers under a financial crash begun in 2008, after deregulations caused bubbles in everything from the BP oil spill, to unbridled greed on Wall Street to topple security there. It is directly related to global warming because the concept of abundance in all resources, finances, and “development” itself finds its shaky foundation in the erroneous idea that all growth, having been limitless before, is limitless still. Of course, Earth itself is a finite resource.
It just took the impact and carbon foot print of seven billion people for it to begin to be keenly felt world wide. As glaciers melt, seas rise, less clean air, water, and soil are available, shortages, wars, famine, floods, storms, and more will generate more and more crowded hoards of refugees. With the refugees also come more and more demands made upon habitats and wildlife, forest, and field. Also, come the many pandemics and disease that follow every war, just at the 1918 floods of returning soldiers spread the most lethal flu epidemic known in history.
All that said, there is still great hope, as finally people around the world are beginning to see that what humans have caused through over plunder, humans can fix with conservation, green energy, and a true appreciation of nature’s sustainability.
