You live in a coastal region where impacts from sea level rise are already evident. Your life or the life of someone you know has already been disrupted due to serious water stressors — either flood, fires, or droughts. Your access to clean drinking water is threatened or non-existent. The place you call home has increasingly been victimized by extreme water-related weather events.
Already, we are colliding with “The Shape of Water.”
A recent article Climate Change May Force Millions Of Americans To Move Inland cites University of Georgia research predicting that by 2100 more than 13 million people in all 50 US states could be effected by sea levels anticipated to rise by 6 feet. NOAA recently issued even more dire predictions:
Earlier this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration upped its worst-case scenario for global sea-level rise to 8.2 feet by the year 2100 — an increase of about 1.5 feet from its last worst-case estimate issued in 2012. In a technical report published in January, the NOAA warned that the U.S. would be especially hard-hit in this extreme projection. Sea-level rise could actually reach up to 10 to 12 feet for all coastal U.S. states except Alaska.
Many major cities, including Boston, Miami, New York and Seattle, would be almost completely submerged in this scenario. Cape Canaveral and the Jefferson Memorial would be underwater, as would the San Francisco International Airport and President Donald Trump’s home away from home, Mar-a-Lago.
On a global scale, the World Bank recently reported that by 2050, 140 million people will be forced to migrate within their countries borders due to climate change; specifically, “droughts, failing crops, rising sea levels, and storm surges.”
Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America – the report warns that unless urgent climate and development action is taken, these three regions could be dealing with a combined total of over 140 million internal climate migrants by 2050.These people will be pushed out by droughts, failing crops, rising sea levels, and storm surges.
H20 Miscellany
- For at least 263 million people across the world, it takes over 30 minutes per round trip to collect water.
- Water shortages could affect 5 billion people by 2050
- SDG6: Access to safe water and sanitation and sound management of freshwater ecosystems are essential to human health and to environmental sustainability and economic prosperity.
