You've gone vegan, you recycle your plastic.
You always drive electric.
You've even replaced holidays with staycations.
Welcome, everybody.
Welcome to a very spontaneous staycation.
Welcome back to another staycation vlog.
I'm going on a staycation. It's 2040
and you've done your part in fighting climate change, but it's not enough.
You live by the sea
and all those reports of sea level rise you've been reading for the past 20 years
weren’t exaggerating. The seawall
didn’t work.
There’s a tsunami warning and a giant storm is 3 hours away.
What would you do?
Would you rush and leave everything behind to escape?
Or would you stay?
Take your chances and ride that wave?
Or can we avoid that worst case scenario by taking action right now
so that you're never forced to make that awful choice?
We're
experiencing the climate crisis in a lot of different ways.
Some are slow burn existential threats looming on the horizon,
and some are sudden disasters that can wash away
entire communities in a flash.
As climate breakdown continues to overwhelm various parts of the planet,
we're constantly on the run away from rising seas and rising temperatures.
If things continue like this, climate migration
will completely reshape our lives and redraw world maps
because we're not talking about thousands or even millions of people here.
The UN's International Organization for Migration estimates
there could be 1.5 billion environmental migrants by 2050.
They're fleeing places like Guatemala,
sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Bangladesh, where extreme
weather is making some areas increasingly difficult to live in.
So they have no choice but to pack up their bags.
This is the next phase of the climate crisis.
Climate migration isn't a question of if, but a question of when.
Climate migration will reshape the world, and we need to be prepared.
Like this community here in Fiji. In 2014, after years of flooding
and saltwater erosion, 140 people in the little village of Vunidogoloa,
instead of waiting for when it's too late, did something surprising.
Today we launched the first project, Fiji,
to save an entire village from the rising sea levels caused by climate change.
They got up and moved with help from the government.
They relocated as a community.
This is called managed retreat.
The idea of proactively moving communities away
from climate vulnerable areas before disaster strikes.
Managed retreat has taken many forms.
Governments buying out vulnerable neighborhoods.
Entire communities moving together
as a group or new settlements, bringing a group of people together.
But in every scenario, it's a massive challenge.
Moving communities means thinking about food, jobs, businesses, social networks.
That's why managed retreat has always been considered a kind of radical idea,
a last resort for when s**t really hits the fan.
Managed retreat has become two dirty words. But to be honest,
we can't really think of it like that anymore because that reality
is fast becoming a new normal
and some countries have already started experimenting with it.
Look at Bangladesh, a country with limited resources to protect
its most vulnerable areas from rising sea levels.
Every year
climate change is forcing half a million Bangladeshis from their rural homes.
Most end up in Dhaka City slums, where space is running out.
The government started to build around 20 new climate resilient
towns with the aim of helping people move and settle there.
And this is all before disaster hits in full scale.
The point is: they’re doing this proactively and not reactively.
Look, managed retreat isn't perfect.
In many ways it's problematic.
But what it really comes down to is it's no one's first choice to leave the home.
Relocation in whatever form is hard.
People stand to lose livelihoods, family connections, ties to their cultures,
not to mention access to basic things like health care,
food, water and mental health support.
There are also huge social justice questions at play here.
Who gets to decide who lives where and when?
Who pays for it?
How will communities continue to be supported if not done right?
Managed retreat can even widen historic inequalities.
Winter storms are literally eating the village alive.
In the US, 500 people in the native Alaskan island of Kivalina
have been trying to relocate after years of coastal flooding.
But they couldn't get federal funding to do that.
Since 2008, they've been fighting a legal battle
and still haven't secured support from the government.
The ice they used to freeze and preserve food is melting
and everything is taking a massive mental toll there.
It's left the island struggling, but it doesn't always go wrong.
Remember Fiji?
Turns out consulting communities on how to plan their move,
empowering them to make decisions and giving them resources they need,
were crucial for success and even left the communities
with improved social, ecological and health outcomes.
That move was successful because the people had agency.
Don't get me wrong.
Managed retreat will never be the ideal choice.
It's complicated and radical and very, very expensive.
Lower income countries need a lot more money
from the richer north to help them adapt to climate change.
And who knows when that's coming?
Because we've been talking about it for quite a while now.
They said, for example, that 2015 is supposed to be
$100 billion each year.
None of this has realized to date.
And as always,
not only do these countries not have enough resources
they’re also the most vulnerable to climate disasters.
I get it.
You think the word retreat implies defeat, but it couldn't be farther away
from that.
It's about facing the challenge head on and facing it together.
Because a climate migration crisis is a global crisis.
Every one of us is impacted.
The way I see it, is managed retreat can give us a chance
to avoid trying to salvage our status quo and perhaps instead intentionally
designing a sustainable
and just future while preparing for what we know is yet to come.
Because disaster never strikes with enough warning.