I’ve been using Medium as one mechanism to catch interesting climate crisis related content. It didn’t take me long to figure out that reviewing the results could be a full-time job-plus, all on its own. And don’t you know, there are plenty of Substack writers on the subject, plus organizations governmental, NGO, academic, scientific, and notable individuals added in. Keeping current is pushing me further and further backward.

Medium is interesting in the way it parcels out its algorithm-driven suggested readings, and a recent example is its flagging of an essay titled “Climate Resilience, Migration and Cities,” attributed to Tabea Sonnenschein and Omer Juma as part of Urban AI’s Emerging Leaders Program. The interest flag is on target, but this essay published on Urban AI’s Medium page, goes back to last fall.  Apparently Medium isn’t worried about my reading overload in presenting old(er) posts. On the other hand, I’ve now followed this page, so, blame on me. By the way, Urban AI describes itself as “The 1st Think Tank on Urban Artificial Intelligences,” so that’s cool.

The basic takeaway from the essay is that the overwhelming demographically young population is found in equatorial and southern regions around the globe (and in the article this is referred to as the Global South). In the Global South, there are more areas and populations facing ever-increasing climate crises (and with plenty of already existing and significant examples) than in what I’ll presume to call the Global North. Part of the challenge is that Global South lacks much in the way of amelioration capacity (i.e., funds), thus making climate migration of a lot of this population unavoidable in the coming years.

Climate migration of a lot of this population will be unavoidable in the coming years unless, of course, there are sufficient resources to correct or compensate for climate crisis conditions, which the authors don’t seem all that optimistic about. The authors point out that climate migration, especially if not otherwise planned for by the target nations, is not a good solution. Apparently, even these French academics understand that Ron DeSantis can only fly or bus so many such migrants to Massachusetts, California, New York, and Michigan.

Put aside my being a wisenheimer for a moment, and appreciate the population numbers involved (references, Global Migration Synopsis, IOM, 2019b; Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2018; and OECD, 2017): by 2050, 143 million people in the Global South will experience climate change-induced internal displacement, with somewhere between 200 million to a billion climate change-induced migrants overall.

There have been plenty of papers and reports and even some general media news items on this topic, but this reminder comes by way of Medium and serves as a good example of the problem statement.