US faces floods of climate refugees

By Tim Radford

LONDON, 24 March, 2016 – By the century’s end, millions of US citizens could become climate refugees. A study of US counties vulnerable to sea level rise warns that if the coasts are not protected, the movement of people could match the scale of the 20th-century “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the south to the northern states.

Altogether, the new research concludes, more than 13 million people could be affected by a sea level rise of 1.8 metres. This is the high end of climate science projections for sea level rise, but even at the low end a rise of 0.9 metres will put more than 4 million people at risk.

And another study of vulnerability worldwide suggests that, everywhere, the cha