by Johanna Hoffman
Johanna Hoffman, a member of our Emerging Fellows program wraps up her series of blog posts on the impacts of climate change by taking a long view extended to 2050. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the APF or its other members. There’s no way to know how climate change will reshape world order in the next 30 years. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is certain. Yet amidst that uncertainty, one factor remains consistent -- climate change will create momentous, grave change. Global temperatures will continue to rise. With hotter temperatures will come rising seas, with hundreds of millions of people potentially displaced as a result. The climatic changes that bring sea level rise also result in stronger hurricanes, more intense rainfall, greater flooding, and storm surge. Droughts will last longer. Raging fire seasons, such as the one ravaging the western coast of North America, will become the norm. Intense, unpredictable and dangerous environmental change will be our collective reality. The myriad consequences of these changes – mounting numbers of refugees and spikes in forced migration, border conflicts and increasing resource scarcity – will have similarly widespread impacts beyond their immediate locales. Just look to what has been happening across Europe in the years since the start of the Syrian Civil War to see what 2050 could like across the globe. These changes are likely to spur increasing fragility in the nation state paradigm. When conditions turn volatile, many leaders move to concentrate power through emergency restrictions and crisis management policies. Restrictive trade regulations, travel limits, and stronger immigration controls. Harsher punishment for protesters and political dissidents frequently go hand in hand, creating inward-looking cultures skeptical about the value of multilateral action. With climate change an inherently international issue, the lack of cooperative, long-term vision that characterize these kinds of regimes can easily create a vicious cycle of increasing environmental degradation and tightening despotic response. Such moves are rarely reversed over time, often aggravating political polarization and paving the way for more dictatorships and authoritarian rule, trajectories that are already taking place in countries from Brazil to Turkey. Potential options for a more conflict free future could be sourced from more effective international cooperation, technological innovation and declines in carbon emissions. Yet collective will and human hubris are significant hurdles to overcome. Rebuilding global institutions like the UN to reflect and repair the longstanding scars of colonialism and address the rapid changes already affecting economies, public health and geopolitical standing across the world, could well continue to be viewed as a pipe dream well out of reach. Yet the coronavirus pandemic of the past year has revealed how broken our systems already are, how quickly change is coming, and just how much is at stake. Now is the time for imagination. To address the many, dangerous and rapidly approaching impacts of climate change head on, we need different kinds of global systems, ones that do not operate on the assumption that certain parts of the world can be disposable and that certain populations can be left to die. Only by cultivating our connections to each other can we find ways to take shelter in our rapidly shifting ground. © Johanna Hoffman 2020
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