DEVELOPED NATIONS

‘We tend to think of climate change as what happens to other people in other countries – typically poor, low-income countries, troubled countries, politically unstable ones,’ says Professor Robert McLeman from the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. ‘But if you look at the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre statistics, a lot of them are in places like the USA.’

For example, you can find Iñupiat communities in Kivalina, an Indigenous village in Alaska, who are having to prepare to move elsewhere due to forecasts showing the likely inundation of their homes by rising sea levels, a far slower moving form of environmental change that nevertheless forces relocation. Similarly, in the UK, the residents of Fairbourne, in Gwynedd, north Wales, have less than 35 years to vacate their village before the council abandons it to the encroaching waves. Happisburgh and many other Norfolk villages have long experienced the sinking feeling of seeing the coastline tiptoe ever closer to their back doors, with many properties now lost to the sea.

‘The advantage that European countries and Americans have is that we have the wealth to build adaptive capacity,’ continues McLeman. ‘We can build sea walls, we can divert rivers, we can organise resettlement of people in small villages in Wales if they can no longer do so. Whereas in a place like Bangladesh, or a small island state in the Pacific, the resources just don’t exist to do that.’