Climate Change and Migration

Rutherford Platt

Human-related climate change is now the foremost threat to humanity and biological systems since the invention of nuclear weapons. As droughts, extreme heat, floods, wildfires, disease, and habitat loss proliferate, the human and non-human populations of ravaged areas seek to survive by migrating to supposedly more habitable locales. Like shipwreck survivors desperately clinging to an overloaded life raft, climate migrants face hostility from the occupants of “the raft” who fear for their own survival. The talk frames the crisis but offers no easy answers.