A few years ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the future. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration - they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced - but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”
Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production.
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