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Using the above definition of “community”: What one or two themes in the movie especially impact YOUR community? Give evidence from the movie connected to evidence in your community to support this assertion. Use photographs or statistics from your community to support these themes.

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Using the above definition of “community”: What one or two themes in the movie especially impact YOUR community? Give evidence from the movie connected to evidence in your community to support this assertion. Use photographs or statistics from your community to support these themes.

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Add to the Padlet Board using the (+) icon. This week you can also add comments to  posts.

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The Environment: Climatic Change as a result of deforestation

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The Environment: Climatic Change as a result of deforestation

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Deforestation is Disastrous to Climatic Change

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Good example of what good leadership for COVID pandemic would look like
https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronavirusfrontlines/2020/07/21/an-infectious-disease-doctor-explains-why-the-us-is-failing-to-control-the-coronavirus-pandemic--and-how-that-can-be-fixed/?fbclid=IwAR1lroDIl3i5mDMCDUDmNL4Y41kO3SG5cPdU5Vi_Gj4vRVmeDxz8Bo_r6nM#734d894d59a4

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"As islands experience land loss and the
loss of freshwater access populations will be forced to
exit their homes and seek new homelands elsewhere.
People will exit cities and countries hoping to establish
new homes in places where the basic necessities of life
can be met. Often this will result in the weakening or extinction of unique cultures. Countries like Australia,
where continuing drought in the interior lands and
coastal impacts are reducing the areas of habitability,
will close their doors to most immigrants. Responding to
ecogees or environmental refugees will become a global
issue."

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My community is concerned with food and water security. This article very well illustrates the overall U.S. situation. In New Mexico we are rural, not urban, and we are agrarian. But we still have to educate so many residents about procuring food, harvesting water, and departing from fossil fuel.

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Until early 2020, consumer spending on food in the United States had been remarkably stable, growing by around 4 percent over the previous five years. Total sales were roughly split evenly between retail outlets (such as grocery stores and supermarkets) and food-service companies (such as restaurants, hospitals, and schools). And until February, revenues were continuing in the same direction.

Then came March and with it, the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, physical distancing and associated lockdowns have dramatically reversed the trend of consumer spending on food. Consumers, forgoing public venues and eating at home, stocked up on groceries and supplies, boosting sales for the month by 29 percent over the prior year. Meanwhile, sales declined at restaurants, fast-food locations, coffee venues, and casual-dining locations by 27 percent (Exhibit 1).

By now, ripple effects into that previously balanced system have become clear. Distribution channels have been upended, with food stranded upstream, creating food-security risks for vulnerable populations. Companies that produce, convert, and deliver food to consumers and businesses face a web of interrelated risks and uncertainties across all steps in the value chain-from farmers to end-customer channels. Food-service suppliers, for example, faced abrupt order cancellations across their entire customer bases. That left many of them with excess stock that they couldn't easily redirect to consumers because of packaging-size mismatches. Few home chefs have the cupboard space to accommodate restaurant-size cans of fruit and vegetables, but creating consumer-friendly formats would require additional investment of capital and time. And that would put perishable materials at risk, threatening narrow margins among prices, logistics, and transaction costs.

Not surprisingly, all that creates uncertainty across the global value chain, with distinct challenges for farmers, distributors, producers, consumer- and packaged-goods companies, and retailers alike. Managers with a clear understanding of the challenges across the sector will be better prepared to decide whether to wait out the crisis or to invest for a longer-term shift in consumer spending. Much also depends on whether-and how quickly-they expect a return to pre-pandemic norms.

Farmers

For many farm operations that require significant amounts of labor (mainly, production of specialty crops, such as strawberries and lettuce), the most pressing pandemic-related challenge faced so far was the availability of workers. Some farmers faced other distinct challenges, such as a steep drop in grain prices following a shock to oil demand. Those value chains are operated in rural areas with low population density and limited opportunities to find skilled labor.

Within the United States, multiple farming and processing value chains are dependent on migrant workers, including those under sponsored visa programs. Only three in ten workers in the US agricultural workforce are born in or are citizens of the United States; the rest are born in other countries, and many are in the United States on guest agricultural visas. If concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic persist, it may be challenging to find workers, even at a premium, as people avoid close-quarters activities and limit their own exposure risk. Since worker wages are already a significant cost factor for farms, the pandemic may further strain farm economics.

Moreover, movement restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic could deter nonlocal workforces from moving among counties or states for work. That would further increase labor challenges for farms, leading to shortages during production peaks and putting harvests at risk. Difficulties in redeploying workers to farms connected to retail-demand-driven organizations or to processing plants with consistent or increased demand could further amplify the imbalance among channels.

With such uncertain futures, the dilemma farmers face is whether they should change crops; plow ahead with planned crops, hoping for a return to normal; or exit production entirely. For many value chains, crops can be returned once rotations are complete. For value chains in areas such as dairy, it can take years to recover production after farmers decide to reduce herds. Already, farmers are taking extreme measures to deal with excess product-for example, breaking eggs, spilling milk, and plowing under crops. If farmers go a step further to reduce capacity, such as eliminating hens, culling herds, and selling farmland, they could reduce capacity for the long term. That could lead to product shortages and price increases for both food producers and consumers when downstream demand returns.

With such uncertain futures, the dilemma farmers face is whether they should change crops; plow ahead with planned crops, hoping for a return to normal; or exit production entirely.

Food-service distributors

Distributors run an optimized and stable supply chain, with upstream orders coming in that anticipate downstream orders going out. Margins depend on there being a steady flow in both directions and having only a subset of products in inventory awaiting orders.

Immediately after coronavirus-related shutdowns, outbound orders suddenly stopped because of government-mandated closures of restaurants, even though inbound orders of food kept coming in from farmers, food-service producers, and processors. That led to logistical bottlenecks and storage-space shortages as distributors worked to cancel incoming shipments of inventory from farmers. Distributors have been significantly affected by quick-service and casual-dining restaurants in their switch to takeout only, with slow recovery given the staged return to full service. Some distributors have also adapted by at least partially initiating online-ordering and delivery services, but that has not been universal. For those unaccustomed to supplying the retail channel, redirecting their sales adds the complexity of modifying their current supply chains-and that can also add to costs.

Having rebalanced supplies with outgoing orders, food-service distributors are now left with overcapacity in their storage facilities and distribution networks, including the costlier "cold chain"-the temperature-controlled storage, equipment, and logistics needed to maintain a desired low temperature. The dilemma distributors face is how to stabilize their network cost structures in the interim. They could scale down support within each facility while maintaining a footprint. Or they could consolidate their networks of state-aligned distribution centers into regional ones, in spite of increased miles and lead times in a highly competitive environment. But consolidating some distribution centers and exiting others would reduce overall capacity in the long term. It would also limit local distribution options for food-service companies when demand returns, reducing channels for food-service producers as well.

Food-service producers

Food-service producers, such as produce and meat processors, face similar volume declines as their distributors do. Although in-store sales have increased to date, that increase has not covered the scale of decrease in food service, so plant utilizations remain significantly reduced. Additionally, many producers' brands may not be recognized by retail consumers, making it difficult to gauge demand immediately.

Moreover, many food-service producers have already invested in equipment and facilities to produce and package food in large multi-serving formats for complex prepared-, processed-, frozen-, canned-, and packaged-food value chains. It would be highly inefficient to reconfigure those investments to single service sizes. In addition, producers' plant personnel may be at risk of infection, since, in some cases, the factories require associates to work in close proximity.

For food-service producers, the dilemma is around the two- to five-year payback period of new packaging lines. Reinvesting and rebalancing a food-service network for retail is not a straightforward decision. Companies making new investments would be facing a 40 percent or more decline in revenue. And any number of issues could extend the payback period or make investments unrecoverable. Forecasts are uncertain, for example, about the duration of pandemic-related demand shifts, the recovery of the food-service economy, and the timeline of returning to full employment. Competition for volume is already putting downward pressure on prices. And short-term solutions, such as manual packing, are labor intensive and face incremental challenges because of physical-distancing precautions.

Consumer and packaged-goods companies

Retail-facing consumer- and packaged-goods companies are facing multiple challenges because of the COVID-19 crisis. As with many companies in manufacturing, they bear risks related to employees working in close quarters at plants functioning at peak capacity. They also face significant increase in demand for certain product types (especially shelf-stable products) and packaging types (such as smaller sizes for home consumption) for which they have limited capabilities and capacity to supply. And they have distribution challenges because of a heightened demand for trucking coupled with a reduction in third-party-logistics capacity. That increases both competition and prices for trucking capacity.

Recent COVID-19 infections at meat-processor plants have raised the possibility of mass closures of plants, causing significant risk to a value chain with limited excess capacity. As of this writing, 18 processing plants in the United States have already been closed, affecting more than a third of the country's beef and pork supply. The US government recently invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to keep plants open. To comply, companies are offering a blend of incentives and incremental safety investments to maximize worker attendance and plant production-and to keep the food supply chain running.

Companies are increasing production to maintain their presence on retail shelves, offering incentives to keep employees at work, and expediting raw materials (or engaging new suppliers) to meet production demand. Some companies are also increasing their e-commerce presence by going direct to consumer, given the spike in e-commerce purchases during the COVID-19 crisis. Those actions can add costs even as on-shelf prices stay fixed-in the face of competition or to avoid raising prices under crisis conditions, some have already brought mothballed production lines back into service and are evaluating their manufacturing footprints to reduce the number of plants.

But consumer- and packaged-goods companies still face the dilemmas of how to approach demand peaks and what demand scenario to prepare for. A company might continue scaling up production at the expense of margin, but when capacity is truly maximized, it will need to decide whether to activate mothballed facilities, make acquisitions, or invest in new or external capacity. It might also partner with food-service producers that likely have excess capacity or even pass up volume requests from retailers, allowing consumer trials and potential long-term share loss to competitor brands and private labels.

Grocery retailers

Grocery stores are benefiting from significant demand increases from demand previously met by food-service companies. However, they face additional challenges and extraordinary activities to protect and serve their consumers. Those include constant and visible cleaning of stores, frequent loading of shelves to keep up with demand, hazard-pay bonuses and incentives to maintain employee numbers, and hiring of additional labor, with limited time for training.

Challenges also include the cost of expanded hours of operation (since foot traffic is limited because of physical distancing), the cost of scaling up online-ordering and delivery systems, and the associated cost of handling consumer complaints for late and errant deliveries. E-commerce has bridged the gap of declining foot traffic in the retail world, with surging delivery volumes across multiple channels escalating the importance of last-mile delivery during the COVID-19 crisis. The e-commerce channel now represents 10 to 15 percent of total grocery spend, increasing fivefold in the past few weeks. That has created a lot of strain in the system, as there are multiple challenges associated with last-minute delivery, given the significant ramp-up in labor required with limited training time. Walmart, for example, has hired 50,000 additional people, and Instacart has hired 300,000, even as they navigate new COVID-19-related safety precautions.

In the months since the pandemic began, Amazon, Walmart, and most grocers have reported impressive sales increases, but margin growth has significantly lagged. At the same time, consumers are facing increasing economic hardship, limiting their ability to pay for goods. Many retailers are caught between the demand of reassuring consumers, protecting workers, and maintaining supply at increasing costs, and the need to maintain value for consumers. They may be able to increase throughput for their supply chains, despite what will likely be a finite period of increased demand, but will need to maintain high product quality even while establishing relationships with new suppliers. And there is always the risk of potential new entrants and additional channel shifts in the next normal.

What can be done now and in the future?

In the short to medium terms, in the absence of a COVID-19 vaccine, the challenges for each value-chain participant will continue. The severity of those challenges will depend on how quickly and safely governments open up economies and how quickly channels restabilize. Even after reopening, food service will continue to face significant challenges (such as requirements for a minimum distance between patrons, causing operating constraints) that may affect demand.

Given fixed prices and cost-driven margin compression in retailer value chains, the returns on investment may not exist for farmers, producers, distributors, and retailers to make medium-term investments to address channel mismatches via investments and rebalancing. Therefore, channel mismatches may continue, with significant consequences to individual participants. If inaction leads to exit by food-value-chain players, it will remove food capacity from the value chain that would, under equilibrium conditions, have been consumed. That may create inflationary pressures when demand returns, if it exceeds supply. Such exits will also remove jobs from the economy well beyond the initial recovery phase, limiting the strength of the rebound.

Food-service companies will need to pursue creative solutions, such as continued delivery and pickup services, to hit break-even volumes when there is limited seating in restaurants. Retail-channel participants, from farm to shelf, will need to coordinate in unprecedented ways to ensure continuity in supply despite rolling plant closures and pockets of equilibrium rebalancing. Profit margins will likely be affected at each step during messy rebalancing. Companies will need to rewire for agility versus trying to achieve static optimization states.

Over the long term, the impact of uncertainty on the food supply chain could take many shapes, depending on how business owners expect the situation to evolve and resolve. On a spectrum of nine potential economic scenarios, a plurality of executives expect two to be most likely. Those two assume that some combination of effective or relatively effective public-health and economic-policy interventions will either contain the virus or limit it to some minor recurrences, resulting in a slow recovery. Under those scenarios, the recovery for food services, for example, has its own trajectory, shaped by shifts in consumer habits, safety at restaurants, and the overall economy (Exhibit 2). Depending on how well the virus is contained and the level of any recurrences, it could take between one and four years for food service to recover. However, it is possible that demand will never return to pre-pandemic levels, creating further challenges across the value chain.

Trying times up and down the food value chain vex company managers with considerable uncertainty. Profit pools are bound to continue shifting, with M&A activity (including potential integration across the value chain) to be expected, raising the need for efficient but resilient supply chains.

About the author(s)

Ignacio Felix is a partner in McKinsey's Miami office; Adrian Martin is a partner in the Chicago office, where Curt Mueller is a senior partner; and Vivek Mehta is a consultant in the New York office.

The authors wish to thank Lutz Goedde, Joshua Katz, Sajal Kohli, and Roberto Uchoa de Paula for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Dennis Swinford, a senior editor in the Seattle office.

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US food supply chain: Disruptions and implications from COVID-19

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Until early 2020, consumer spending on food in the United States had been remarkably stable, growing by around 4 percent over the previous five years. Total sales were roughly split evenly between retail outlets (such as grocery stores and supermarkets) and food-service companies (such as restaurants, hospitals, and schools).

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Consumer Supported Agriculture - weekly local harvest bag

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Consumer Supported Agriculture - weekly local harvest bag

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During this pandemic people of my age are requested to stay at home. We are working diligently to educate people about subscribing to farms. This week I met a woman, slightly younger than myself, who had never learned to cook or prepare food in any way. She is endangering herself by visiting a supermarket or take-out every day.

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We are trying to educate our local residents to collect their monsoon rainwater in barrels. The canales conducting water from the roof are mandated by law, but not enough people are using downspouts and barrels to conserve their water in this very arid area.

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This is a 7000 gallon tank for rainwater and snow runoff from the roof. We have a lot of months with no rainfall. This is how we water fruit trees.

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Damming for erosion control for soil conservation and catching runoff.

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Damming for erosion control for soil conservation and catching runoff.

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Soil conservation and water retention is extremely important here. I personally add to the height of my dams every five years. The rains terraform the soil anew just about every five years. We are permaculture aware, and my group, right now is learning more about permaculture from a teacher in Spain, online.

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Dam for stopping runoff and building soil

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We are trying to educate people to chip the trees that have fallen in the winter storms, and to use the chips to protect their soil. Good for retaining moisture following rains, and preventing erosion.

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According to New Mexico Department of the Environment, the average annual rainfall in New Mexico is 13.85 inches. And we are an agrarian state! We need to catch every drop that falls. Here is a monsoon storm, today, on its way up the mountain. Now is our primary water catching season. Occasionally the force of these storms can create a lot of damage.

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We are a high desert. I live at an altitude of 2300 meters. Our farmers are expert in "dry farming." We use the local indigenous systems of agricultural knowledge and the system of acequia irrigation, brought from the dry regions of Spain in the 17th century.

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Climate change has affected my community in many ways one of them is water reduction.
there for the National Development Company a governmental company planed a project for surface water management in Kabul. this project deifned in two phases. In first phase the worker are digging thousands small ditches in six  zon around the City.
In the second phase they are going to plant at least 13 million sapling to make forest around the city.

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Human consciousness

The impact of this them on my community is clear when we see the young generation they are participated in entrance exam of Universities in lockdown time.

The photo show volunteer participant in Daykondi Province.

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Environment: Climate change and Afghan community

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Environment: Climate change and Afghan community

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Afghanistan is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and one of the least equipped to handle what’s to come. Experts say drought, flood, avalanches, landslides, extreme weather, mass displacement, conflict, and child marriage—all of which already plague Afghanistan—are set to worsen.

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This story was produced in partnership with National Geographic and the Fuller Project, with funding from the National Geographic Society.

As dry months turned to parched years, Fatemeh watched the crops in her northwestern Afghan province of Badghis wither and her cattle die of thirst. Hunger turned to desperation, and eighteen months ago, her farming family begged a wealthy man for a loan to get them through the worst drought Afghanistan had seen in decades. He obliged, with $1,250 worth of sheep, rice, and flour.

When rains returned in spring, so did the man, this time demanding repayment. But there hadn't yet been a profitable harvest. "Give me your daughter," he said. He wanted shy, four-year-old Fariba as a wife for his son.

"She would have died from sorrow," says Fatemeh, glancing at Fariba, her wide, brown eyes outlined with kohl.

And so they fled-to save Fariba, to search for land that could survive the next drought, and to escape U.S.-backed Afghan airstrikes that pounded Taliban fighters in nearby villages at night. After three days and three nights on the road, they found shelter in a sprawling, bare-bones camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Afghanistan's third largest city, Herat.

In the 18 years since the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom and invaded Afghanistan, the fight against terrorism has dominated the global conversation about the South Asian country, influencing billions of dollars spent on warfighting and reconstruction efforts in a relentless conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Meanwhile, a potentially bigger fight is brewing.

Afghanistan is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and one of the least equipped to handle what's to come. Experts say drought, flood, avalanches, landslides, extreme weather, mass displacement, conflict, and child marriage-all of which already plague Afghanistan-are set to worsen.

There has been relatively little attention paid to climate change in Afghanistan, where the majority of Afghans are farmers or earn income from agriculture, and where the United Nations Environment Programme estimates 80 percent of conflict is over land, water, and resources. And assistance to help Afghans cope with the effects of drought and climate change-related hardships is often too short term or does not take into account the actual needs of Afghans on the ground, critics say.

Afghanistan's extreme drought of 2018 is over, for now. But Fatemeh is one of an estimated 13.5 million Afghans who remain severely food insecure. A third of Afghans have migrated or have been displaced since 2012, according to the International Organization for Migration.Projections paint a picture of an even hotter, more resource-scarce Afghanistan.

Temperatures could rise by 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, according to UN Environment and Afghanistan's National Environmental Protection Agency, unless measures are taken to limit greenhouse gas emissions. While Afghanistan's precipitation levels are projected to remain relatively stable through the end of the 21st century, hotter temperatures would lead to more evaporation, endangering life-sustaining water resources.

That could be a death sentence in places like Badghis, where Fatemeh and her family dug holes in the ground to collect rainwater and melted snow to survive before ultimately fleeing.

"No land. No water. No life," says Gul Dasta, Fatemeh's sister. Under her homemade emerald green dress hanging off of her rail thin body, a newborn baby tries in vain to feed from her deflated breast.

To much, too little

Some 450 miles east of Herat, in northeastern Afghanistan's Panjshir province, local communities are also at the mercy of the elements. There, the turquoise Panjshir River winds through a lush valley wedged between towering mountains.

In July 2018 a mountain glacier melted too fast, causing a natural dam surrounding a glacial lake to burst. Thousands of cubic tons of water rushed down the mountain, triggering a landslide that destroyed schools, hundreds of homes, and fields growing beans, potatoes, olive trees, and wheat.

Shepherds on the mountain called downstream to alert their loved ones, but for at least 10 people, including 65-year-old Bib Mazari, it was too late. "The water washed her body away," said her brother, Niaz Mohamed.

The spring and summer snowmelt of glaciers keeps entire communities alive with their cool, fresh water. But too much snowmelt too fast is deadly, increasing the risk of springtime flooding and summer drought.

Glacier volumes in the extended Hindu Kush Himalaya region are projected to decline by up to 90 percent by 2100, according to the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.

The cash-strapped and embattled Afghan government is working on installing stations on the mountain to warn people of disasters. But locals, who say there has been inadequate government assistance, aren't holding their breath. Following the 2018 flash flood, which wiped out fertile agriculture land, many villagers left Panjshir for good. They're not alone, much like Fatemeh and her family, who abandoned their traditional way of life in order to survive.

Across the country, men like Gul Dasta's husband are saying goodbye to loved ones to search for work in Iran, leaving women to head households in a traditionally patriarchal society. Families are moving to displacement camps and urban cities like the capital Kabul, one of the world's fastest growing cities. There, they pray, life will be easier.

But even in Kabul, the most developed Afghan city, home to hundreds of embassies and military bases, many city residents face their own fight for survival. Kabul's population has ballooned in recent decades, placing even more strain on resources, like water. Despite Afghanistan's abundance of snowy mountains and rushing rivers, clean water is a luxury for many Afghans, largely due to war, widespread water mismanagement, and corruption.

Kabul's water distribution system provides water to less than 20 percent of the city's population. Because most of the groundwater is not potable, Kabul residents dig unregulated wells or buy expensive bottled water that clog waterways and festering roadside sewers. An $82 million, USAID-supported project to expand Kabul's water infrastructure is supposed to be completed by 2021. But such water projects in the past have come under fire for failing to meet objectives.

Afghanistan currently lacks the ability to store or use most of its water, says Faez Azizi, a water resources and hydrology advisor at Afghanistan's Ministry of Energy and Water. Most of that water flows into neighboring countries.

"The people need water," says Azizi. "Afghanistan needs the construction of dams. And this needs huge investment."

But large-scale dam projects are controversial and complicated. USAID and other development and government agencies have struggled to support dam projects, and such initiatives pose diplomatic and security risks both within Afghanistan and with neighboring countries like Iran.

For rural communities across Afghanistan, small dams are lifelines to produce electricity, irrigate fields, and divert water for drinking.

In May, a tiny farming village flanked by the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan's central Bamiyan province-famous for its once towering stone Buddhas blown up by the Taliban in 2001-plunged into darkness when floodwaters wiped out a dam and the electrical lines it powered.

The drought set off a series of devastating events. Girls and women, traditionally responsible for collecting water, cooking, and tending to crops, were forced to walk longer distances during drought. In one girls' school in rural Bamiyan, one-fifth of the students-several hundred girls-were pulled out of school by their families during the drought, according to Director Abdul Qayoon Afshar.

But even when it rained, the water didn't offer much relief. The parched ground could not easily absorb water. Deforestation on the mountainside created a sleek surface for water to rush down, wiping out the dam, the community mill, and fields of freshly planted crops.

"It has gotten harder for us," says 41-year-old Abdul Ghafur, who pulled his oldest son out of school to help replant. Ankle deep in mud and wielding a dirt-caked hoe, he sighed, staring out at the wilted, water-logged fields of destroyed crops his family had planted days earlier. "And it will get harder for my sons to do this."

Abdul Ghafur is counting down the days until he, too, will be forced to leave Bamiyan in search of work, just like his neighbors.

In Bamiyan, a mountainous geographic buffer offers relative protection from powerful militant groups. But in other provinces, like Fatemeh's home of Badghis, due west of Bamiyan, drought and natural disasters further fuel insurgency and militant recruitment.

"It was easy for [the Taliban] to capture the area," says 40-year-old Kamar Gul, who left Badghis two decades ago during a previous drought, and who still has family in Badghis. "Everyone was hungry."

In Badghis, wholly reliant on rainfall for agriculture and drinking water, food insecurity is still at crisis level. In 2017, nearly 60 percent of Afghans made a living from agriculture, and yet, nearly half were highly food insecure. Only one country, war-ravaged Yemen, was more food insecure.

"Every day, I dream my children are dying from hunger," says Fatemeh, who says members of her family joined the Taliban during the drought. There has been relatively little research into how the effects of climate change, and the desperation it fuels, impact peace prospects.

"Climate change exacerbates the situation," says Jeremy Pal, Professor of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science at Loyola Marymount University. There's a limited amount of arable land, and the "potential for more refugees and displacement."

In recent years, less winter snow has meant it's easier for the Taliban to wage war outside of its traditional fighting season. Meanwhile, more Afghan civilians were killed or wounded this past year than in any year since 2009, mainly by Afghan and U.S.-led allies, as well as by attacks by the militants they're fighting.

While the United States has spent at least $744.9 billion in warfighting since 2001, in addition to millions more from the international community, most of that money went to traditional security efforts: training Afghan soldiers, dropping bombs, and supporting thousands of foreign troops. Sixteen percent of the U.S. budget in Afghanistan has gone toward reconstruction, the majority of it funding security, counternarcotics, and governance projects. Only a small fraction of funding has supported initiatives that help Afghans adapt to climate change, respond to natural disasters, and foster resilience.

"The development system is broken," says Anthony Neal, a humanitarian policy analyst who served as Advocacy Manager throughout the drought response for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which helps manage camps for internally displaced people like Fatemeh. "Development donors are not adaptable and we're therefore relying on the short-term funding and emergency response to meet long-term and developmental issues."

Fighting back

Though limited and inhibited by insecurity, corruption, and lack of sustained funding, initiatives to combat climate change have popped up in Afghanistan in recent years, some of them supported by the United States. and the international community. Greenhouses have been set up for women farmers. Communities have received funding and training to grow crops like saffron instead of drought-resistant poppies, which have long fueled Afghanistan's illicit heroin trade.

Early warning systems have been developed in order to better warn communities of impending natural disasters. Wells and water systems have been dug and installed in remote areas. Awareness, too, has increased about climate change and the threat it poses to national security.

In September, despite near-daily terrorist attacks in the capital and across the country, dozens of young Afghans-many of them women- took to the streets in Kabul demanding that attention be paid to climate change. Guarded by Afghan security forces holding Kalashnikov rifles, the protestors held up banners and donned face masks protecting their mouths and noses from the polluted air, thick with smoke billowing from the exhaust pipes of Soviet-era vehicles and coal-burning stoves. "Stop denying, our world is dying," read one sign held up by a young man.

While initiatives across Afghanistan strive to foster climate change resilience and adaptation, they largely cannot reverse or slow the effects of climate change because Afghans are not the primary drivers of climate change in their country. Instead, that burden largely lies with the United States, China, and India, together making up half the world's CO2 emissions. In recent years, the United States has loosened regulations on emissions and slashed funding for development programs in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

These policy shifts have coincided with controversial peace negotiations with the Taliban, which calls for a pullout of foreign troops in Afghanistan, in addition to other demands that have left many Afghans worried about the future of international aid.

In Herat, the camps housing Fatemeh and thousands of others have lost most of their emergency funding in recent months. That means largely no more food or water distribution, or education programs, which has led to increased rates of child marriage and begging. Funders say the situation is no longer an "emergency" because the drought is over and people, in theory, could return home.

Just down the road, another sprawling camp filled with Afghans who fled previous droughts and conflict has turned into a permanent, impoverished town. They, like Fatemeh, don't plan to return home.

Sitting inside her family's tent, its sides rippling against whooshes of hot, sandy wind, Fatemeh thinks back to her own brief childhood in Badghis, wading through golden fields of wheat up to her knees. There, she laughed and played with friends as the cattle grazed nearby.

"We were free," Fatemeh says, holding the tiny hand of her daughter, Fariba, tightly. "I want my daughter to have that same feeling."

Unless something changes drastically-and soon-Fariba will grow up in a wasteland dotted by plastic tents, next to a dry, cracked riverbed that offers no relief. When she begins menstruating, she'll pay off her family's debt by marrying the son of the man who loaned her family money. They may have survived the drought, but it has most certainly cost Fariba her freedom.

Sophia Jones is a senior editor with the Fuller Project, a nonprofit journalism organization reporting on global issues impacting women. Solmaz Daryani is a documentary photographer. Khwaga Ghani contributed reporting.

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In Afghanistan, climate change complicates future prospects for peace

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This story was produced in partnership with National Geographic and the Fuller Project, with funding from the National Geographic Society. As dry months turned to parched years, Fatemeh watched the crops in her northwestern Afghan province of Badghis wither and her cattle die of thirst.

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Climate change effects on Water in Afghan Community (Nimroz Province) 

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Climate change effects on Water in Afghan Community (Nimroz Province) 

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These photos take by Me, during 2 months, we can clearly see the impacts.

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My hometown of Gettysburg relies on 2 million tourist each year to visit the historic battlefield. Tourism is the primary driver in our local economy. The National Park Service is committed to keeping Gettysburg as it was during the war. Climate change and invasive species are presenting challenges. If Gettysburg changes will the tourist continue to come?

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The following case study is part of a forthcoming NPS handbook on climate change entitled "Climate Change and Cultural Resources: Impact Assessments and Case Studies." The original author is Caitlin Smith.
Battlefields represent an important interface between nature and culture in cultural landscapes. At Gettysburg National Military Park, preserving historic landscape features associated with historic events is a constant challenge in a dynamically changing landscape. Gettysburg has over 2000 outdoor monuments and tablets, 400 of which are artillery pieces, and all of which are vulnerable to constant weathering and erosion as a result of being on display outside, exposed to the elements (Kristen McMasters 2011, personal communication). The historic patterns of vegetation are also an integral part of the historic landscape at Gettysburg. Tree lines, orchards, farm fields, and other significant areas of open and closed vegetation influenced the course of the watershed battle of the Civil War (NPS.gov 2006). Maintaining historic vegetation patterns at Gettysburg allows visitors to more accurately understand the obstacles faced by soldiers and command decisions made by both Union and Confederate armies. In fact, the primary reason that Congress created the park in 1895 was to "preserve the topographic, landscape, and cultural features that were significant to the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg" (NPS.gov 2006).

However, climate change may present unprecedented challenges and opportunities to maintaining the historic landscapes and structures of Gettysburg. The Eastern Woodlands bioregion is expected to experience higher maximum temperatures and drier conditions, more extreme precipitation and flooding events, and significant shifts in vegetation ranges and distribution (Schramm and Loehman 2010). Such changes in temperature and moisture regimes accelerate decomposition rates, and are likely to compound the current weathering effects on monuments and structures within the park, such as rotting or cracking wooden fences, and rusting iron cannons and artifacts. Longer summers may lengthen the tourist season, putting more pressure on the park's already burdened carrying capacity. Warmer conditions may also expand the northern range of termites, posing a very significant threat to the many wooden structures in the park (Lee and Chon 2011).

A warmer, drier climate is also expected to accelerate the process of vegetation change, leading to a landscape dominated by fewer temperate forest species and more mixed forest/savanna grassland species (Bachelet et al. 2001). While hardwood forests fall victim to inhospitable temperature ranges, water stress and competition from invasive species, vegetation characteristic of present day South Carolina and Georgia may emigrate north to Pennsylvania by the end of the century (USFS 2008). This shift may in fact reduce management needs to clear the battlefields of non-historic trees that encroach upon the desired openness of the cultural landscape.

Over the years, natural succession has been allowed to take over the Gettysburg battlefields, changing the appearance and ability to accurately interpret the historic landscape. For example, fields that have not been farmed for the past 70 years have become forests. Park managers must constantly remove trees that have grown up over the past 65-70 years, replant orchards, and re-establish grasslands in order to restore the 1863 vegetation characteristics that allowed for certain observation, firing, cover and concealment points crucial to the outcome of the battle. Often times in the management of a cultural landscape, it is not necessarily the type of vegetation that is critical to maintaining historic integrity, but the distribution of open and closed spaces formed by vegetation (Dolan 2011, personal communication). Therefore, under most climate change scenarios, the vegetation transition from temperate forest to a more open savannah environment may be much more conducive to the management and maintenance of the historic battlefields of Gettysburg.

Nevertheless, climate change will fundamentally alter the experience and appearance of Gettysburg National Military Park. Including climate change as part of the Gettysburg story will be essential to interpretation and appreciation of the cultural landscape, past, present, and future.

Sources Cited:Dolan, Susan. NPS Historical Landscape Architect, personal communication regarding cultural landscape management, June 2011.Lee, Sang-Hee and Tae-Soo Chon, "Effects of climate change on subterranean termites' territory size: a simulation study", Journal of Insect Science, vol. 11, no. 80, March 2011, p. 1-14.McMasters, Kristen. NPS Archeologist with the American Battlefield Protection Program, personal communication regarding threatened cultural resources at Gettysburg National Military Park, July 2011.NPS Gettysburg National Military Park, Park News, Goals of Battlefield Rehabilitation, last modified August 10, 2006, Schramm, Amanda and Rachel Loehman, 2010. Understanding the science of climate change: Talking points - impacts to Eastern Forests and Woodlands. Natural Resource Report NPS/NRPC/NRR-2010/224. National Park Service, Fort Collins, Colorado.
1. Bachelet, Dominique, Ronald P. Neilson, James M. Lenihan, and Raymond J. Drapek, "Climate Change Effects on Vegetation Distribution and Carbon Budget in the United States", Ecosystems, 2001 vol. 4, p. 164-185
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5. http://www.nps.gov/gett/parknews/gett-rehab-goals.htm.
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2. United States Forest Service (USFS), Mapped Atmosphere-Plant-Soil System Study (MAPSS), Simulated U.S. Vegetation Distribution, last modified March 2008, http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/mdr/mapss/about/modeloutput/sim_usvegdist.shtml

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The following case study is part of a forthcoming NPS handbook on climate change entitled "Climate Change and Cultural Resources: Impact Assessments and Case Studies." The original author is Caitlin Smith. Battlefields represent an important in­terface between nature and culture in cultural landscapes.

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In West Virginia, the impact of climate change has been relatively mild compared to Colorado, where I grew up and Vietnam, where I have visited frequently. In Colorado, prolonged droughts, destructive pine beetles, and frequent wildfires have made climate change impacts in a semi-arid region very noticeable in the span of my lifetime. Vietnam, a country on the frontline of climate impacts, change can be seen everywhere. Raising salinity levels in rice paddies, more powerful and more frequent typhoons, and increased flooding are all impacts that are easily recognizable as climate in change. West Virginia has abundant natural resources. Lush deciduous and evergreen forests, annual precipitation averages 44" (1117.6mm), and an abundance of fossil fuels, has made West Virginia slow to focus on subtle warning signs. Energy production, dependent on an abundance of coal, makes it hard to change to less-polluting natural gas or viable wind and solar energy that could be helping the world as a whole. Real-life pain drives action.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112019/west-virginia-climate-change-red-spruce-allegheny-mountains-species

https://www.wvpublic.org/post/unpacking-ways-climate-change-affecting-west-virginia#stream/0

https://www.usaid.gov/vietnam/climate-change

https://csfs.colostate.edu/colorados-forests-changing-climate

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Coral Bleaching is a major problem in the Micronesia region of the Pacific. As the ocean water temps rise coral is dying. Along with the coral dying goes the many species that call the corals home. Pacific Islanders and Micronesians rely on reef fish and other ocean creatures for their livelihoods and main source of food. The coral bleaching is presenting a challenge to island communities.
Micronesia also relies on tourism and is a popular diving destination. Unfortunately as the beautiful coral dies off I am afraid the attraction to this beautiful region could fade away.

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Well lets just say the reality of climate change and what it actually is going to mean in the coming days hit me pretty well. I think the way Jeff has featured the story of Living in the Future's past is beautiful and effective. In my community we are obsessed with our history and where we are coming from but never where we are going. We think of our ancestors and how to maintain their traditions but we never ask ourselves how our children will be looking at our traditions and think highly or lowly of us. If we spent half as much time looking at our future and worrying about how its gonna look like i believe we will be in the right track. Expediency and quick gratification has been too real especially with the current millennial generation. We want what we want now and never give a thought what we might need 5 years from now let alone 20 years from now. If our communities were to imagine the world we are going to give our children who will be fundamentally smarter than we are at the moment we will be working hard to make it better. because for now we are basically creating a problem that might be too late for them to fix come their time but its not too late for us now.

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Total land area: Kenya

Forest and tree cover extent: Kenya
Extent of primary forest cover and tree cover for Kenya. All area figures are in hectares (ha)
Primary forest loss and tree cover loss: Kenya
Annual loss of primary forest cover and tree cover for Kenya by year. All area figures are in hectares (ha)
Biodiversity data: Kenya
Species count by taxa for Kenya. For consistency, all data for a given group comes from a single source. Amphibians - amphibiaweb; Reptiles -reptile-database; Fish - fishbase; Birds - birdlife; Mammals - IUCN; and Plants - World Conservation Monitoring Centre of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP-WCMC).
Conservation data: Kenya
Data on threatened species in Kenya as of 2018, according to the IUCN Red List.
Protected areas data: Kenya
Data on threatened species in Kenya as of 2017, according to the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) maintained by the United Nations Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC).

Protected areas (2017)

Percentage

Terrestrial protected areas,
% of total land area

12.4

Marine protected areas,
% of territorial waters

Tree cover loss data for Kenya

"Tree cover threshold" is used for defining the tree cover area. For example, 75% includes only areas with more than 75% tree cover, whereas 10% includes all areas with more than 10% tree cover. 75% tree cover reflects a dense canopy.

Biomass and land use carbon emissions data for Kenya

"Tree cover threshold" is used for defining the tree cover area. For example, 75% includes only areas with more than 75% tree cover, whereas 10% includes all areas with more than 10% tree cover. 75% tree cover reflects a dense canopy.

Tree cover data for subnational administrative areas in Kenya

"This data is based on a definition of 30% tree cover. Areas with less than 30% canopy cover are excluded.

Carbon dioxide emissions data for subnational administrative areas in Kenya

"This data is based on a definition of 30% tree cover. Areas with less than 30% canopy cover are excluded.

Biomass data for subnational administrative areas in Kenya

This data is based on a definition of 30% tree cover. Areas with less than 30% canopy cover are excluded.
Archived forest data for Kenya | Forest data for Kenya
Data Source: Tree cover loss: Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA via Global Forest Watch. Administrative boundaries: Global Administrative Areas database (GADM), version 3.6.

Citation: Mongabay. "Deforestation statistics for [selected country name]". Accessed on [date] from rainforests.mongabay.com.

Ads are placed on this page automatically by Google. Mongabay does not control what ads are displayed.

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Extent of primary forest cover and tree cover for Kenya. All area figures are in hectares (ha) Annual loss of primary forest cover and tree cover for Kenya by year. All area figures are in hectares (ha) Species count by taxa for Kenya. For consistency, all data for a given group comes from a single source.

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Human impact on the environment, case study of Kisii Community

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Human impact on the environment, case study of Kisii Community

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Kisii community has always been known for good weather and rainfalls because of the dense forests that have always existed. with modernization though individuals and the government have been cutting trees for various purposes. most places that were forests have been replaced by an agricultural farm, buildings, markets, bus parks and even upcoming industries. the same trees that have been cut are he same trees used for construction. the effect has been felt years later, as much as the weather is still favorable, the rain levels have gone down, some streams and rivers have dried up and for other rivers the levels of water has reduced. This situation has been passed from generation to generation and if this flow is not reversed, the situation will definitely get from bad to worse

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By MAGATI OBEBO

Destruction of forests in Kisii County continues even in the face of a ban on logging by the government.

In the last five years alone, at least one forest has been decimated by the county government to give way to a bus park cum market at Keumbu, Nyaribari Chache Sub-county.

The danger facing the forests in the county is further heightened by lack of forest guards to deter destructive human activities.

At Nyangweta, the largest of the eight designated government forests, the effect is apparent as human activities take toll.

What was a thick, dense forest with gigantic and massive pine and eucalyptus trees a decade ago is now a pale shadow of what it means to be a forest.
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The situation is made worse by huge industrial investments lined to up on the forest's land.

Plans are also under way to allow an investor to set up a Sh5 billion factory.

On Thursday last week, Kisii Governor James Ongwae was in the Senate petitioning the Lands Committee to allow the hiving off of 120 acres of Nyangweta forest land for the sugar plant.

He said they had already gazetted 900 acres but needed the extra portion.

There are also plans to construct a university campus on part of the land.

When the Nation visited, a huge complex that will house the university was still under construction.

Former South Mugirango MP Manson Nyamweya says the campus is meant to help poor youth who cannot afford to travel to the main campus in Kisii Town to get education.

Mr Ndege Onguti, a resident and former volunteer guard at the forest, says the absence of forest police worsens the situation.

He said large strips of pine wood have been cut by cartels in the last two years.
DEPLETED TREES
Mr Onguti noted that mature trees had long been depleted and what was remaining were slender immature trees which are yet to stimulate the appetite of loggers. He added that land in much of the expansive forest is rocky, sandy and trees planted there take decades to mature.

At Emborogo Forest in Masaba South Sub-county, the entire hilly forest is under threat of extinction.

Thousands of eucalyptus trees planted by the government in the mid-70s have already been cut to pave the way for a primary school and a church.

Locals say they decided to set up Emborogo Primary School to help pupils who used to walk several kilometres to Ramasha and Suguta.

"In Kisii every village has a school. By setting up one here, we have a generation to care for," said Mr Mogire Onchoke a resident.

However, area assistant chief Stanely Osumu denied destruction of the forest.

County chief forest officer was out and could not give a comment.

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Destruction of forests in Kisii goes on despite logging ban

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By MAGATI OBEBO Destruction of forests in Kisii County continues even in the face of a ban on logging by the government. In the last five years alone, at least one forest has been decimated by the county government to give way to a bus park cum market at Keumbu, Nyaribari Chache Sub-county.

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Climate Migration - coming north from Central America

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Climate Migration - coming north from Central America

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This is from yesterday's New York Times. New Mexico is not a place that a lot of immigrants come to - they do come - but there is no economic opportunity here, so they continue on farther north. Our farmers are accustomed to drought on a regular basis, but one of our primary crops, the chile is having a difficult time this year.

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Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope - until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn't get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge's region - a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys - the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.

The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here - the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño - is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but - until recently - little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge's father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. - they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.

From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

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. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. 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. 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. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. 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."

People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world's populations.

Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone's benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.

The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come.

Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region's biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders.

We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years.

Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5 percent of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

The model shows that the political responses to both climate change and migration can lead to drastically different futures.

As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.

In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable - and predicted - catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes. The only way to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of mass migration is to prepare for it, and preparation demands a sharper imagining of where people are likely to go, and when.

I. A Different Kind of Climate Model

In November 2007, Alan B. Krueger, a labor economist known for his statistical work on inequality, walked into the Princeton University offices of Michael Oppenheimer, a leading climate geoscientist, and asked him whether anyone had ever tried to quantify how and where climate change would cause people to move.

Earlier that year, Oppenheimer helped write the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that, for the first time, explored in depth how climate disruption might uproot large segments of the global population. But as groundbreaking as the report was - the U.N. was recognized for its work with a Nobel Peace Prize - the academic disciplines whose work it synthesized were largely siloed from one another. Demographers, agronomists and economists were all doing their work on climate change in isolation, but understanding the question of migration would have to include all of them.

Together, Oppenheimer and Krueger, who died in 2019, began to chip away at the question, asking whether tools typically used by economists might yield insight into the environment's effects on people's decision to migrate. They began to examine the statistical relationships - say, between census data and crop yields and historical weather patterns - in Mexico to try to understand how farmers there respond to drought. The data helped them create a mathematical measure of farmers' sensitivity to environmental change - a factor that Krueger could use the same way he might evaluate fiscal policies, but to model future migration.

Their study, published in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Mexican migration to the United States pulsed upward during periods of drought and projected that by 2080, climate change there could drive 6.7 million more people toward the Southern U.S. border. "It was," Oppenheimer said, "one of the first applications of econometric modeling to the climate-migration problem."

The modeling was a start. But it was hyperlocal instead of global, and it left open huge questions: how cultural differences might change outcomes, for example, or how population shifts might occur across larger regions. It was also controversial, igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics, who attacked the modeling effort as "guesswork" built on "tenuous assumptions" and argued that a model couldn't untangle the effect of climate change from all the other complex influences that determine human decision-making and migration. That argument eventually found some traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to model precise migration figures.

But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to this well established but amorphous threat seemed worth taking. In the early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that scientists shouldn't traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice, producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try to steer away from that fate. Trying to project the consequences of climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly provocative efforts. "If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration," he wrote in 2010, "they should publish them."

Since then, Oppenheimer's approach has become common. Dozens more studies have applied econometric modeling to climate-related problems, seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works. Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one.

As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate's subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just two million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus - food scarcity, water scarcity and heat - the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.

North Africa's Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region - with more than 150 million people and growing - is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65 percent of farmable lands have already been degraded. "My deep fear," said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa's transition into a post-climate-change civilization "leads to a constant outpouring of people."

The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already - resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf - 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India's Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air-conditioning will simply die.

If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 - including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people - as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt's breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk.

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. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. 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. The idea was to build on the Oppenheimer-style measure of response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a "gravity" model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants might end up. The resulting report, published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete.

The bank's work targeted climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, focusing not on the emergency displacement of people from natural disasters but on their premeditated responses to what researchers call "slow-onset" shifts in the environment. They determined that as climate change progressed in just these three regions alone, as many as 143 million people would be displaced within their own borders, moving mostly from rural areas to nearby towns and cities. The study, though, wasn't fine-tuned to specific climatic changes like declining groundwater. And it didn't even try to address the elephant in the room: How would the climate push people to migrate across international borders?

In early 2019, The Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center, hired an author of the World Bank report - Bryan Jones, a geographer at Baruch College - to add layers of environmental data to its model, making it even more sensitive to climatic change and expanding its reach. Our goal was to pick up where the World Bank researchers left off, in order to model, for the first time, how people would move between countries, especially from Central America and Mexico toward the United States.

First we gathered existing data sets - on political stability, agricultural productivity, food stress, water availability, social connections, weather and much more - in order to approximate the kaleidoscopic complexity of human decision-making.

Then we started asking questions: If crop yields continue to decline because of drought, for instance, and people are forced to respond by moving, as they have in the past, can we see where they will go and see what new conditions that might introduce? It's very difficult to model how individual people think or to answer these questions using individual data points - often the data simply doesn't exist. Instead of guessing what Jorge A. will do and then multiplying that decision by the number of people in similar circumstances, the model looks across entire populations, averaging out trends in community decision-making based on established patterns, then seeing how those trends play out in different scenarios.

In all, we fed more than 10 billion data points into our model. Then we tested the relationships in the model retroactively, checking where historical cause and effect could be empirically supported, to see if the model's projections about the past matches what really happened. Once the model was built and layered with both approaches - econometric and gravity - we looked at how people moved as global carbon concentrations increased in five different scenarios, which imagine various combinations of growth, trade and border control, among other factors. (These scenarios have become standard among climate scientists and economists in modeling different pathways of global socioeconomic development.)

Only a supercomputer could efficiently process the work in its entirety; estimating migration from Central America and Mexico in one case required uploading our query to a federal mainframe housed in a building the size of a small college campus outside Cheyenne, Wyo., run by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where even there it took four days for the machine to calculate its answers. (A more detailed description of the data project can be found at propublica.org/migration-methodology.)

The results are built around a number of assumptions about the relationships between real-world developments that haven't all been scientifically validated. The model also assumes that complex relationships - say, how drought and political stability relate to each other - remain consistent and linear over time (when in reality we know the relationships will change, but not how). Many people will also be trapped by their circumstances, too poor or vulnerable to move, and the models have a difficult time accounting for them.

All this means that our model is far from definitive. But every one of the scenarios it produces points to a future in which climate change, currently a subtle disrupting influence, becomes a source of major disruption, increasingly driving the displacement of vast populations.

II. How Climate Moves People

Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera moved to the outskirts of San Salvador six years ago, after her life in the rural western edge of El Salvador - just 90 miles from Jorge A.'s village in Guatemala - collapsed. Now she sells pupusas on a block not far from where teenagers stand guard for the Mara Salvatrucha gang. When we met last summer, she was working six days a week, earning $7 a day, or less than $200 a month. She relied on the kindness of her boss, who gave her some free meals at work. But everything else for her and her infant son she had to provide herself. Cortez commuted before dawn from San Marcos, where she lived with her sister in a cheap room off a pedestrian alleyway. But her apartment still cost $65 each month. And she sent $75 home to her parents each month - enough for beans and cheese to feed the two daughters she left with them. "We're going backward," she said.

Her story - that of an uneducated, unskilled woman from farm roots who can't find high-paying work in the city and falls deeper into poverty - is a familiar one, the classic pattern of in-country migration all around the world. San Salvador, meanwhile, has become notorious as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a capital in which gangs have long controlled everything from the majestic colonial streets of its downtown squares to the offices of the politicians who reside in them. It is against this backdrop of war, violence, hurricanes and poverty that one in six of El Salvador's citizens have fled for the United States over the course of the last few decades, with some 90,000 Salvadorans apprehended at the U.S. border in 2019 alone.

Cortez was born about a mile from the Guatemalan border, in El Paste, a small town nestled on the side of a volcano. Her family were jornaleros - day laborers who farmed on the big maize and bean plantations in the area - and they rented a two-room mud-walled hut with a dirt floor, raising nine children there. Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador's crop, slashing harvests by 70 percent. Then drought and unpredictable storms led to what a U.N.-affiliated food-security organization describes as "a progressive deterioration" of Salvadorans' livelihoods.

That's when Cortez decided to leave. She married and found work as a brick maker at a factory in the nearby city of Ahuachapán. But the gangs found easy prey in vulnerable farmers and spread into the Salvadoran countryside and the outlying cities, where they made a living by extorting local shopkeepers. Here we can see how climate change can act as what Defense Department officials sometimes refer to as a "threat multiplier." For Cortez, the threat could not have been more dire. After two years in Ahuachapán, a gang-connected hit man knocked on Cortez's door and took her husband, whose ex-girlfriend was a gang member, executing him in broad daylight a block away.

In other times, Cortez might have gone back home. But there was no work in El Paste, and no water. So she sent her children there and went to San Salvador instead.

For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded. It's in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure, resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn that the most severe strains on society will unfold. Food has to be imported - stretching reliance on already-struggling farms and increasing its cost. People will congregate in slums, with little water or electricity, where they are more vulnerable to flooding or other disasters. The slums fuel extremism and chaos.

It is a shift that is already well underway, which is why the World Bank has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into East African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population has doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035. In Mexico, the World Bank estimates, as many as 1.7 million people may migrate away from the hottest and driest regions, many of them winding up in Mexico City.

But like so much of the rest of the climate story, the urbanization trend is also just the beginning. Right now a little more than half of the planet's population lives in urban areas, but by the middle of the century, the World Bank estimates, 67 percent will. In just a decade, four out of every 10 urban residents - two billion people around the world - will live in slums. The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that 96 percent of future urban growth will happen in some of the world's most fragile cities, which already face a heightened risk of conflict and have governments that are least capable of dealing with it. Some cities will be unable to sustain the influx. In the case of Addis Ababa, the World Bank suggests that in the second half of the century, many of the people who fled there will be forced to move again, leaving that city as local agriculture around it dries up.

Our modeling effort is premised on the notion that in these cities as they exist now, we can see the seeds of their future growth. Relationships between quality-of-life factors like household income in specific neighborhoods, education levels, employment rates and so forth - and how each of those changed in response to climate - would reveal patterns that could be projected into the future. As moisture raises the grain in a slab of wood, the information just needed to be elicited.

Under every scientific forecast for global climate change, El Salvador gets hotter and drier, and our model was in accord with what other researchers said was likely: San Salvador will continue to grow as a result, putting still more people in its dense outer rings. What happens in its farm country, though, is more dependent on which climate and development policies governments to the north choose to deploy in dealing with the warming planet. High emissions, with few global policy changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador - just like rural Guatemala - to empty out, even as its cities grow.

Should the United States and other wealthy countries change the trajectory of global policy, though - by, say, investing in climate mitigation efforts at home but also hardening their borders - they would trigger a complex cascade of repercussions farther south, according to the model. Central American and Mexican cities continue to grow, albeit less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows drastically, most likely concentrating poverty further. Far more people also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped and more desperate than ever.

People move to cities because they can seem like a refuge, offering the facade of order - tall buildings and government presence - and the mirage of wealth. I met several men who left their farm fields seeking extremely dangerous work as security guards in San Salvador and Guatemala City. I met a 10-year-old boy washing car windows at a stoplight, convinced that the coins in his jar would help buy back his parents' farmland. Cities offer choices, and a sense that you can control your destiny.

These same cities, though, can just as easily become traps, as the challenges that go along with rapid urbanization quickly pile up. Since 2000, San Salvador's population has ballooned by more than a third as it has absorbed migrants from the rural areas, even as tens of thousands of people continue to leave the country and migrate north. By midcentury, the U.N. estimates that El Salvador - which has 6.4 million people and is the most densely populated country in Central America - will be 86 percent urban.

Our models show that much of the growth will be concentrated in the city's slumlike suburbs, places like San Marcos, where people live in thousands of ramshackle structures, many without electricity or fresh water. In these places, even before the pandemic and its fallout, good jobs were difficult to find, poverty was deepening and crime was increasing. Domestic abuse has also been rising, and declining sanitary conditions threaten more disease. As society weakens, the gangs - whose members outnumber the police in parts of El Salvador by an estimated three to one - extort and recruit. They have made San Salvador's murder rate one of the highest in the world.

Cortez hoped to escape the violence, but she couldn't. The gangs run through her apartment block, stealing televisions and collecting protection payments. She had recently witnessed a murder inside a medical clinic where she was delivering food. The lack of security, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of child care, the lack of sustenance - all influence the evolution of complex urban systems under migratory pressure, and our model considers such stresses by incorporating data on crime, governance and health care. They are signposts for what is to come.

A week before our meeting last year, Cortez had resolved to make the trip to the United States at almost any cost. For months she had "felt like going far away," but moving home was out of the question. "The climate has changed, and it has provoked us," she said, adding that it had scarcely rained in three years. "My dad, last year, he just gave up."

Cortez recounted what she did next. As her boss dropped potato pupusas into the smoking fryer, Cortez turned to her and made an unimaginable request: Would she take Cortez's baby? It was the only way to save the child, Cortez said. She promised to send money from the United States, but the older woman said no - she couldn't imagine being able to care for the infant.

Today San Salvador is shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, and Cortez is cooped up inside her apartment in San Marcos. She hasn't worked in three months and is unable to see her daughters in El Paste. She was allowed a forbearance on rent during the country's official lockdown, but that has come to an end. She remains convinced that the United States is her only salvation - border walls be damned. She'll leave, she said, "the first chance I get."

Most would-be migrants don't want to move away from home. Instead, they'll make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city. It's only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders, taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call "stepwise migration." Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing into a foreign land - vulnerable to both its politics and its own social turmoil - is an entirely different trial.

Seven miles from the Suchiate River, which marks Guatemala's border with Mexico, sits Siglo XXI, one of Mexico's largest immigration detention centers, a squat concrete compound with 30-foot walls, barred windows and a punishment cell. In early 2019, the 960-bed facility was largely empty, as Mexico welcomed passing migrants instead of detaining them. But by March, as the United States increased pressure to stop Central Americans from reaching its borders, Mexico had begun to detain migrants who crossed into its territory, packing almost 2,000 people inside this center near the city of Tapachula. Detainees slept on mattresses thrown down in the white-tiled hallways, waited in lines to use toilets overflowing with feces and crammed shoulder to shoulder for hours to get a meal of canned meat spooned onto a metal tray.

On April 25, imprisoned migrants stormed the stairway leading to a fortified security platform in the center's main hall, overpowering the guards and then unlocking the main gates. More than 1,000 Guatemalans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Haitians and others streamed into the Tapachula night.

I arrived in Tapachula five weeks after the breakout to find a city cracking in the crucible of migration. Just months earlier, passing migrants on Mexico's southern border were offered rides and tortas and medicine from a sympathetic Mexican public. Now migrant families were being hunted down in the countryside by armed national-guard units, as if they were enemy soldiers.

Mexico has not always welcomed migrants, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was trying to make his country a model for increasingly open borders. This idealistic effort was also pragmatic: It was meant to show the world an alternative to the belligerent wall-building xenophobia he saw gathering momentum in the United States. More open borders, combined with strategic foreign aid and help with human rights to keep Central American migrants from leaving their homes in the first place, would lead to a better outcome for all nations. "I want to tell them they can count on us," López Obrador had declared, promising the migrants work permits and temporary jobs.

The architects of Mexico's policies assumed that its citizens had the patience and the capacity to absorb - economically, environmentally and socially - such an influx of people. But they failed to anticipate how President Trump would hold their economy hostage to press his own anti-immigrant crackdown, and they were caught off-guard by how the burdens brought by the immigration traffic weighed on Mexico's own people.

In the six months after López Obrador took office in December 2018, some 420,000 people entered Mexico without documentation, according to Mexico's National Migration Institute. Many floated across the Suchiate on boards tied atop large inner tubes, paying guides a couple of dollars for passage. In Ciudad Hidalgo, a border town outside Tapachula, migrants camped in the square and fought in the streets. In a late-night interview in his cinder-block office, under the glare of fluorescent lights, the town's director of public security, Luis Martínez López, rattled off statistics about their impact: Armed robberies jumped 45 percent; murders increased 15 percent.

Whether the crimes were truly attributable to the migrants was a matter of significant debate, but the perception that they were fueled a rising impatience. That March, Martínez told me, a confrontation between a crowd of about 400 migrants and the local police turned rowdy, and the migrants tied up five officers in the center of town. No one was hurt, but the incident stoked locals' concern that things were getting out of control. "We used to open doors for them like brothers and feed them," said Martínez, who has since left his government job. "I was disappointed and angry."

In Tapachula, a much larger city, tourism and commerce began to suffer. Whole families of migrants huddled in downtown doorways overnight, crowding sidewalks and sleeping on thin, oil-stained sheets of cardboard. Hotels - normally almost sold out in December - were less than 65 percent full as visitors stayed away, fearful of crime. Clinics ran short of medication. The impact came at a vulnerable moment: While many northern Mexican states enjoyed economic growth of 3 to 11 percent in 2018, Chiapas - its southernmost state - had a 3 percent drop in its gross domestic product. "They are overwhelmed," said the Rev. César Cañaveral Pérez, who earned a Ph.D. in the theology of human mobility in Rome and now runs Tapachula's largest Catholic migrant shelter.

Models can't say much about the cultural strain that might result from a climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do say is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply.

At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will most likely see its own climate exodus. One in six Mexicans now rely on farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability per capita could decrease by as much as 88 percent in places, and crop yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most likely come from Chiapas.

Yet a net increase in population at the same time - which is what our models assume - suggests that even as one million or so climate migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward in their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current stresses far worse.

Already, by late last year, the Mexican government's ill-planned policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets, unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation.

It has angered many Mexican citizens, who have begun to describe the migrants as economic parasites and question foreign aid aimed at helping people cope with the drought in places where Jorge A. and Cortez come from.

"How dare AMLO give $30 million to El Salvador when we have no services here?" asked Javier Ovilla Estrada, a community-group leader in the southern border town Ciudad Hidalgo, referring to López Obrador's participation in a multibillion-dollar development plan with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Ovilla has become a strident defender of a new Mexico-first movement, organizing thousands to march against immigrants. Months before the coronavirus spread, we met in the sterile dining room of a Chinese restaurant that he frequents in Ciudad Hidalgo, and he echoed the same anti-immigrant sentiments rising in the U.S. and Europe.

The migrants "don't love this country," he said. He points to anti-immigrant Facebook groups spreading rumors that migrants stole ballots and rigged the Mexican presidential election, that they murder with impunity and run brothels. He's not the first to tell me that the migrants traffic in disease - that Suchiate will soon be overwhelmed by Ebola. "They should close the borders once and for all," he said. If they don't, he warns, the country will sink further into lawlessness and conflict. "We're going to go out into the streets to defend our homes and our families."

One afternoon last summer, I sat on a black pleather couch in a borrowed airport-security office at the Tapachula airfield to talk with Francisco Garduño Yáñez, Mexico's new commissioner for immigration. Garduño had abruptly succeeded a man named Tonatiuh Guillén López, a strong proponent of more open borders, whom I'd been trying to reach for weeks to ask how Mexico had strayed so far from the mission he laid out for it.

But in between, Trump had, as another senior government official told me, "held a gun to Mexico's head," demanding a crackdown at the Guatemalan border under threat of a 25 percent tariff on trade. Such a tax could break the back of Mexico's economy overnight, and so López Obrador's government immediately agreed to dispatch a new militarized force to the border. Guillén resigned as a result, four days before I hoped to meet him.

Garduño, a cheerful man with short graying hair, a broad smile and a ceaseless handshake, had been on the job for less than 36 hours. He had flown to Tapachula because another riot had broken out in one of the city's smaller fortified detention centers, and a starving Haitian refugee was filmed by news crews there, begging for help for her and her young son. I wanted to know how it had come to this - from signing an international humanitarian migrant bill of rights to a mother lying with her face pressed to the ground in a detention center begging for food, in the space of a few months. He demurred, laying blame at the feet of neoliberal economics, which he said had produced a "poverty factory" with no regional development policies to address it. It was the system - capitalism itself - that had abandoned human beings, not Mexico's leaders. "We didn't anticipate that the globalization of the economy, the globalization of the law ... would have such a devastating effect," Garduño told me.

It seemed telling that Garduño's previous role had been as Mexico's commissioner of federal prisons. Was this the start of a new, punitive Mexico? I asked him. Absolutely not, he replied. But Mexico was now pursuing a policy of "containment," he said, rejecting the notion that his country was obligated to "receive a global migration."

No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces - climate, increasingly, among them - that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico's borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people - many millions more - float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming - that between now and 2050, nearly nine million migrants will head for Mexico's southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.

Before leaving Mexico last summer, I went to Huixtla, a small town 25 miles west of Tapachula that, because it sat on the Bestia freight rail line used by migrants, had long been a waypoint on Mexico's superhighway for Central Americans on their way north. Joining several local police officers as they headed out on patrol, I watched as our pickup truck's red and blue lights reflected in the barred windows of squat cinder-block homes. Two officers stood in back, holding tight to the truck's roll bars, black combat boots firmly planted in the cargo bed, as the driver, dodging mangy dogs, navigated the town's slender alleyways.

The operations commander, a soft-spoken bureaucratic type named José Gozalo Rodríguez Méndez, sat in the front seat. I asked him if he thought Mexico could sustain the number of migrants who might soon come. He said Mexico would buckle. There is no money from the federal government, no staffing to address services, no housing, let alone shelter, no more good will. "We couldn't do it."

Rodríguez had already been tested. When the first caravan of thousands of migrants reached Huixtla in late 2018, throngs of tired, destitute people - many of them carrying children in their emaciated arms - packed the central square and spilled down the city's side streets. Rodríguez and his wife went through their cupboards, gathering corn, fried beans and tortillas, and collected clothing outgrown by their children and hauled all of it to the town center, where church and civic groups had set up tents and bathrooms.

But as the caravans continued, he said, his good will began to disintegrate. "It's like inviting somebody to your place for dinner," he said. "You'll invite them once, even twice. But will you invite them six times?" When the fourth caravan of migrants approached the city last March, Rodríguez told me, he stayed home.

In the center of town, the truck lurched to a stop amid a busy market, where stalls sell vegetables and toys under blue light filtered through plastic tarps overhead. A short way away, five men sheltered from the searing heat under the shade of a metal awning on the platform of a crumbling railway station, never repaired after Hurricane Stan 14 years earlier. Rodríguez peppered the group - two from Honduras, three from Guatemala - with questions. Together they said they had suffered the totality of misfortune that Central America offers: muggings, gang extortion and environmental disaster. Either they couldn't grow food or the drought made it too expensive to buy.

"We can't stand the hunger," said one Honduran farmer, Jorge Reyes, his gaunt face dripping with sweat. At his feet was a gift from a shopkeeper: a plastic bag filled with a cut of raw meat, pooled in its own blood, flies circling around it in the heat. Reyes had nowhere to cook it. "If we are going to die anyway," he said, "we might as well die trying to get to the United States."

Reyes had made his decision. Like Jorge A., Cortez and millions of others, he was going to the U.S. The next choice - how to respond and prepare for the migrants - ultimately falls to America's elected leaders.

Over the course of 2019, El Paso, Texas, had endured a crush of people at its border crossings, peaking at more than 4,000 migrants in a single day, as the same caravans of Central Americans that had worn out their welcome in Tapachula made their way here. It put El Paso in a delicate spot, caught between the forces of politically charged anti-immigrant federal policy and its own deep roots as a diverse, largely Hispanic city whose identity was virtually inextricable from its close ties to Mexico. This surge, though, stretched the city's capacity. When the migrants arrived, city officials argued over who should pay the tab for the emergency services, aid and housing, and in the end crossed their fingers and hoped the city's active private charities would figure it out. Church groups rented thousands of hotel rooms across the city, delivered food, offered counseling and so on.

Conjoined to the Mexican city of Juárez, the El Paso area is the second-largest binational metroplex in the Western Hemisphere. It sits smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, a built-up oasis amid a barren and bleached-bright rocky landscape. Much of its daily work force commutes across the border, and Spanish is as common as English.

Downtown, new buildings are rising in a weary business district where boot shops and pawnshops compete amid boarded-up and barred storefronts. The only barriers between the American streets - home to more than 800,000 people - and their Juárez counterparts are the concrete viaduct of a mostly dry Rio Grande and a rusted steel border fence.

To some migrants, this place is Eden. But El Paso is also a place with oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of the year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every two days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs - already a third of some residents' budgets - will get pricier, and warming will drive down economic output by 8 percent, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable as the places farther south.

In 2014, El Paso created a new city government position - chief resilience officer - aimed, in part, at folding climate concerns into its urban planning. Soon enough, the climate crisis in Guatemala - not just the one in El Paso - became one of the city's top concerns. "I apologize if I'm off topic," the resilience chief, Nicole Ferrini, told municipal leaders and other attendees at a water conference in Phoenix in 2019 as she raised the question of "massive amounts of climate refugees, and are we prepared as a community, as a society, to deal with that?"

Ferrini, an El Paso native, did her academic training as an architect. She worries that El Paso will struggle to adapt if its leadership, and the nation's, continue to react to daily or yearly spikes rather than view the problem as a systematic one, destined to become steadily worse as the planet warms. She sees her own city as an object lesson in what U.N. officials and climate-migration scientists have been warning of: Without a decent plan for housing, feeding and employing a growing number of climate refugees, cities on the receiving end of migration can never confidently pilot their own economic future.

For the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has largely choked off legal crossings into El Paso, but that crisis will eventually fade. And when it does, El Paso will face the same enduring choice that all wealthier societies everywhere will eventually face: determining whether it is a society of walls or - in the vernacular of aid organizations working to fortify infrastructure and resilience to stem migration - one that builds wells.

Around the world, nations are choosing walls. Even before the pandemic, Hungary fenced off its boundary with Serbia, part of more than 1,000 kilometers of border walls erected around the European Union states since 1990. India has built a fence along most of its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh, whose people are among the most vulnerable in the world to sea-level rise.

The United States, of course, has its own wall-building agenda - literal ones, and the figurative ones that can have a greater effect. On a walk last August from one of El Paso's migrant shelters, an inconspicuous brick home called Casa Vides, the Rev. Peter Hinde told me that El Paso's security-oriented economy had created a cultural barrier that didn't exist when he moved here 25 years earlier. Hinde, who is 97, helps run the Carmelite order in Juárez but was traveling to volunteer at Casa Vides on a near-daily basis. A former Army Air Forces captain and fighter pilot who grew up in Chicago, Hinde said the United States is turning its own fears into reality when it comes to immigration, something he witnesses in a growing distrust of everyone who crosses the border.

That fear creates other walls. The United States refused to join 164 other countries in signing a global migration treaty in 2018, the first such agreement to recognize climate as a cause of future displacement. At the same time, the U.S. is cutting off foreign aid - money for everything from water infrastructure to greenhouse agriculture - that has been proved to help starving families like Jorge A.'s in Guatemala produce food, and ultimately stay in their homes. Even those migrants who legally make their way into El Paso have been turned back, relegated to cramped and dangerous shelters in Juárez to wait for the hearings they are owed under law.

There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to a changing climate than to migrate. It is the obvious progression the earliest Homo sapiens pursued out of Africa, and the same one the Mayans tried 1,200 years ago. As Lorenzo Guadagno at the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration told me recently, "Mobility is resilience." Every policy choice that allows people the flexibility to decide for themselves where they live helps make them safer.

Are you a teacher looking for a way to use this project in your classroom? You can find resources from the Pulitzer Center here.

But it isn't always so simple, and relocating across borders doesn't have to be inevitable. I thought about Jorge A. from Guatemala. He made it to the United States last spring, climbing the steel border barrier and dropping his 7-year-old son 20 feet down the other side into the California desert. (We are abbreviating his last name in this article because of his undocumented status.) Now they live in Houston, where until the pandemic, Jorge found steady work in construction, earning enough to pay his debts and send some money home. But the separation from his wife and family has proved intolerable; home or away, he can't win, and as of early July, he was wondering if he should go back to Guatemala.

And therein lies the basis for what may be the worst-case scenario: one in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated, closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human life.

In that scenario, the global trend toward building walls could have a profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will bring.

If this happens, the United States and Europe risk walling themselves in, as much as walling others out. And so the question then is: What are policymakers and planners prepared to do about that? America's demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth alone doesn't overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and exacerbating inequalities. At the same time, the United States and other wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N. World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and improved farmers' incomes. It can't reverse climate change, but it can buy time.

Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds, in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet's population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study's authors, told me that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the peer-review process and that he felt pushed to "understate" the implications in order to get the research published. The result: Migration is only superficially explored in the paper. (A spokeswoman for the journal declined to comment because the review process is confidential.)

"There's flat-out resistance," Scheffer told me, acknowledging what he now sees as inevitable, that migration is going to be a part of the global climate crisis. "We have to face it."

Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed - factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next - and when they do it - makes a difference.

The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. "If we don't develop a different attitude," he said, "we're going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in."

Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American West, "Killing the Colorado," was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Meridith Kohut is an award-winning photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, who has documented global health and humanitarian crises in Latin America for The New York Times for more than a decade. Her recent assignments include photographing migration and childbirth in Venezuela, antigovernment protests in Haiti and the killing of women in Guatemala.

Reporting and translation were contributed by Pedro Pablo Solares in Guatemala and El Salvador, and Louisa Reynolds and Juan de Dios García Davish in Mexico.

Data for opening globe graphic from "Future of the Human Climate Niche," by Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning and Marten Scheffer, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Graphic by Bryan Christie Design/Joe Lertola.

Maps in Central America graphics sequence show total population shift under the SSP5 / RCP 8.5 and SSP3 / RCP 8.5 scenarios used by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and it is calculated on a 15-kilometer grid. A cube-root scale was used to compress the largest peaks.

Projections based on research by The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Model graphics and additional data analysis by Matthew Conlen.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint and Shannon Lin.

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Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground.

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Culture and Religious belief in Food Production systems

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Culture and Religious belief in Food Production systems

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The current evictions of People settled in the Mau Forest; the Ogiek question.

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After watching jeffs  documentary ,it is evident that climate change is real.He clearly describes various scenarios  that proves it.In my community a similar description is given by a fellow enviromentalist.Through social media pages,you tube channel we enlighten the young people and community members the reality of climate change.

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My community is pastoralist community in the Horn of Africa, who herd camels, cows, goats and sheeps. Traditionally, Camel is highly valued by most of the Somali people. for the past 3 decades deforestartaion related charcoal production was impacted my community in many ways. Although charcoal is a source of energy for cooking and other household needs. yet, deforestation affects wild animals, plants and humans. it caused soil erosion which also triggered droughts since the pasture of the livestock was extremely reduced. it also led to desertification and habitat loss. Since the forests regulate local and global weather through their absorption and creation of rainfall and their exchange of the atmospheric gasses, my commuunity suffered recurrence draughts and low rainfall. for the past decade the governments in the Horn of Africa region restricted the production of charcoal. The fact that Al-shabaab terrorist group used to get revenue on the charcoal businesss also restricted the production and shipments. Thanks to the UN for their role on regulating this by intercepting ships departing from the Somalia waters.

Plastic waste has become another pressing environmental issue in my community, since the consumption of the products with disposal plastic increased. The garbage collection systems are often inefficeint and the recyling the plastic waste nonexistent.

1. https://reliefweb.int/report/somalia/charcoal-production-south-central-somalia
2. https://afrikansarvi.fi/issue10/106-artikkeli/282-charcoal-and-deforestation-a-case-study-of-puntland-somalia

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Climats change affected Agriculture and food insecurity

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Climats change affected Agriculture and food insecurity

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The negative effect of climate change have impacted  Haiti's agriculture productivity. The rains are infrequent and irregular, resulting in drought and floods to an almost equal extent. Drought and havy rains cost farmers  crops and arable land. Deforetastion severly limits  the country's capacity to increase agicultural production, ensure food security and nutrution, eridicate poverty and acheive more sustenaible development.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/02/01/climate-change-in-haiti/

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Pictures takes after the hurricane Matthew

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Interconnectedness of the economy and the superorganism