Eight years ago, twenty governments around the world commissioned a report on the potential death toll of climate change if it proceeds unmitigated. The study examined all of the ways that climate change can result in mass fatalities, from hunger to heat and disaster to disease. It projected that by 2030, seven hundred thousand people around the world would die annually from causes directly linked to climate change.
And death is just one outcome. Hundreds of millions more lives are at risk of being upended by sea-level rise, extreme weather, and desertification. These pressures will cause new migration patterns, especially among the nation’s 1.3 billion people living in poverty, many of them in high climate-change risk zones. This is in turn likely to spur new geopolitical conflicts, which could easily set off chain reactions around the globe. No country is invincible. No way of life is indestructible.
Read more at Jacobin.