Climate Change and the Migrant Crisis | Years of Living Dangerously
Nice to meet you.
How big is this European migration crisis? Down, it's big, and it's getting bigger. We're doing a story on the impacts of climate change on migration. Many of the people are fleeing conflicts; we just couldn't believe that some weren't fleeing climate change, and so we're investigating.
More people are more exposed to more extreme weather, and on top of that, there is weaker governance and there is violence. They have a right of being relocated elsewhere because they didn't cause climate change. We in the industrialized north caused climate change.
I think what got me really interested in this story is that people don't understand that the 1951 Geneva Convention protects refugees, and refugees are only those people who are fleeing conflict or persecution. What country, and how long did it take to get here from Guinea?
If you're fleeing the fact that you can no longer support your family because your crops don't grow because the rain doesn't fall, you have no protection, no future here. So you're tortured by a dictator; you have certain rights. If I've been driven out of my country by this, a woman named Mother Nature, there's absolutely nothing that will protect you.
We need to either give hope to people where they are today in their situation of extreme vulnerability, or we will take not just one million people coming this year to Europe; it will be millions and millions. Is it our missions that are impoverishing your country? Those who did nothing to cause climate change, they feel it today.
I think this is among the most important journalism projects I've ever been part of, and the commitment to truth and excellence in telling this climate change story is simply unparalleled. We have to be much, much better in investing in a better coming future; that is the way to avoid that we all will live very dangerously.
It's 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Is this weather normal for this time of year?