The exodus of species is a drastic consequence of global warming Estadão

are you packing yet Well, it’s good to think about. You may have noticed that the climate has already changed, but the worst thing is that things are about to get worse as we are doing far less than we should to avoid greenhouse gas emissions and many places, possibly including your home, need will be left. We had some time to avoid the worst, but we did little. Since the mid1980s, researchers such as Robert Peters, Thomas love joy, Camile Parmesan and Lesley Hughes, noticing links between rising temperatures in habitats and changes in the migration patterns of butterflies, birds and fish, began issuing warnings that something was wrong with the climate. But almost nobody paid any attention to what they said, even in the scientific community.

When the climate problem was taken seriously, there might still be time to avoid major damage. But since most politicians think about the next elections and not the next generations, the reality has been since Kyoto climate conference 1997, which set a 1.5°C temperature rise as a ceiling, and Paris in 2016, which set a 43% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the situation only got worse. It’s almost unbelievable, but almost 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in all of human history occurred after the release of Al Gore’s blockbuster film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006.

Greenpeace protest to warn the Brazilian people about the risks of climate change, such as Sea level rise Photo: Tasso Marcelo/Estadão

Not that the solutions are easy. Mainly because this is a global crisis, but partly one that needs to be addressed locally, by nations, cities and even individuals. And individuals have ingrained habits and, what is worse, they elect, as we well know, from time to time a denial president who, instead of working in the right direction, gets in the way and boycotts. The famous Kyoto was the third conference; the first was in Germany in 1995 and we are now at the 27th in Egypt. Knowing from the start that they would have to contend with government and corporate reluctance, they ended up setting perhaps overly complacent targets and trying to sign off on a global commitment to limit warming to 1.5C by 2100, which is what bad would be enough. Speeches have been and are being made, documents have been and are being signed, but in practice we are probably heading for an increase of 2.8º or more, which will bring us an apocalyptic reality without mince words.

The problems are already a reality around the world, including in Brazil, and they will only get worse. Migrations caused by climate change have increased, even if disguised as other reasons. Prolonged droughts or major floods can lead to political, religious or ethnic conflicts and trigger civil wars and mass exoduses, but the root cause, the climate, is often overlooked. Just before hatching civil war in SyriaThe region experienced its worst drought in 900 years, leaving 1.5 million farmers deprived of everything and forced to migrate to the outskirts of major cities in extremely precarious conditions. Calling this fact the “cause” of the civil war would be an exaggeration, but dismissing it is not reasonable either.

In most cases, the countries most affected are those closest to the tropics, i.e. the poorest.

The fact is that difficult times are ahead of us. The places where most of us live could become uninhabitable in a few decades, so we need to think about new homes, if not for us then for our children and grandchildren. And of course, as there will be more people and less space, it will be necessary to negotiate housing with those who are already there. In most cases, the countries most affected are those closest to the tropics, i.e. the poorest. Bangladesh suffers more than Canada (whose agriculture even temporarily benefits from the rise in temperature). And not only people will migrate, plants and wild animals will also be driven out of their habitats by climate change.

Unlike us animals, the closer they live to the poles, the worse it is, because with rising temperatures, more and more invaders are penetrating extreme latitudes and putting the indigenous people under pressure. As the polar bear struggles to survive in an environment with less ice, its brown cousin occupies the territory. Since they interbred, to the scientists’ initial surprise, there is a chance that in the future the polar bear will survive in browns only as a genetic fragment, just as genes from the extinct Neanderthal are present in our DNA. Beavers have migrated to Alaska from Canada, and the dams they are building on rivers (there are thousands of them already) are profoundly changing the region’s ecology in a domino effect that is damaging forest cover, fish, and whales, among other things. . . Scientists have even managed to measure the migratory speed of many animal (and even plant) species, and some are moving at an average speed of five meters per day.

Nova Xavantina in Mato Grosso, the border between forest and deforestation Photo: Amanda Perobelli/Portal

If the situation on land is dramatic, it is even worse at sea. On the beach where I grew up I remember well that until a few years ago we knew mullet season was upon us when we saw the shoals on the walls of the waves about to break. But they have become fewer every year, and last winter there were no mullets at all. If the disappearance of mullets I witnessed could even be the result of local factors, the scientific accounts of what’s happening in the oceans globally are solid and downright terrifying. Until recently, the decline in fish stocks was mainly explained by overfishing. Not that this isn’t an important factor, but climate change is increasingly entering the equation.

As the German shows Benjamin von Brackel In Nature on the Run (from 2021), the oceans, far from the territorial borders of the countries, are a lawless land, no matter how hard international organizations have tried to bring order to the mess. And the temperature of the sea has risen faster than that of the land. In fact, a phenomenon that some scientists have dubbed the “subtropization” of the North Sea is already taking place, in which species from lower latitudes are becoming more abundant while native ones tend to disappear. The matter reached the point in the last decade where it provoked a serious diplomatic crisis as European countries set quotas for mackerel fishing. Then at some point they almost completely disappeared, only to reappear far in the north of Iceland.

Marine research expedition in the Abrolhos Bank region of southern Bahia organized by the NGO Conservation International Photo: Enrico Marone/CI

Traditionally, without that fish in their seas, it wasn’t part of the deal, and so Icelanders smeared themselves in the novelty, prompting revolts in countries like Britain and Norway. “You are stealing our fish,” cried the scandals. “But it was the fish that went away,” argued the happy Icelanders (who, in the event of sanctions, small but strategically located, threatened to leave NATO). In the end, things calmed down, although Norway boycotted Iceland as much as possible. The question remains: if democratic and civilized nations that have lived peacefully together for decades almost got into fights over fish migration, what awaits us globally with the increase in these occurrences?

In a book more than aptly titled Nomad Century how climate migration will reshape our world (2022), Gaia Vince, former editor of Nature magazine, states that if everything continues as it is, it will be around 3.5 years from now Billions of people who do this will not be able to live in the places they live today. They are driven from their homes by rising sea levels, persistent droughts or even temperatures that are too high for humans. In summary, we are talking about more than a third of humanity having to leave their homes and their countries. And if this will be drama for those who ‘travel’, so will it be for those who ‘host’. Brazil does not have a promising future. Unless our prospects are as bad as Bangladesh or Kiribati (the Indian archipelago that is literally going under), we’re not doing well either. A large part of our cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Recife, are very vulnerable to sea level rise. At the other end of the problem, if the Amazon becomes a savannah, the southeast region is in danger of becoming deserted. And we seem committed to it.

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If the Amazon turns into savannah, the southeast region is in danger of becoming deserted

In the face of changing habitats, animals simply migrate, free from border controls and visas in passports, effectively cornering those already living at the extremes. Humans, on the other hand, have to grapple with a relatively new invention, national borders. Why does someone in South Sudan go hungry while food is wasted in Europe? While this seems “only” a moral issue, demographic migration pressures could become so severe in the coming decades that it is better for those further north, less affected by climate change (usually the main contributors), to prepare welcoming and integrating new residents.

And we Brazilians will have an additional problem. If, with global warming, a large portion of humanity will migrate to the poles, the reality is that the north has much more landmass than the south. The upper part of the globe includes the vast (partly sparsely populated) countries of Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska, Canada, Iceland and Greenland. In our hemisphere we would only have Patagonia and Antarctica as travel destinations. We must hope that our Argentinian brothers will agree to share their backyards with us.l