My Boiling Point

Climate induced displacement is happening today, do I still need to justify it?

The above chart shows how people have been displaced by disasters in 2021. Climate change isn’t experienced the same way for people everywhere, and that is the major reason climate communication seems to fail.

There’s a big difference between how people in historically rich countries and those in poor countries understand this. People in poor countries (which are mostly based in the Global South), like Bangladesh, coincidentally where I’m from, see the effects of climate change every day.

But in rich countries like the UK (in the north), it’s not a lived experience.

Let’s take Bangladesh as an example.

I moved from there to the UK a couple of years ago. I didn’t move just for a better life, but predominantly because of a fear that most of South Asia will become uninhabitable soon. Try hanging that over your head as an educated person who is trying to make the best decision for the next twenty to thirty years of his/her life.

But even if you did not read all the latest IPCC reports, the reality is the weather is getting worse every year and many of us are trying to make sense of our decisions because people cannot just move because of a climate breakdown…