Climate Refugees - Is this our civilization's Titanic collision or is it to be our ultimate coming of Age?
image shot at Aro Ha
Would you say spending £7.22 Trillion or $9.176 Trillion a year on housing refugees is a sustainable investment?
It may be distasteful to lead with money a discussion regarding the current displacement of millions of people when human suffering and tragedy is present. The utter horrors of unrelenting wars and global gang violence, poverty, famine, flooding, and yes ultimately a simple dream of a better life has led to the escalation of asylum seekers. However right now it is only our governments that are having to figure out how to foot ever increasing bills of migrants crossing borders, and when you hear the news and the sum is a few billion dollars it’s likely you may just flip the channel. What’s a few billion these days…..but a sum of $9 Trillion may have you not ignore.
And why I am is because what you are witnessing at the moment is a trickle. What you will experience is to be indiscriminate to who is to be affected, rich and poor. No government how ever well resourced will be able to handle an unstoppable tsunami of incalculable cost both in terms of money as well as quality and peace of life for everyone. The cataclysmic issue of refugees is to make climate crisis a clear and present danger to you and your family and everyone you know and care about. However by the end of this article I do hint at ways we may be able to take responsibility, innovate new ideas and change the course of how history is to be written. Rewriting history takes more than flipping a channel, so thank you for reading this and then if you wish sharing your own ideas and action steps.
I first encountered refugees on the move in 2005 in northern Mozambique as a consequence of cyclones causing the mass movement of hordes of people, about 80,000 faces, young, old, babies being born, people dying, everyone thrown together in a relocation chaos as a result of seeking higher ground because of flooding. It was unavoidable disaster. Ever since that instantly imprinted memory I have recognized the immediacy of needs that confront the first hours and days in the epicenter of swelling crisis regarding food, water and shelter that collectively have to be activated and dealt with by a mass of in the field care givers. Simultaneously the entire situation has to be backed by a logistics labyrinth that must be implemented through sanitation, energy and health.
Yet this type of chaotic event is triggered in an instant, usually unpredicted, no comfort zone where normality resides, not known or planned for through weeks of preparation and certainly without the vast needs mentioned above and no historic foundation of social services being in place.
read on….
