“We were so terrified with the water coming into the house and the sound of the storm. In front of my eyes, the walls of our house collapsed.” That’s Geeta Maiti, a resident of Mousuni Island, part of the Indian Sundarbans—a 4,000 square-mile World Heritage site on the Bay of Bengal, shared by India and Bangladesh. There, a rich ecosystem supports the world’s largest mangrove forest and several hundred animal species, including the endangered Bengal tiger. The region is home to approximately 13 million people. It is one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change in the world.
“Losing Ground” was directed by Lisa Hornak and Erin Stone. It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent creators, curated by The Atlantic.
How many millions of people will be forced to leave their homes by 2050? This documentary looks at the so-called hotspots of climate change in the Sahel zone, Indonesia and the Russian Tundra.
Lake Chad in the Sahel zone has already shrunk by 90 percent since the 1960s due to the increasing heat. About 40 million people will be forced to migrate to places where there is enough rainfall. Migration has always existed as a strategy to adapt to a changing environment. But the number of those forced to migrate solely because of climate change has increased dramatically since the 1990s. It is a double injustice: after becoming rich at the expense of the rest of the world, the industrialized countries are now polluting the atmosphere with their emissions and bringing a second misfortune to the inhabitants of the poorer regions. One of them is Mohammed Ibrahim: as Lake Chad got hotter and drier, he decided to go where the temperatures were less extreme and there was still a little water, trekking with his wife, children and 70 camels from Niger to Chad and then further south. The journey lasted several years and many members of his herd died of thirst. Now he and his family are living in a refugee camp: they only have seven camels left. Mohammed is one of many who have left their homelands in the Sahel – not because of conflict and crises, but because of the high temperatures. He’s a real climate refugee.
Rising sea level and contaminated fresh water could make an island paradise in the Indian Ocean uninhabitable. The effects of climate change on the Maldives are difficult to ignore. Maldivian climate activist Thilmeeza Hussain says these changes are impacting everyday life for the 400,000 people who live there. Will Maldivians become climate refugees? How can this island nation be saved? Hussain is an Aspen New Voices Fellow and a speaker at Spotlight Health. The views and opinions of the speakers in the podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the Aspen Institute.
