“It’s Only Happening Over There”

Sometimes it’s easier to read about “other people’s problems” than roil in the muck of the mega-issues that surround us. It gets even more interesting if we can pretend that such devastation can only happen “there” and does not reflect our reality. After all, we are an ultra-modern nation with access to some of the best scientific and technological solutions on earth. We track and manage problems “really well,” we tell ourselves. But we know we are a “reactive” country these days, where kicking the can down the road is “good politics,” “building in anticipation” is just too expensive and denying that big problems even exist makes many of us sleep better. We may know better, but it is amazing how much we comfort each other in group reassurances that “we’ve got this” or “don’t worry about that, because it’s just fake news.”

So today’s blog-journey takes us to Vietnam, once our enemy and now a nation with whom we have pretty good commercial and diplomatic relations. Vietnam is equally concerned about its big bully nation to the north: China. But Vietnam is a particularly fascinating microcosm of one particularly nasty form of climate change devastation: the combination of severe drought with rising coastal ocean waters over relatively flat land. As temperatures rise and water tables sink, even with great rivers that have traditionally been the agricultural life blood of so many nations, there is often a pattern of salt water rolling up from the mouth of such waterways well into the interior, replacing the rapidly receding fresh water.

To a lesser extent, so far anyway, that is beginning to happen in the Western world – England’s Thames River that runs through London is an example… and even the Mississippi here.  But in countries where nature’s agricultural bounties have depended on great rivers, the cost can be incalculable. And so it is with the famous Mekong River in Southeast Asia, flowing through China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, where it empties into the sea. The Mekong Delta used to be Vietnam’s best farming region. Used to be. Increasing salinity has made the southern reaches of the river unable to support regional agriculture. People are abandoning farms in those areas in droves. Starvation is ugly.

Partnered with the University of Southampton (UK), Alex Chapman, Research Fellow in Human Geography at the University of Southampton, and Van Pham Dang Tri, Head of the Department of Water Resources, Can Tho University, mounted a long-term research project directed at Vietnamese migration patterns focusing on the underlying causation of such population movement. While some of the migration patterns reflect a desire to seek economic opportunity inherent in urban areas, upon deeper examination, these academics discovered some truly disturbing facts that impact people all over the world. Their summary of findings was republished in the January 9, 2018 academic journal, The Conversation. Here is an excerpt from that study:

“The Vietnamese Mekong Delta is one of Earth’s most agriculturally productive regions and is of global importance for its exports of rice, shrimp, and fruit. The 18m inhabitants of this low-lying river delta are also some of the world’s most vulnerable to climate change. Over the last ten years around 1.7m people have migrated out of its vast expanse of fields, rivers and canals while only 700,000 have arrived.

“On a global level migration to urban areas remains as high as ever: one person in every 200 moves from rural areas to the city every year. Against this backdrop it is difficult to attribute migration to individual causes, not least because it can be challenging to find people who have left a region in order to ask why they went and because every local context is unique. But the high net rate of migration away from Mekong Delta provinces is more than double the national average, and even higher in its most climate-vulnerable areas. This implies that there is something else – probably climate-related – going on here.

“In 2013 we visited An Thạnh Đông commune in Sóc Trăng Province aiming to collect survey data on agricultural yields. We soon realised that virtually no farmers of An Thạnh Đông had any yields to report. The commune had lost its entire sugarcane crop after unexpectedly high levels of salt water seeped into the soil and killed the plants. Those without a safety net were living in poverty. Over the following weeks hundreds of smallholders, many of whom had farmed the delta for generations, would tell us that things were changing and their livelihoods would soon be untenable.

“In 2015-2016 disaster struck with the worst drought in a century. This caused salt water to intrude over 80km inland and destroyed at least 160,000 ha of crops. In Kiên Giang (pop. 1.7m), one of the worst affected provinces, the local net migration rate jumped and in the year that followed around one resident in every 100 left.”

Access to fresh water is rapidly becoming one of the most serious issues on earth. In the United States, while individual water usage has declined in the last twenty years, agricultural water usage has remained fairly constant. An average Californian would have to sacrifice to get personal water usage down to 100 gallons a day, but folks in Cape Town, South Africa – a modern city by any standards – are down to 13.7 gallons available person… with less than 90 days of water reserves even at this level. Several western American cities are headed in the same direction.

Drought in Syria and Iraq – mostly in Sunni-dominated agricultural areas – pushed well over a million farmers and their families off their land. The Shiite governments turned their backs on these citizens, making them easy prey for extremists like al Qaeda and ISIS… and served as a ready recruiting ground for even “moderate” rebels seeking equality and justice. The region exploded in violence. Water shortages and drought are incenting violent conflict in way too many nations.

The rest is history, but farmers migrating from their farms (and warfare) soon became the backbone of a mass flood of refugees into Europe. Droughts and warfare in North Africa pushed those migration numbers through the roof.

Here in the United States, we are watching water tables dry up, significantly in the southern mid-west, west and southwest. Even as some parts of our nation are experiencing extreme flooding, mainstream waterways, lakes and aquifers are drying up fast in those other areas. What to do?

Desalinization is an exceptionally expensive solution that sucks electrical power in extremes… and produces toxic salt that cannot simply be dumped into the ocean without pretty much killing off life in the immediately surrounding areas. Conservation is essential as is reexamining our irrigation practices. As Russia and Canada benefit by the global warming trend, most the rest of the world suffers.

So far, absent doing something massive about accelerating climate change driven by our over-production of greenhouse gasses, we just don’t have any easy answers. And our government officially denies that there is such a thing as man-induced climate change, actively encouraging us to use toxic coal more while trying to reduce emission requirements on automakers.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what we once thought were going to be serious climate change consequences to be faced by future generations are exploding around us very much in the here and now.