Woré Gana Seck at a speaking event in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America
It was Woré Gana Seck who first told me about what she called the “climate refugees.”
Last fall I traveled with Seck, executive director of Green Senegal, on a US speaking tour about the effects of climate change on poor communities. At venues across the American Midwest, Seck told the stories of families split apart by drought and crop failure, of teenagers lost at sea while attempting dangerous ocean crossings. She talked about a certain cemetery in Spain–the “Cemetery of the Unknown People”–filled with West Africans who had fled their homelands seeking a better way to earn a living.
I thought of Seck last week when I read Lisa Friedman’s article Coming Soon: Mass Migrations Spurred by Climate Change. Friedman interviews a married couple in Haringar, Bangladesh, who are the last remaining members of their family in their village; everyone else has fled to India, unable to catch enough fish to earn a living because of increasingly severe cyclones and floods. One by one, Friedman says, small migrations like these are “changing the face of the world”:
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