United States temperature map

The Great Climate Migration

For this month’s equity resource, Equity Committee member Ellen Block recommends the article “The Great Climate Migration” by Abrahm Lustgarten. This award-winning long form essay (a collaboration between the New York Times Magazine and Pro Publica) reckons, in very human ways, with one of the questions at the heart of climate change – when humans can no longer live in their home communities, where will they go?

The society of Environmental Journalists, who awarded the article the prestigious Pulliam award for Reporting on the Environment said: “This deeply reported and powerfully written series delivers a gut punch as it asks, and seeks to answer, some troubling questions about what will happen as a changing climate makes a growing number of places less amenable to human habitation…Superb photography, video, mapping and graphics make for a stunning multimedia package. The takeaways are sobering, and sure to deepen readers’ understanding of the human consequences of failing to control emissions.”

As this article demonstrates, we need to see climate change as an equity issue, both because its impact will be inequitably distributed globally, and because if we are not prepared, the other equity issues that impact our communities will only worsen. 

Read the article here, or listen to it as a podcast here

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