Will climate change turn us into a world of uprooted migrants?

Climate One Conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats,

the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge.

I'm Greg Dalton.

Climate instability is an increasing driver of human migration, but no one identifies

themselves as a climate refugee.

It's a notion that doesn't have a legal meaning today.

It's something that talks to our spirit, to our hearts,

but you can't have a status of a climate refugee today in our world. Dina UNESCO is head of the

Migration, Environment and Climate Change Division at the UN Migration Agency in Geneva. She acknowledges

that environmental degradation may be one among many factors driving migration.

But people leaving their homelands are even less likely to cite climate as a cause.

People in Central American countries, you know, if you actually ask them,

why did you feel forced to leave your country?

They would not tell you all because of climate change.

Oscar Chacon is co-founder and executive director of Alianza Americas, a network of Latin American

and Caribbean immigrant organizations in the United States. Extreme cycles of drought and heavy

rain have left many subsistence farmers around the world without any viable options to work

and eat.

Any place there's a cash crop. When that cash crop is decimated, there's no fallback plan, right?

There's nothing that we can kind of do tomorrow in order to feed our families and to buy our food.

Lauren Markham is author of The Far Away Brothers, two young migrants and the making of an American life.

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