AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And I’m Nermeen Shaikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers from around the country and around the world. As wildfires continue to rage in California and a shocking new report finds that many coastal cities will be permanently flooded by rising sea levels, Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera has canceled the upcoming U.N. Climate Summit. The two-week summit had been scheduled for December in the Chilean capital of Santiago, which has seen weeks of mass protests against the Chilean government’s neoliberal policies. The U.N. is now looking for an alternative venue. The annual climate meetings offer a critical space for developing countries to request greater help from rich nations as they confront the worst effects of the climate crisis.

Piñera’s announcement comes as a dire new report warns 300 million people are at risk of being displaced due to rising sea levels, three times more than previous estimates. According to the study published in Nature Communications, the vast majority of the most vulnerable populations are concentrated in Asia with China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand facing the gravest threat.

AMY GOODMAN: The study finds global sea levels are expected to rise between two to seven feet and possibly more, with some coastal cities being wiped off the map. To talk more about the implications of the latest report, we are joined by two guests. Here in New York, Benjamin Strauss is with us, CEO and chief scientist at Climate Central and co-author of the new study on rising sea levels. And Harjeet Singh is the global lead on climate change at ActionAid, working with climate migrants in a number of countries, joining us from New Delhi, India. We begin with Benjamin Strauss. Explain the report, the scope of the report and what you found.

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: Thanks so much for having me, Amy and Nermeen, to discuss such an important issue. We found that the global exposure to sea level rise and coastal flooding in the coming several decades is more than three times what we thought based on previous data. Essentially, almost all of climate science has been focused on the question of what the sea level will be in the future, which makes sense. That’s what’s changing; sea level is rising. But you really need to know two things to understand the human vulnerability to sea level rise, and one is the height of the sea but the other is the height of the land.

We all assumed that we knew that, that it was fixed and simple. But in my research with my colleague, Scott Kulp, we took a closer look at the data being used to estimate land elevations globally, and while there is very accurate data in the United States and Australia and parts of Western Europe, the data set used for global analysis and most of Asia and the rest of the world overestimated coastal elevations by more than six feet or two meters.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Why did they do that? Why was there such a huge overestimation?

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: The elevation was based on measurements taken from satellites. So basically, the sensing beams that came down were very broad in their footprint. And so it averaged in rooftops, buildings, treetops with the ground in determining the elevation in the data set.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s look at a map depicting Southern Vietnam could all but disappear by 2050, In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it.

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: Yes. So we’ve made an interactive map. We published a map together with the report so that any of your listeners can look really in any part of the world if they go to Coastal.ClimateCentral.org. And we found huge changes in the major deltas of Asia compared to what we had previously thought.

Now, it is worth also noting that we discovered more than 100 million people today live on land that’s below the high tide line. And there is a little piece of hope in that, which is that means that most of them are likely to be protected by coastal defenses to some degree. But on the other hand, it also means that many people—we may not hear about it in the headlines—many people may already be suffering from frequent flooding and inundation affecting their lives and livelihoods.

AMY GOODMAN: And the new findings based on an innovative way to read satellites?

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: Yes. So what we did is we used artificial intelligence to try and improve on this elevation data from satellites. We took that satellite-based data set but another 23 variables and we fed it into a big algorithm soup, so to speak, in order to try and find an approach to improve those data. We used about 50 million data points where we had a very accurate elevation reading, as well as the inaccurate satellite reading, to develop and calibrate the model. And then we used completely different sets of points in other areas to show that the model worked, even outside of the areas where we trained it.
So that’s how we have confidence in these results.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I would like to bring Harjeet Singh into the conversation. Harjeet Singh is with ActionAid and he is joining us from New Delhi, India. Harjeet, could you respond to the findings of this report, and in particular, the fact that the vast majority of the most vulnerable areas—areas vulnerable to sea level rise—are in Asia?

HARJEET SINGH: Thank you for having me here. Well, I am saddened but not surprised. We are already seeing such grim reality in different parts of the Global South. So developing countries who had little role in causing the problem are already facing this climate emergency. Just to put it into context, 60 million people were displaced in 2018 by weather-related disasters, and now the estimates that are coming for sea-level rise, if I talk of India, it’s seven times more the number, and in Bangladesh, it’s going to be eight times more than the previous estimate.

People are being forced to leave their homes as their local coping mechanisms fail. Their farms and homes are being swallowed up by sea. I have met people who would point towards the sea several meters in from the shoreline to where their homes used to be and are now under water. That is the grim reality they are facing. They leave their families behind, particularly women, children and elderly, and we are seeing in this part of the world how families are getting disintegrated completely and they have no place to go. And where they’ll end up in urban areas and small towns and cities, they end up living in inhuman and unhygienic conditions. So that’s the reality which we are already facing, and with these numbers it becomes absolutely horrific.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Harjeet, can you talk about what kind of support, if any, these climate migrants receive to help them move or resettle wherever they are able to go?

HARJEET SINGH: Well, the reality is that developing countries are also not ready. We are now facing the climate emergency—or what we call it, loss and damage, in the climate parlance—they have not even been ready with their adaptation plans. The whole concept of adaptation, which means preparing for these impacts, became much more active in 2001, and since then, they have not got any support from developed countries which is adequate for them to put these defenses that we’re talking about. Whether it is about coastal protection, whether it is about retrofitting homes or thinking of planned relocation—which is being talked about now at the U.N. level—but hardly any support has reached these communities. And we are talking of millions of people in this part of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Harjeet Singh, can you talk about this latest news that just broke yesterday as more than a million people were in the streets of Chile this past weekend? The embattled President Piñera announced that the U.N. Climate Summit would be canceled in December. It was going to be held in Santiago. Now the U.N. has to decide whether they have to put off this climate summit or if they will find an alternative venue. But the significance of the cancellation at this point?

HARJEET SINGH: Let’s understand, the climate crisis and the social unrest in Chile or elsewhere have the same root cause: that’s inequality. Governments continue to prioritize corporations over the rights of people. And that is why this uprising, this unrest that we are seeing in Chile—now with climate conference, COP25 being canceled, it means—it is a major [inaudible] to the issue that we were supposed to be talking there. Loss and damage, the challenges that climate migrants are facing, was very much on the agenda. And it was all about how the institution that has been created in 2013 needs to be rebooted so that it can respond to the current reality and the future.

So if I connect with what is happening in Chile, what the COP was going to be discussing, and this new report, I think it’s really a terrible situation that we now will see this COP moving to some other city and probably for 2020. Our hearts are with people in Chile. The fight that they are fighting is absolutely real. And as I said, the climate justice fight and the social unrest, they are all connected to the core cause of inequality and we need to recognize that core cause behind these challenges.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Harjeet, can you talk about that inequality also in the context of climate change? That countries that have historically emitted the least are now the most vulnerable?

HARJEET SINGH: Absolutely. If you look at historical emissions, the climate crisis that we are facing today is not a result of emissions that are happening now. The climate works on a lag system, so the emissions that have taken place in the last 150 years are causing the climate crisis that we face today.

And if you look at these historical resolutions, the United States is responsible for more than quarter, and another quarter of emissions come from European Union. That is the inequality. Yes, China is the biggest polluter at the moment, but historical emissions come largely from United States and European Union. And if you look at the emission reduction targets that they have put on the table from the United States, European Union and even Japan, it is one fifth of their fair share. So civil society organizations have come up with this calculator that looks at the historical responsibility, the GDP and the capability and through that [inaudible] assessment we have found that it is only one fifth.

Developing countries, on the contrary, have put their plans, which are far more ambitious, and most of them are in line with keeping the temperature below two degrees Celsius. So the inequality which has caused a problem also exists when it comes to climate action. And the business-as-usual approach that we see from majority of developed countries is not going to help. We need to be responding to the grave situation that we are facing at this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Indonesia announcing plans to relocate its capital, the capital city of Jakarta. It is going to relocate to the island of Borneo. Jakarta, which is home to over 30 million people, has been steadily sinking into the Java Sea and a study found that over a quarter of Jakarta will be underwater within the next 10 years. Excessive extraction of groundwater, poorly managed environmental policies have led to Jakarta’s surface water becoming polluted and unfit for consumption. Rising sea levels from climate change further compound the issue. This is the Indonesian president Joko Widodo announcing the plans.

PRESIDENT JOJO WIDODO: [translated] The place has a minimum risk of natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tsunami, forest fires, volcanoes and landslides. Secondly, the location is strategic, as it is located in the center of Indonesia. Thirdly, it is close to the other developed cities.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s not clear what will happen to the millions of Jakarta residents at risk of losing their homes and livelihoods as Jakarta is submerged in the coming years. But I want to ask each of you this question, starting with Harjeet Singh.

HARJEET SINGH: Everything points to the unsustainable development model that we have created that continues to exploit nature, whether it is about extraction of water at unsustainable levels and man-made crisis or climate change that we have caused. I think we need to look at how we treat development. What is our definition of development? And who is causing that destruction? Some of these fundamental questions we need to ask.

The whole orientation towards GDP growth and completely ignoring what we are doing to environment has to change. Environment now has to be at the center of everything that we are doing, how we’re using our natural resources, how we are building our homes, how we are using water. All of that has to change. And that thinking is not yet there despite some of these challenges that we are seeing and look at the kind of actions we are now forced to take.

But our political leaders are still stuck with that thinking that corporations are going to solve the problems, and we are seeing privatization and not really rebooting the development model that we have created, which is responsible for all the crisis that we are facing in this world today.

AMY GOODMAN: Ben Strauss?

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: I think we have to look at Jakarta and really use it to understand we could all be Jakarta tomorrow. Unfortunately, it’s a model for what could happen to many other coastal cities. Or we could look at New Orleans, which has more resources and has built a levy system to protect itself, but when a hurricane comes, we saw the tragedy that can take place when you live in the bottom of a bowl and the defenses fail. So I think it’s really important lesson that we have to take great heed of, that a major nation would go to the length of relocating their largest city and their capital city, or trying to do that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Very quickly, before we conclude, a city like Bombay, a population of almost 20 million, and the greater Bombay area, large parts of which will be underwater according to this report by 2050, that area includes where two nuclear installations are housed.

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: Oh, there’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure right by the coast everywhere including nuclear facilities, hazardous waste sites of every kind. If the ocean rises to submerge those areas, all kinds of nuclear waste or toxins and other noxious material can be spread around. So we have an enormous cleanup—or better, a defense effort—in front of us. This is an entirely new problem in the course of human civilization. We really don’t have the institutions or the precedent to deal with the loss of land.

And I hope that with adequate warning, decades of warning, we have some chance of finding and investing resources to defend the places that we are able. But there is a great inequity of resources around the world. It is going to be very expensive. And some places, just by their geography, may be prohibitive to defense. So yes, this really is a new chapter. If I can find any silver lining in this—and it’s hardly one, but I will say that—just as the threat from sea level rise and coastal flooding turns out to be much greater than we thought it was—

AMY GOODMAN: Three times greater. Three hundred million people will be affected.

BENJAMIN STRAUSS: —three times greater—the benefits of cutting climate pollution would also be three times greater. Right? So think of the benefit-cost equation that moves some audiences; it suddenly changed. But on the other hand, Harjeet made a very important point that there is a lag in the system. So if I put a chunk of ice on the table in front of us right now—it is very simple and profound—it wouldn’t melt instantly. It would take time. So in the same way, the ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland have just barely begun to respond to the warming that we have already caused.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Benjamin Strauss, chief scientist at the news and science organization Climate Central. And Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change at ActionAid, speaking to us from New Delhi, India.

When we come back, we continue on the climate crisis by looking at the fires still raging in California. The congressmember we will speak to is calling for PG&E to become a public utility. Then we will speak with a woman who is a former prisoner who fought fires while incarcerated. We will also talk about the housekeepers and the workers who are going to estates that are burning where the owners have evacuated, but the people are not told. Stay with us.