-Thirst: Amnesty International says 2 billion people will see their water access severely and incredibly diminished. In the Horn of Africa, people are only finding 1/4 of the water they had before.
-Hunger: Many people will die from malnutrition. Many more people will die from chronic undernutrition. So many sources I have read have stated that food supplies will greatly diminish due to climate change. This will be due to an increase in floods, rising sea levels eating up land and causing salinity in the dry land that remains, increased droughts, dry places getting too dry and wet places getting too wet, overheating, storms, extreme weather, unpredictable weather, a decrease in soil fertility caused by loss in biodiversity, cold snaps coming earlier and earlier into the growing season in northern countries, erosion washing away farmland, increased pests due to the inability of the environment to control pests, the list goes on. 345 million people worldwide already have acute (not moderate, not high, but acute) levels of hunger, in large part due to climate change.
-Heat Waves: Over 1.5 billion people live in places where they constantly face the upper limits of heat that the human body can tolerate. As the earth warms, heat waves will become far more frequent and many people will die from them.
-Cold: As the polar vortex becomes looser and looser, many more people in the more northern parts of the world will be subjected to extreme cold and will die due to it, especially poor people.
-Natural Disasters: Storms, floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides, and more will greatly increase in both frequency and severity, killing many people.
-Poverty: More than 100 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty by 2030 alone due to climate change. By 2030 alone, and this number will only increase as time goes on. Note here that I said extreme poverty. Not multidimensional poverty, which is also very deadly and torturous, not acute multidimensional poverty, which is incredibly deadly, but extreme poverty, the worst form of poverty of all. Even greater numbers of people will be pushed into multidimensional and acute multidimensional poverty.
-War: As resources dwindle, there will be wars over the little remaining fertile land, the little remaining water, the few remaining pastures. These wars will also get many people killed.
-Far Right Extremism: Increased displacement, climate refugees (due to the crowding of people into areas that are still cool enough to live in, because many places, like Australia, will become too hot to sustain human life), decreased wealth flowing to the middle class, and other factors will increase fascism and far right ideology. This will lead to increased hate crimes, perhaps greatly so, and this will lead to more people dying.
-Epidemics, pandemics, new and old diseases: As the capacity of the environment to do pest control decreases, disease carriers will increase and diseases like malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and more will increase. As natural spaces get degraded, animals will become less healthy and diseases among animals will increase. This will lead to an increase in new diseases crossing over from animals to humans and to an increase in new diseases being created in animals.
-Homelessness: As more people lose their homes due to storms, floods, and other natural disasters, there will be an increase in homelessness and more people will die due to the risks of being unhoused.
-Suicide: The degradation in natural spaces will cause mental health among members of communities that are closely tied to the natural environment to worsen, leading to increased suicides. This will be amplified due to the fact that communities closely tied to the environment such as Indigenous communities and Afro-Latino communities are often already marginalized and already face risks to their mental health. Like for example most members of the religion I am a part of already have at least one mental illness, and we rely on our connection to our Parent, the earth, to help us heal ourselves and build better lives for ourselves and our children. If the earth is dead many of us will be too. And we’re actually really privileged compared to say, Indigenous people (though some of us are Indigenous but not me), so imagine how much worse it would be to be part of an even more marginalized group that is closely tied to the environment. -Pollution: Increased use of fossil fuels will lead to increased air pollution. 9 million people already die each year due to air pollution. This will only grow worse as the amount of greenhouse gases and other harmful gases builds up in the atmosphere.
-Not Having Enough Nutrients: Calories aren’t the only thing the human body needs, nutrients are incredibly important too. The climate crisis will destroy the health of the ocean, due to acidification, rising water temperatures, and changed weather conditions and water flow. This will kill many fish. 3 billion people rely on fish for their main source of protein, because of how cheap it is compared to other sources of protein. Many of these people will not be able to get the fish they need and will lack the vital nutrients the fish provide them, which will lead to many deaths.
-Decrease in Social Cohesion: The natural environment teaches so many of us to be good people. Without healthy nature, many of the new generations won’t take into their souls the necessity of helping each other. If less of us help each other, more people will die. I’m going to get a bit religious now. So look at this paragraph with an open mind. The earth is our Parent, who we all came from and who we all live on. If the earth is unhealthy, the people will be too, and if the people are unhealthy, the earth will be too. Like any healthy parent-child relationship, our well-being is tied into Their well-being and Their well-being is tied into ours. But it’s not just my religion that says that the people need a healthy planet, it’s many religions all over the world. And it’s not just many religions all over the world that say this, but science says this too. So if you care about social justice at all, you have to care about climate change.
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