Abstract
The chapter begins with a brief history of climate change and population displacement, starting with the migration of protohumans from the trees to the savannas to the mass migration out of Africa, to the mass migration of Europeans during the Little Ice Age between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that led to poor crop production, famine, disease, and social conflict. The chapter then moves forward to the present day to briefly describe changes in climate that have been attributed to human activity, including warming temperatures, rising sea levels, global distribution of regions of increased and decreased precipitation, and ocean acidification, as well as different forms of migration based on duration and degree of choice that are consequences of these climate changes: that which is caused by acute natural disasters and that which is due to long-term changes in climate. A conceptual framework guiding the examination of climate-related displacement or “climigration” is introduced. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the aims and organization of the book.
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Palinkas, L.A. (2020). Introduction. In: Global Climate Change, Population Displacement, and Public Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41890-8_1
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