According to the United Nations, some 150 million people will become climate refugees by 2050. The journalists and photographers of Collectif Argos have spent four years seeking out the first wave of people displaced by the consequences of climate change. They show the damage wrought to homes and livelihoods by rapid warming near the Arctic, rising sea levels that threaten the island nations of Tuvulu, the Maldives, and Halligen and farmers displaced by the desert's advance in Chad and China.
Created in 2001, Collectif Argos brings together ten journalists--photographers and writers--who share a commitment to documenting the changes taking place in the world---ecological, economic, political, and cultural, subtle or spectacular, global or local.
People of the Arctic, the Sundarbans, the Maldives, the Longbaoshan, the Louisiana Gulf Coast, Tuvalu, Lake Chad, and the Himalayas comprise the nine communities Collectif Argos visited with pen and camera to produce, in 2007, the sad and haunting Climate Refugees, recently translated and published in English. While the global pool of climate literature is crowded and it's becoming increasingly difficult to advance the climate story, this book does so by documenting firsthand the day-to-day experience of people being challenged by weather conditions so extreme, they are simply forced to quit, pull up roots, and move to higher ground. Their remote and rugged communities, all struggling to adapt to chaos, are canaries in the global mine of climate change. And their stories are moral barometers for the rest of the world. Mark Dowie Orion