How much change in distribution of demography and agricultural crop types will take place in temperate and tropical regions due to climate change considering present rate of consumption of resources? What are those safer regions which will be the most favorite destinations of migrants affected by global warming, vulnerable events and ground water depletion?

The increasing consumption of earth resources like fossil fuel, mining, pumping out ground water etc. is creating disturbances inside earth and in earth’s atmosphere. These disturbances in earth systems will attract vulnerable events like earthquakes, tsunami, cyclones etc. Regions prone to these vulnerable events will be devastated which will force people to migrate to safer places.

On the other hand, due to global warming and melting of ice, regions like Scandinavia and Russia will get more agricultural land and greenery. This will attract migration of people towards northern parts of these countries. Even people from other parts of Europe, Africa and Asia may shift towards these areas in due course of time. Another factor affecting migration will be sinking of islands due to sea level rise.

Depletion of ground water will also be major factor affecting migration to other places within region or in some cases out of the region (if severity increases). In tropical region like south Asia, glaciers are melting; rivers are not having enough water to recharge the ground water. The uncertainty of monsoon rains is increasing. The rain water is not properly trapped to recharge the ground water, most of it goes as run off. Very soon in these regions, conditions will be so that people will be forced to leave agriculture and migrate to some other places. This will also affect the agricultural patterns and population distribution.

I believe that during next decade, we must focus our research to search the answers of these questions in order to prepare future generation ready against natural and man made disasters. One of the steps of action may be to develop multidisciplinary programs and teams of scientists and modelers including social scientists, political scientists, geophysicists, ecologists and atmospheric and agricultural scientists etc.

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