> 500 million pacific islanders will be forced to flee to Southeast Asia
How the heck did you come up with this number? The entire population of Oceania excluding Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea is 3 million.
How the heck did you come up with this number? The entire population of Oceania excluding Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea is 3 million.
The term Pacific Islander [1] seems to not include the Philippines and Indonesia, as these islands are generally considered to be part of South East Asia [2]. One logical connection is that the Philippines and Indonesia are tectonically on the Asian crust [3], while the islands to the east are on the oceanic crust.
Thus the original statement of 500 million people fleeing to southeast asia makes geographically no sense, but I guess the intent of the people of Indonesia, Philippines etc. being cut off of seafood remains clear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Islander
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ocean#/media/File:Paci...
There are significant conflicts over water (https://reliefweb.int/report/world/editor-s-pick-10-violent-...). I'd expect those to extend to food too, and be acute in some regions.
I couldn't reply to the other poster (nogabebop23) that was making the point that they don't depend on reefs, but their point is moot because this is a global issue with different impacts at each latitude.
Also, they're quite developed countries and to the relatively small extent their food consumption is fish, it comes from trade and commercial fishing, not subsistence fishing, so their food supply will be no more impacted than any other asian country. And even that impact will look more like more seafood coming from fish farms as commercial fishing becomes less viable, as we've seen in China.
There are people, predominantly in the pacific islands proper, who rely on subsistence fishing and the decline of fish stocks will be hugely disruptive for them. It's still a big tragedy, but the number is more like a couple hundred thousand. I don't think it helps the debate to exaggerate by three orders of magnitude.
"...will be forced to flee Southeast asia"
OP says it right there in the same sentence you quoted...
I was trying to make the point that the influx of refugees from Pacific island nations will destabilize regions like Korea and Vietnam which have already seen such terrible conflict. India's going to be underwater, so there's going to be a northward migration of something like 500 million people from there and elsewhere.
The endgame is that those countries will likely be communist and a mix of non-christian religions. So the US seems to be positioning itself as pro-Russia and anti-China in a divide-and-conquer strategy. I think that's shortsighted, because the 21st century won't have 20th century politics. I'd rather see our attention turn towards not screwing over the developing countries that provide our goods and services. We could like, trade with them rather than bomb them. Admittedly, I'm probably misreading this, and also don't want to detract from environmental discussion.