0/5

Dateline: Oct 24

Dateline hears from "climate change refugees" leaving sinking homes in Louisiana.

This week on Dateline, “America’s First Climate Change Refugees” hears from people leaving sinking homes on the Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana.

When people think of climate change refugees they might think of small island nations in the Pacific – but rising sea levels are also affecting a growing number of Americans. From Alaska in the north to Louisiana in the south, this Tuesday Dateline reporter Jeannette Francis meets the Americans living with the realities of a rapidly changing climate.

President Donald Trump has labelled climate change “a myth” and “a very expensive hoax”. He pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement and has cut funding to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, yet it’s his presidency that will oversee the relocation of America’s first ever climate change refugees.

Captain Dan Kipnis is a retired fishing captain from Miami Beach. “I’m worried about climate change. I’m worried about the sea level coming up and me having a life that I don’t like, so I’m going to sell the house,” he tells Dateline.

“It hurts me to leave here. I built everything here – to stay here, to live out my life here, the next 20 years until I die – and I’m not going to be able to do it.”

University of Miami Professor Harold Wanless says even with conservative estimates the future of Miami is not good. “It won’t be here in 100 years,” he tells Dateline.

“We’ll be trying to hang on to a city that has no infrastructure, no fresh water, no regular electricity, and so on. No sewerage facilities. Or it will abandoned completely.”

Dateline meets the people of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, as they prepare to leave their sinking homes. The island has lost 98 per cent of its land mass since 1955.

Fourteen-year-old Juliette Brunet’s family has been on the island for more than 200 years, but she will be the last generation to be born there.

“My whole family lived here and, like, having to move away from where all my family lived is kind of hard but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” she tells Dateline.

On the other side of the country, the Inupiat people of Kivalina, Alaska, have been pleading for help to relocate for decades. Kivalina is in a region that is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. They tell Dateline that, with Trump as President, they are turning to the private sector for help relocating.

Dateline investigates whether the impact of a rapidly changing climate could turn what President Trump believes to be a “very expensive hoax” into an even more expensive reality.

Tuesday 24 October at 9.30pm on SBS.

One Response

  1. Global anthropological climate change is real but it is disingenuous to blame the coastal erosion that is occurring in south eastern Louisiana on climate change.

Leave a Reply