NPR: Grim And Hopeful Global Trends To Watch In 2020 (And Fold Into A Zine)

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We don't have a crystal ball, but as journalists covering global health and development, we have a pretty good nose for emerging trends (with some help from our favorite expert sources).

Some likely trends give cause for optimism — signs of progress in solving the world's problems. Other trends are pessimistic — threats and challenges that are expected to worsen in the year ahead.

Here are 11 trend lines we'll be watching in 2020. First we'll give you the bad news — then the hopeful predictions.

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NPR: The $4 Million Severance Payout That Almost Didn't Happen

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In late November, a group of laid-off garment industry workers in Indonesia collected more than $4 million in severance pay owed to them by their employer.

It was a rare victory, won with the help of local labor unions, international advocacy groups and major retailers like Nike. But it may not happen again: The government there is moving forward with a controversial plan to roll back labor protections in the hope of attracting more foreign investment.

In November 2018, a factory in West Java that was producing sportswear for Nike and other international retailers shut down, leaving 2,000 workers without a job. Under Indonesia's generous severance laws, most of the workers should have been eligible for 18 months worth of severance pay, equal to about $4,000 dollars each.

Instead, Hojeon, the Korean company that operated the factory, paid out only half that amount, according to an April report by the Washington-based advocacy group Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which was contacted by the unions for the factory workers to investigate the situation.

That report kicked off months of negotiations between labor unions, WRC, the Korean company Hojeon, Nike and other retailers that purchased apparel from the factory. (The government was not involved because unions made a decision not to pursue legal action against Hojeon, which they feared would result in a lengthy court battle, according to the WRC report).

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NPR: The Powerlessness Of Nigeria's Tech Startups

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Chris Oyeniyi runs a small tech startup in Lagos, Nigeria. It's a smartphone app called KariGO that he says is "like Uber but for trucks." Businesses or factories can use it to hire big semitrucks to move their products around the country. He started it in 2016 and now has 11 office staff members, and he owns a few dozen trucks.

But unlike Uber, which operates 24/7, Oyeniyi says the app is limited to normal business hours. He wants to keep it open around the clock but faces what has so far been an insurmountable obstacle. It's not a staff shortages, government regulations or software glitches.

"One thing will not allow us to do that," he says. "Electricity."

Oyeniyi says he pays about $800 every month to keep the lights and computers on in his small office. The reason for the high cost? Power from the government-run electrical grid is cheap but goes out so often — multiple times a day, every day — that he is forced to rely on a loud, fume-belching, diesel-sucking generator. It's too expensive to fuel and maintain beyond the bare minimum number of hours.

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NPR: Could 'Hidden Hunger' Be Conquered With A Particle The Size Of A Grain Of Salt?

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Staple foods and seasonings like flour and salt could be made more nutritious with a new technology that borrows from the pharmaceutical industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Two billion people worldwide suffer from so-called "hidden hunger" — they may eat enough calories to keep hunger at bay but don't get nearly enough micronutrients like iron, calcium and Vitamins A and B.

Hidden hunger is often the result of a diet that relies too much on staple carbohydrates like corn, rice and cassava that are low-cost and filling but not very nutritious and not enough on nutrient-packed fruits, vegetables and animal products.

Especially for children and pregnant women, hidden hunger can have severe, long-lasting health effects, including birth defects, decreased brain function, a compromised immune system and chronic fatigue. But in many low- and middle-income countries, high-nutrient foods — not to mention workarounds like vitamin supplement pills — are often scarce and expensive.

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NPR: Hospitals Around The World Have A Dire Shortage Of Blood

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When Claude Tayou Tagny was a young medical student on a rotation through clinics in rural Cameroon, he treated a woman during a difficult childbirth. She had lost, by his estimate, at least three pints of blood, triple the normal amount for childbirth and equal to roughly 30% of her total blood volume.

Tagny, with no supply of blood on hand, did the only thing he could: put out a call to the woman's family for emergency donations. He was only able to raise one pint.

"It was not enough," he says. The baby survived, but the woman did not.

It wasn't the last time Tagny, now a hematologist at the University of Yaounde Teaching Hospital, would confront a similar crisis. He says that a family's frantic rush to collect blood — critical for treating everything from traumatic injuries and malaria-caused anemia to sickle cell disease and cancer — are part of the hospital's daily rhythm. And there's never enough.

"That is what we are facing every day," he says. "People dying because they don't have blood available in the hospitals."

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NPR: Turkey's Invasion Of Syria Worsens A Humanitarian Crisis

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As a military offensive by Turkey into Syria enters its third day, aid agencies are increasingly concerned. An estimated 100,000 civilians in northeastern Syria have been displaced, at least one displaced-persons camp was relocated out of the line of fire, a front-line hospital was abandoned and critical water infrastructure was taken out of commission, according to the United Nations. All of this is exacerbating a humanitarian crisis that was already one of the world's worst.

On Wednesday, Turkish ground and air forces commenced a series of assaults against a Syrian militia of the Kurdish ethnic group, which had been an American ally in the fight against ISIS but is viewed as a terrorist organization by the Turkish government.

Until this week, northeastern Syria near the border with Turkey had been a refuge of relative safety for people fleeing violence in other parts of the war-torn country. Humanitarian relief agencies have been providing food, water, medicine and other lifesaving aid to more than 90,000 internally displaced people there as well as more than 1 million other residents who had lost access to social services because of the conflict.

Now, the towns and camps where those people are living are suddenly on the front lines of a new, unpredictable combat operation.

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NPR: Escape To New York: Afraid For Her Life, A Pakistani Activist Seeks Asylum

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In May, one of Pakistan's most controversial women's-rights activists vanished.

Gulalai Ismail, 32, had spent much of her life organizing young women and girls to push back against child marriage and assert their rights in a male-dominated society. She founded an organization, Aware Girls, that provided leadership training and produced one alumna who went on to become the world's best-known girls' education advocate and youngest-ever Nobel laureate: Malala Yousafzai.

Ismail was used to making enemies, ranging from anonymous Facebook trolls to Taliban militants. But early last year, when she began to draw attention to the stories of women who claimed to have been raped or sexually assaulted by Pakistani security forces, she attracted the ire of her most formidable opponent yet: The country's all-powerful military and intelligence agencies.

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NPR: A Mix Of These Foods Could Restore Healthy Microbes In Malnourished Kids

This story first appeared on NPR.

Olivia Falcigno/NPR

When children suffer from severe malnourishment, they don't just lose weight.

The condition wreaks havoc on biological systems throughout the body — including the microbiome, the healthy bacteria and other microbes that live in our digestive tracts. Those bacteria number in the trillions in every person and include hundreds of different species. They're essential for metabolism, bone growth, brain function, the immune system and other bodily functions.

In a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science, scientists in a renowned microbiology lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, report the development of a specialized food designed to rehabilitate gut microbes in severely malnourished children, a treatment that should facilitate both their immediate and long-term recovery.

The food — a spoon-fed paste made from chickpeas, soy, peanuts, bananas and a blend of oils and micronutrients — was shown to substantially boost microbiome health.

The researchers are still working to understand the exact biochemistry that causes certain foods to have a greater impact on restoring the microbiome than others. But Lawrence David, a leading gut microbe specialist at Duke University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, says that the research represents an unprecedented step forward in understanding what a healthy gut microbiome should look like, how health conditions like malnourishment affect it and what interventions might work to repair damages.

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NPR: Trump Froze Aid To Guatemala. Now Programs Are Shutting Down

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For Carlos Marroquín, the chickens are all that's left.

For the past several years, Marroquín has struggled to feed his wife and five children with the proceeds from their 10-acre corn farm. They live in a mud-brick house with a sloped terra cotta roof, nestled among pines, acacias and prickly pear cactus in Guatemala's mountainous northern Quiché region, part of the country's Dry Corridor that has been gripped by a multiyear drought.

Last November, his family was one of the 6,000 poorest families here to be selected for a U.S. government-backed humanitarian relief program. The family began receiving a monthly cash transfer of around $60, which it was encouraged to spend on fresh fruit, cereal, dairy products and other grocery staples to supplement a diet that rarely varied beyond black beans and homemade corn tortillas.

"The first time we got the money, we thought it was a dream," he recalls. "How was it possible to get money we hadn't earned? It was only when we had it that we believed it was real."

But this summer, as Marroquín watched his corn wither once again, he noticed that the cash was also starting to dry up. The $60 became $40, which became $18. Then he learned that in the last week of August, the program would come to an end, at least a year earlier than its organizers had hoped.

The reason: a decision in April by President Trump to freeze $450 million in U.S. foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — what's known as the Northern Triangle — over what he described as their failure to stem the outflow of northbound migrants.

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Medium: The FDA Is About to Crack Down on Shady CBD Products

This ‘Wild West’ industry could be facing some law and order

Credit: yavdat/Getty Images

This story first appeared on Medium:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is gearing up to tighten its oversight of cannabidiol, better known as CBD, the non-intoxicating chemical cousin of THC that is marketed as a natural remedy for a wide variety of ailments.

Since late last year, products containing CBD—from pills, oils, and cosmetics to drinks, gummies, and even dog treats—have proliferated across the country. The boom is largely thanks to a change in federal law that legalized hemp—a low-THC variety of marijuana—which had previously been categorized with pot and harder drugs like cocaine and heroin. That change opened the door for legal hemp-derived CBD and a market that could explode to $22 billion by 2022, according to the market research firm Brightfield Group. 

But now a broad cross-section of medical researchers, policy analysts, marijuana industry insiders, and federal regulators are worried that door was opened a little too wide. On June 20, the House of Representatives approved an amendment to a package of upcoming spending bills that directs the FDA to come up with new regulations for CBD products. 

But the agency was already on it: In May, it hosted an all-day hearing on CBD, where officials grilled dozens of experts about which—if any—of the multitude of claims made about CBD were actually backed by science, and how consumers can be sure about the quality of what they’re really getting when they pay for a CBD product. The agency also fired off a series of menacing letters to CBD-selling companies that the agency claims violated marketing laws. The FDA is accepting public comments on potential CBD regulation until July 16, and has already received more than 2,700 (many of which sing CBD’s praises: “I want the FDA to leave cbd oil alone…this is a plant from God, let Gods people use it to heal and manage pain”). After that, new rules could follow quickly. 

“We must sort this out in service of public health,” Amy Abernethy, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, said on Twitter after the hearing. “We will work as quickly as possible to define a way forward.”

So is it time to start stockpiling your favorite CBD products before they disappear? Here’s what you need to know:

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National Geographic: Cameroon’s embattled ebony trees get a lifeline—from guitar maker

The guitar industry has a spotty track record for sustainable wood sourcing. But one manufacturer is trying to help stave off deforestation.

Noël Nakere Dobo Nkouli finishes planting an ebony sapling in the Congo Basin forest of southeastern Cameroon. “These trees,” he says, “are our heritage.” PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM MCDONNELL

This story first appeared in National Geographic.

WIELDING A MACHETE, Noël Nakere Dobo Nkouli hacks a path through thick vines crowding the tropical forest outside his village in Kompia, in Cameroon’s rural southeast. Every few yards, he digs a shallow hole in the rich, red soil and plants the leafy sapling of an ebony tree, an iconic indigenous hardwood species with a jet-black interior that is prized for sculptures, piano keys, furniture accents, and stringed instrument fingerboards.

Since last year, Nkouli and his neighbors in a handful of other villages in the area have planted more than 5,000 ebony trees. The trees won’t be mature enough to harvest for a century, but Nkouli sees them as an investment in future generations at a time when the forests of central Africa are quickly disappearing under pressure from agriculture and logging.

Their work is part of an ambitious reforestation effort supported by an unlikely patron: the American guitar manufacturer who equips the likes of Taylor Swift and Jason Mraz and is among Africa’s biggest commercial consumers of ebony.

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Bloomberg Businessweek: The NASA Veteran Cracking Down on Illegal Gold Miners

Satellite-imaging software helps government officials identify unlicensed mining sites.

A small-scale mining operation in Kibi, Ghana.

PHOTOGRAPHER: RUTH MCDOWALL FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

A small-scale mining operation in Kibi, Ghana. PHOTOGRAPHER: RUTH MCDOWALL FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

This story first appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.

The illegal gold mine is hidden just past a thick grove of cocoa trees, a little ways off the two-lane road through Sagyimase, Ghana, a rural town a couple hours’ drive north of the West African nation’s capital, Accra. It sits on a torn-up patch of ground the size of a football field, where three dozen workers operate backhoes and a tangle of generators, pumps, and hoses, washing peanut-size nuggets of gold out of the red earth. Gold was Ghana’s biggest export last year, and mines like this are common throughout the country, often a more lucrative alternative to cocoa farming. But this mine—like too many others, government officials say—is operating without a valid permit, without oversight of its severe environmental impact, and without paying taxes meant to underwrite the land’s eventual restoration.

In Ghana’s vast agricultural hinterland, such mines often operate with little fear of regulators. Felix Addo-Okyireh, an official with Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency who oversees the small-scale mining industry in Sagyimase and the rest of the country’s Eastern Region, has two enforcement officers patrolling an area slightly smaller than New Jersey. “It’s difficult to identify the illegal mines unless we happen to bump into them,” he says. Mining is a big reason why Ghana has the world’s fastest-growing rate of deforestation, according to the World Resources Institute, and often leads to the contamination of farmland and water sources with toxic chemicals including mercury and cyanide. So Addo-Okyireh and his colleagues have turned to NASA for help.

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NPR: Rewards — And Risks — Of Using Antibiotics As Silver Bullet For Kids In Africa

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A boy named Zourkaleyn, 3 years old, has is blood tested at a station inside a mud-brick house in the village of Poulloh, Dosso region, Niger, as part of the pioneering MORDOR study. Gates Archive/Dominique Catton

Researchers pursuing a simple, cheap way to dramatically reduce childhood deaths in sub-Saharan Africa released some promising new results today — but it's still unclear whether their approach might ultimately put more children at a disadvantage in fighting off serious diseases.

The story starts in 2009, when a group of ophthalmologists from the University of California-San Francisco published some surprising results from a study they had conducted in Ethiopia on trachoma, an eye infection that's the world's leading cause of preventable blindness. The eye doctors knew that the antibiotic azithromycin was effective in fighting the disease and had administered it to tens of thousands of children there, ages 1 to 9. Meanwhile, they wanted to keep watch on whether the drug seemed to have any other beneficial effects on the children's health.

What they found was remarkable: Mass azithromycin treatment, administered two times a year, seemed to have an almost miraculous ability to reduce childhood deaths. In Ethiopia, 58 babies per 1,000 births don't survive past the age of 5. That's lower than the sub-Saharan Africa average of 76 but still far higher than in Europe or the U.S. (where the rate is around 6 per 1,000). But in groups of children treated with azithromycin, the mortality rate was half that of untreated groups.

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NPR: New HIV Map Offers Most Detailed Look Yet At The Epidemic

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The United Nations has set a goal of ending the global HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.

The tide is slowly turning in southeastern Africa — including countries like South Africa, Mozambique, Lethoso, and Botswana — which remains the epicenter of the epidemic, home to more than half of the 36.9 million people living with the disease. The rate of deaths and infections there are declining overall. But a July report from the United Nations AIDS agency found a $5.4 billion shortfall in global funding needed to achieve final victory.

A first-of-its-kind new map may help increase the precision of the HIV/AIDS response, as some data-savvy researchers narrow their focus on the continent's worst-affected areas — to the size of a small town.

A study published Wednesday presents what these researchers describe as the most detailed map ever produced of HIV prevalence across sub-Saharan Africa. The team behind the map is an international consortium of epidemiologists led by the University of Washington-Seattle's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation(IHME). Their work appears in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

The researchers don't just go country by country. Theybreak down the continent into a grid of thousands of 9.6-square-mile squares. The result is a view of HIV distribution that is much more fine-grain than the usual national or province-level data and that could have a huge impact on how resources are allocated to diagnose and treat as well as to prevent new infections.

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MIT Technology Review: How do cow herders spot water in the Sahara? With satellites, of course.

Climate change makes it even harder to find water on the edge of the Sahara. Now herders in Mali rely on images from space to direct them to the nearest watering hole.

JEROME DELAY/AP

This story first appeared in MIT Technology Review.

For most of his 50 years, Abdoul Ag Alwaly, a cattle herder in northern Mali, used the same way of finding water for his cows. He would pay a motorcyclist or camel driver to roam the desert surrounding the city of Gao and check the levels of scattered creeks and wells. The process was expensive, time-consuming, and risky—sometimes he’d march his herd for days only to find that he’d received a bad tip, or that another herd had gotten there first.

In recent years climate change has made the search even harder, Alwaly says. Where he lives, in the Sahel, the vast strip of arid scrubland south of the Sahara Desert, temperatures are rising faster than the global average, droughts are more frequent, and vegetation is scarcer. Erratic rainfall has made traditional watering holes unreliable. Animals frequently perish during the search, Alwaly says, and competition for water can easily turn violent.

So he’s trying a new approach. Over the last year, Alwaly, who leads a local union of livestock herders, has started to look for leads in satellite images. “With your phone and 25 francs”—about four US cents— “you’ll know, and can move with a lot more certainty,” he says.

Across the continent, rising temperatures and unpredictable rains are a serious threat to millions of small farmers and herders. Real-time, hyper-local satellite data can be used to detect early warning signs of drought and crop failure. As satellite imaging gets cheaper, more prolific, and higher in resolution, and the massive quantities of data it yields become easier for computers to manage and interpret, a growing number of private companies and nongovernmental organizations are finding ways to put it directly into the hands of people who deal with the effects of climate change every day.

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NPR: Plight Of Survivors After Cyclone Idai: No Power, No Homes, No Roads

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When Cyclone Idai, a devastating tropical storm, swept across southeastern Africa on Thursday, it killed at least 150 people, displaced hundreds of thousands and left Beira, a coastal city of a half-million people in central Mozambique, almost totally destroyed.

In the aftermath, with some of their neighbors still trapped on rooftops or in trees, some local residents began the long process of recovery with a small but notable rebuttal to nature, by beginning to move the beach back to its rightful place.

The storm, which made landfall on Thursday, pushed tons of sand from the city's beach onto downtown streets, complicating emergency response efforts that were already hampered by a total lack of electricity, telecommunications networks or running water, says Jamie LeSueur, emergency operations manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, who is helping to lead emergency response efforts in Beira and was one of the first aid workers to reach the scene.

"We saw massive destruction," LeSueur says. "But within two days, people were in the streets with shovels. Seeing the response has been just awe-inspiring."

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NPR: U.S. Supreme Court Rules That World Bank Can Be Sued

More suits could follow as international financial organizations grapple with this new standard of accountability for the unintended consequences of their investments.

The coal-fired Tata Mundra power plant in western India was funded by a branch of the World Bank. A group of farmers and fishermen is suing, claiming that contamination of local water sources has disrupted their livelihoods.

Sami Siva/International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

This story first appeared in NPR.

The World Bank can be sued when its overseas investments go awry. And so can some other international organizations.

That is the clear message from the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week issued a 7-1 decision in Jam v. International Finance Corporation, ruling for the first time that international financial institutions, including various branches of the bank and other U.S.-based organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank, can be subject to lawsuits in cases where their investments in foreign development projects are alleged to have caused harm to local communities.

The decision overturns a decades-old presumption dating to the founding of the World Bank in 1945 — that the IFC, a Washington, D.C.-based branch of the World Bank Group that finances private-sector projects in developing countries, and other bank-affiliated organizations are fully immune from such suits.

The Jam suit, which was filed in 2015, is far from over. With the fundamental immunity issue resolved, it will return to a federal circuit court in Washington, D.C., this spring for further battles over the facts of the case, and it may not be decided for years. In the meantime, at least one other major suit against the IFC is now gaining steam in response to last week's decision, and more could follow as international financial organizations grapple with this new standard of accountability for the unintended consequences of their investments.

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Medium: Scientists Are Making THC and CBD Without Marijuana

New research paves the way for cannabinoids without cannabis

Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images

This story was first published in Medium.

As marijuana becomes increasingly mainstream — the legal cannabis market is estimated to reach $166 billion by 2025 — the potential for cannabis to change numerous industries from health to food is great. The future of cannabis may feature production facilities that have more in common with a craft beer brewery than a grow house — and leave out the plant altogether.

In a paper published today in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, biochemists at the University of California, Berkeley report what some cannabis industry experts are describing as a breakthrough in biosynthetic cannabinoid production. By using genetically modified yeast, the Berkeley scientists were able to convert simple sugars into the active chemical compounds in marijuana: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). The scientists made THC and CBD — the chemicals that get users high and which have supposed medical benefits — without the marijuana plant.

The research could help make these compounds — which are produced in relatively low quantities by the plant — much cheaper and more widely available for medicinal and recreational use, potentially bypassing some of the common constraints for the traditional marijuana market, including sky-high energy needs and a complex, ever-shifting legal landscape.

“It’s an idea that many companies have been working on, but I’ve never seen anything so thorough,” says Daniele Piomelli, director of the University of California, Irvine’s Institute for the Study of Cannabis, who was not involved in the research. “It appears like a very substantial step forward.”

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NPR: A Fatal Public Health Problem In Africa That Flies Under The Radar

Western donors are overlooking the safety of African food markets

An unrefrigerated meat market in Cameroon (Photo by Siobhán O’Grady)

This story first appeared in NPR.

In September, public health officials in South Africa finally declared victory over the world's worst-ever outbreak of listeriosis, a foodborne illness that had sickened more than 1,000 people and killed more than 200 there since January 2017.

The cause? A batch of "polony," a popular processed lunch meat similar to bologna, contaminated with listeria, a bacteria found in animal feces. Government health inspectors traced the outbreak to a factory owned by the South African packaged foods producer Tiger Brands, and ordered the recall of nearly 6,000 tons of affected food.

Even with that particular crisis under control, Africa as a continent continues to suffer from the world's highest per-capita rate of foodborne illnesses. A new report this month from the World Bank's Global Food Safety Partnership points to one reason why: Much of the funding for food safety efforts on the continent come from Western donors — and most of those efforts concentrate on safety standards for foods exported to other countries.

"Trade is important for a lot of [African] economies," says Lystra Antoine, an agricultural economist who is one of the report's authors. But, she says, "that has an unintended consequence."

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CIGI: Climate Migrants Face a Gap in International Law

Even with the GCM, climate-displaced people are falling through the cracks.

Photo by Tim McDonnell

This column first appeared with the Centre for International Governance Innovation

In December, diplomats from more than 160 nations met for two days in Morocco to adopt the United Nations’ Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), a non-binding agreement that aims to make life a little easier for the unprecedented number of people worldwide who are on the move away from home.

One of the agreement’s signature achievements was to recognize the role that extreme weather and other climate-related disasters can play in prompting displacement and migration. According to the Nansen Initiative, a research collaborative backed by the European Union, between 2008 and 2014 an average of 22.5 million people were displaced every year by natural disasters. Experts expect that number to grow as sea levels rise, droughts last longer and storms worsen. By 2050, the total number of climate-displaced people could grow beyond 200 million — about two percent of the global population. And yet, there remains no legally binding international recognition or protection for climate migrants.

The GCM took the biggest step yet toward solving that problem. It calls on its signatories to “better map, understand, predict and address migration movements, such as those that may result from sudden-onset and slow-onset natural disasters, the adverse effects of climate change, environmental degradation...” The GCM also calls on signatories to “cooperate to identify, develop and strengthen solutions...including by devising planned relocation and visa options” for climate migrants. Its recommendations mirror those put forward in September by aspecial UN task force on displacement, which was created during the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.

Still, there’s a long way to go before any of this language translates to tangible benefits for climate migrants. The GCM has yet to yield substantive regional or national policy changes aimed at climate migrants. The United States, as well as Australia, Israel, Italy, Hungary and other key players in global migration politics, pulled out of the agreement over concerns that it could impede their domestic immigration agendas. In the meantime, as climate displacement escalates, more evidence is accumulating about the complex ways in which climate change interacts with the panoply of other factors that might compel a person to migrate, and what the impacts of this unprecedented surge of human mobility might be.

The stakes of this issue were vividly on display on the southern US border late in 2018, when thousands of Central American migrants joined caravans. A September assessment by US border officials pointed to drought-stricken farms and hunger as the primary driver for those migrants. US President Donald Trump responded by deploying National Guard troops to the border and instigating an unprecedented federal government shutdown over funding for a border wall.

Even with the GCM, climate-displaced people are falling through the cracks.

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