Displaced | Desplazado

By 2050, as many as 1 in 8 people around the world will be at risk of displacement by sea level rise, drought, wildfires, extreme heat and other climate disasters.

Drilled global climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani and award-winning photojournalist Daniele Volpe traveled to Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia to meet communities on the front lines of climate breakdown who are already facing displacement.

From a fishing village in Mexico that has been mostly washed away, to Maya Ch’orti’ subsistence farms in Guatemala where crops have failed for years, to rancherias of the Wayuu people in Colombia whose livestock are dying from drought, each is on the edge of survival. But each community is fighting—to find ways to adapt to the new climate conditions, and to get the resources they need and the reparations they are owed. They are fighting for themselves, for the communities who will face displacement next, and for the rights of future generations.

“It’s too late for us, but we need a law or a policy to help others,” said Áurea Sánchez a fisherwoman from El Bosque, Mexico, who has testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about how her community was destroyed by storms and sea level rise driven by burning fossil fuels. “We were the first, but we won’t be the last.”