Climate change will displace millions. Here's how we prepare

It was about two years
after Hurricane Katrina

that I first saw the Louisiana flood maps.

These flood maps are used
to show land loss in the past

and land loss that is to come.

On this particular day,
at a community meeting,

these maps were used to explain

how a 30-foot tidal surge
that accompanied Hurricane Katrina

could flood communities like mine
in south Louisiana

and communities across
the Mississippi and Alabama coast.

It turns out that the land we were losing
was our buffer from the sea.

I volunteered to interact
with the graphics on the wall,

and an in instant my life changed
for the second time in two years.

The graphics showed massive land loss

in south Louisiana and an encroaching sea,

but more specifically the graphics showed
the disappearance of my community

and many other communities
before the end of the century.

I wasn't alone at the front of the room.

I was standing there with other members
of south Louisiana's communities --

black, Native, poor.

We thought we were just bound
by temporary disaster recovery,

but we found that we were now bound
by the impossible task

of ensuring that our communities
would not be erased by sea level rise

due to climate change.

Friends, neighbors, family, my community:

I just assumed it would always be there.

Land, trees, marsh, bayou:

I just assumed that it would be there
as it had been for thousands of years.

I was wrong.

To understand what was happening
to my community,

I had to talk to other communities
around the globe.

I started in south Louisiana
with the United Houma Nation.

I talked to youth advocates
in Shishmaref, Alaska.

I talked to fisherwomen
in coastal Vietnam,

justice fighters in Fiji,

new generations of leaders

in the ancient cultures
of the Torres Straits.

Communities that had been here
for thousands of years

were suffering the same fate,

and we were all contemplating
how we would survive the next 50.

By teh end