Giving Compass' Take:

• Chris D'Angelo reports that the migration caused by Hurricane Dorian is a part of the building climate refugee crisis that we are unprepared to address.  

• How can funders work to minimize the number of climate refugees and ensure that those who must migrate can do so safely and peacefully? 

• Learn about the world's first climate change refugee visa program. 

Dorian was a slow-motion train wreck that human-caused climate change supercharged. Above-average ocean temperatures fueled the storm as it crept through the Bahamas at a sluggish 1 mph. And like hurricanes Harvey and Florence, Dorian offers a glimpse at the future of hurricanes in a rapidly warming world. Research shows there’s been a marked slowdown in the speed of hurricanes over both water and land, which increases the risk of heavy rain, flooding, and storm surge.

In an op-ed, climate scientists Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler called Dorian “truly a nightmare scenario — and a preview of the climate crisis to come.”

Bahamians HuffPost spoke to both in West Palm Beach and on Grand Bahama struggled to find the words to describe what they’d survived.

“This one feels like a work that is not of this world,” said Mervin Henfield, a pastor in the community of Eight Mile Rock on Grand Bahama. “We’ve never experienced anything like this.”

The storm also highlights the growing crisis of human displacement amid extreme weather and rising seas. An average of 24 million people has been displaced by catastrophic weather per year since 2008. That number is forecast to soar to between 140 million and 1 billion by mid-century. Yet international law does not legally define “climate refugee,” and there are major gaps in protection for those fleeing rising seas, drought, extreme weather, and other environmental disasters.

If the U.S. response over the last few weeks is any indication, the Trump administration will do little to support such climate refugees — not even those from neighboring, friendly nations. President Donald Trump said the U.S. must be “very careful” about admitting Bahamians and claimed, without offering any evidence, that Dorian refugees could include “very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers.” Defending the administration’s refusal to grant temporary protected status to survivors, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the Bahamas “is a perfectly legitimate country capable of taking care of their own.”

Read the full article about the building climate refugee crisis by Chris D'Angelo at Grist.