More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, and the problem is likely to grow more serious as climate change exacerbates such problems, experts have warned.

Tens of millions of people are likely to be similarly displaced in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural productivity. Such people are likely to migrate in regions across Asia and governments must start to prepare for the problems this will create, warned the Asian Development Bank.

The costs will be high — about US $ 40 billion — for adapting and putting in place protective measures — from sea walls to re-growing mangrove swamps (红树林沼泽) that have been cut down — that can help protect against the impacts of storm tides.

“While large-scale climate-related migration is a gradual phenomenon, communities in Asia and the Pacific are already experiencing the consequences of changing environmental conditions, including more frequent severe storms and flooding,” the bank said last week. This could lead to a widespread crisis across the region in coming years if preparations are not made to deal with the current and probable future consequence.

Robert Dobias, climate change project chief at the Asian Development Bank, said that, at present, climate change is still a relatively small cause of migration, as economic causes are the most worrying and frightening, and as environmental disasters happen independently of global warning.

The Asian Development Bank warned that governments must start to make preparations now, because more extreme weather has already started to take effect, though the changes so far have not been so great in their impact. The bank is working on a report that will set out in detail the likely problems and suggest a range of potential policy changes to help deal with them.

In 2018, the state of California was on fire. Alexandria Villasenor, who was 13 at the time, witnessed the destruction of Northern California’s Camp Fire, which would go on to burn more than 150,000 acres of land. Villasenor was scared. “That’s when I found out how important climate education was,” she reflected. “And just how much we lacked climate education these past couple of years.”

Villasenor, now 15, is determined to have a bigger conversation. She quickly realized the fight requires international, government-level changes. For her, what started as local concern turned into a year-long protest (抗议) in front of the United Nations’ New York City headquarters and a global campaign for more compulsory climate education. She sat on a bench in front of the headquarters, pleading for the world’s leaders to take climate change seriously.

Her action received national attention, with millions of other students around the world joining in the movement. “It’s completely unacceptable to not learn anything about our planet and our environment in school, after all the young people would ‘inherit’ the Earth.” Villasenor said, “That’s why I think that climate education is so important, and that’s why I concentrate on it now.”

Right now, Villasenor is working with the Biden-Harris administration on its climate plan, which has promised to center the needs of young people and communities most impacted by climate change. She even spoke at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “That was definitely a huge moment when I realized that people were listening to the voices of me and youth climate activists,” Villasenor said.

When she isn’t connecting with her fellow youth activists or holding elected officials accountable to the climate concerns of their young voters, Villasenor is like most other teens. “My favorite thing to do, of course, is sleep.” she said. “I like to read a lot. I like fantasy books, normally. I also like to write.”

The immense and forbidding Southern Ocean is famous for howling winds and strange waves that have tested mariners for centuries.

But its true strength lies beneath the waves.

The ocean’s dominant feature, extending up to two miles deep and as much as 1.200 miles wide, is the Antarctic Circumpolar (极地附近的) Current, by far the largest current in the world.

It is the world’s climate engine, and it has kept the world from warming even more by drawing deep water from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, much of which has been in the deep ocean for hundreds of years, and pulling it to the surface. There, it exchanges heat and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere before being pushed again on its endless round trip.

Without this action, which scientists call upwelling, the world would be even hotter than it has become as a result of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. “From no perspective is there any place more important than the Southern Ocean,” said Joellen L. Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona. “There’s nothing like it on Planet Earth.”

For centuries this ocean was largely unknown, and its conditions were so extreme that only a relative handful of sailors went to its waters with lots of icebergs.

What fragmentary scientific knowledge was available came from measurements taken by explorers, naval ships, the occasional research expeditions or whaling ships.

But more recently, a new generation of floating, autonomous probes (探测仪) that can collect temperature, density and other data for years—diving deep underwater, and even exploring beneath the Antarctic sea ice, before rising to the surface to phone home—has enabled scientists to learn much more. They have discovered that global warming is affecting the Antarctic current in complex ways, and these shifts could complicate the ability to fight climate change in the future.