Issuu

publication design PROCESS Julia Kline

VISC 202 HERSTOWSKI

Table of Contents

4-6

8-9

10-14

16-22

PROJECT BRIEF

TYPOGRAPHY NOTES

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION SUMMARY

OPENING SPREAD SKETCHES

MOCKUPS

24-27

TOOL KITS

THUMBNAILS

29-41

FIRST THREE SPREADS

42-50

SPREAD VARIATIONS

THE MAC IS NOT A TYPEWRITER

FONT PAIRING

52-53

JUSTIFICATION SETTINGS

FONT SPECS

54-58

FINAL SPREAD

PRAGRAPH BREAKS

PROJECT REFLECTION

Project Brief

In Elements of Typography, our first project was to design a magazine with the concepts of Publication Design. We explored the concept of type as image and type with image to express the article. My goal was to express the message of the article through manipulation of the words and text, the organization of elements on the grid, and the images chosen. Through the establishments of grid layouts, visual hierarchies, and creative typography, we were able to tell a story to the reader and keep them engaged in the article. We each picked an article from the New York Times that we were interested in and went from there. I picked the Great Climate Migration because I know global warming is a huge issue that humans have on the Earth and I don’t really read much about it. The pictures really stood out to me because they are very powerful and speak for themselves which calls for a simpler spread. My idea for the magazine was to showcase the images and evoke empathy, while warning what the consequences of climate change are. I started out by sketching the opening spread layout using the pictures that stood out the most and manipulating the headline. Then, I put some ideas into the computer and ended up with three refined mockups. I liked the idea of the text having some sort of movement to it because it correlates to the numbers of people having to migrate from their countries. I chose to go with the picture of a man, Jorge, kneeling down at the dried up soil where crops used to grow. I warpd the headline “Migration” and layered the same word on top of eachother with a different scaled warp to give off a progression of migration. I added in the color red and the tint of pink because red is an emotionally intense color and it is also associated with danger. It also drew ot the pops of red in the images from the artcile taken in Central America. By learning about the basics of typography and font pairings, I messed around with the Font Specs for what certain fonts and typefaces fit together and with the message of the article. It was also important to play around with the paragraph breaks and thumnails to see what looks best with the article itself and certain images. Although it seemed like a long process, the result was worth it.

Basics of Typography

TYPOGRAPHY

BODY COPY

DISPLAY TYPE

HIERARCHY

KERNING

LEADING

The art of arranging type- it’s about using the letters and words to form into layouts

Bulk of text that’s presented to reader; Anything other than a headline and a sub-headline

Grab your attention, example- film posters

The way we arrange elements of type in order of importance

Adjust the space between two characters/numbers; Used to please the eye and for different effects

The space between the lines above and below; too tight or too loose makes it hard to read

TRACKING

WIDOWS & ORPHANS

SERIF TYPEFACE

10 11 12

Space between groups of letters or entire words; Can change the density of a block of text

A word that sits on the bottom line on its own leaving a gap; A word or fragment that sits alone at the top of a column and disrupts horizontal alignment

Small traditional decorative strokes; Used for professional or authoritative copy

SANS SERIF TYPEFACE No decorations on strokes; More modern with less visual noise; Better for on screen

SCRIPT/CURSIVE Highly decorative

SLAB SERIF TYPEFACE Thicker serifs; Commonly used for headlines

Ten Rules to Type

JUSTIFY LEFT

USE ONE FONT

SKIP A WEIGHT

DOUBLE POINT SIZE

ALIGN TO ONE AXIS

Set type to read left to right, avoid indenting first line of paragraph

Do not use two of the same sans, serif, sans serif, slab serif, or script faces together create contrast

Slight weight changes don’t create enough contrast

For example if using 30pt. for headline, use 15pt. for body or more for a more dramatic effect

Align elements to grid line

PICK ANY FONT

GROUP BY USING RULES

AVOID THE CORNERS

MIND THE GAP

Helps block info into shapes and appears more orderly

Negative space is a good thing

Spacing between paragraphs and the end of paragraphs; Pay attention to shapes made by the rags; Use only a single space after punctuation

BE BOLD OR ITALIC, NEVER REGULAR

Grid - Thinking with Type

GOLDEN SECTION A ratio that has been used in Western art and architecture for more than two thousand years;

MODULAR GRID

BASELINE GRID

Consistent horizontal divisions from top to bottom in addition to vertical divisions from left to right

The ratio for the golden section is 1 : 1.618.

MULTICOLUMN GRID Provides flexible formats for publications that have a complex hierarchy or that integrate text and illustrations; The more columns you create, the more flexible your grid becomes

DESIGNING WITH A HANG LINE An area across the top can be reserved for images and captions, and body text can “hang” from a common line; Divides the page horizontally

Serves to anchor all (or nearly all) layout elements to a common rhythm;To style headlines, captions, and other elements, choose line spacing that works with the baseline grid ( 18/24 for headlines, 14/18 for subheads, and 8/12 for captions)

The Great Climate Migration

Early in 2019, Guatemala experienced an excruciating drought that left bankruptcy and starvation to inhabit their land. This caused hundreds of million of people from Central America to flee to another land or die. The result will be the greatest wave of global migration in the world’s history. These people are moving to the Middle East, Europe, and North America toward the coasts and away from hot climates. Temperatures are predicted to rise more in the next 50 years than it did in the last several thousand decades combined according to the National Academy of Sciences. The migration could bring some advantages such as new opportunities and bringing new people into an aging work force. But northern nations could seal themselves off to the outside countries, leaving many to suffer.

WORD COMBINATIONS Confluence of Drought Sweeping Scale of change Demographic Decline Population surges Misery reigns Influx of migrants Collision course Rapid desertification Chronically Hungry Food insecurity Destabilizing Globalization Staggering Climate Crisis Hope

Opening Spread Sketches

Mockups

I took nine ideas from my sketches and modified them in the computer, changing the image and text maipulation. Then, I refined three of the mockups and picked one of those to use for my opening spread.

collision o u r s e

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

Abrahm Lustgarten for the New York Times

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

The New York Times

July 23, 2020

The Great Climate Migration

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

Abrahm Lustgarten

The New York Times

July 23, 2020

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

The New York Times

July 23, 2020

Font Pairing

SERIF WITH SANS SERFIF

SANS SERIF HEADING WITH SERIF BODY TEXT

ONLY COMBINE 1-2 FONTS

CONTRAST BETWEEN SIZING & HIERARCHY

FONTS WITH SIMILAR X-HEIGHT

BOLD HEADER WITH THINNER BODY TEXT

NO DOUBLE SCRIPT

3 FONT COMBO SERIF, SAME SERIF, SERIF BODY TEXT

DOUBLE SANS SERIF

BOOK FOOL-PROOF COMBO IS SIMPLE

Font Specs

Font Specs helped combine fonts that worked well with eachother and helped organize the different fonts used. I ended up using 3 fonts in my final spread- ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro, Mr Eaves XL Mod OT, and Proxima Nova. All of which are Sans Serif typefaces that give off a clean look and work well together.

Itc Avant Garde medium 64pt

Proxima Nova regular 20pt

Proxima Nova light 12pt

Proxima Nova semibold italic 18pt

Proxima nova 9pt

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

Chiapas, Mexico. Coto (Right) Hopping A Train With Other Migrants.

Collision Course

BY ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

proxima nova light 8pt 24

THE GREAT MIGRATION NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

proxima nova light 11pt

Early in 2019, a year before the

the residents have largely stayed. Now,

Scientists have learned to project such

world shut its borders completely, Jorge

though, under a relentless confluence of

changes around the world with surpris-

A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala.

drought, flood, bankruptcy and starva-

ing precision, but — until recently — little

The land was turning against him. For

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Al-

has been known about the human con-

five years, it almost never rained.

most everyone here experiences some

sequences of those changes. As their

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his

degree of uncertainty about where their

land fails them, hundreds of millions of

last seeds into the ground.

next meal will come from. Half the chil-

people from Central America to Sudan

The corn sprouted into healthy green

dren are chronically hungry, and many

to the Mekong Delta will be forced to

stalks, and there was hope — until,

are short for their age, with weak bones

choose between flight or death. The

without warning, the river flooded.

and bloated bellies. Their families are all

result will almost certainly be the great-

Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields

facing the same excruciating decision

est wave of global migration the world

searching in vain for cobs he could still

that confronted Jorge.

has seen.

eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet,

The odd weather phenomenon that

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son

signing away the tin-roof hut where he

many blame for the suffering here —

each packed a pair of pants, three

lived with his wife and three children

the drought and sudden storm pattern

T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed.

known as El Niño — is expected to

into a single thin black nylon sack with a

But after the flood, the rain stopped

become more frequent as the planet

drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned

again, and everything died. Jorge knew

warms. Many semiarid parts of Guate-

his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay

then that if he didn’t get out of Guatema-

mala will soon be more like a desert.

for their transit, another loan the family

la, his family might die, too.

Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

would have to repay at 100 percent

Even as hundreds of thousands of

percent in some parts of the country,

interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. —

Guatemalans fled north toward the

and the amount of water replenishing

they would go that night. They had no

United States in recent years, in Jorge’s

streams and keeping soil moist will drop

idea then where they would wind up,

region — a state called Alta Verapaz,

by as much as 83 percent. Researchers

or what they would do when they got

where precipitous mountains covered in

project that by 2070, yields of some sta-

there.

coffee plantations and dense, dry forest

ple crops in the state where Jorge lives

From decision to departure, it was three

give way to broader gentle valleys —

will decline by nearly a third.

days. And then they were gone.

proxima nova 9 pt

p22 underground medium 64pt

Proxima Nova regular 20pt

P22 underground light 12pt

Proxima Nova light italic 18pt

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION Collision Course

BY ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

p22 underground light 8pt

TABASCO, MEXICO. Migrants from Central America riding north on the Bestia freight rail line.

THE GREAT MIGRATION NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

proxima nova light 11pt

Early in 2019, a year before the

the residents have largely stayed. Now,

Scientists have learned to project such

world shut its borders completely, Jorge

though, under a relentless confluence of

changes around the world with surpris-

A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala.

drought, flood, bankruptcy and starva-

ing precision, but — until recently — little

The land was turning against him. For

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Al-

has been known about the human con-

five years, it almost never rained.

most everyone here experiences some

sequences of those changes. As their

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his

degree of uncertainty about where their

land fails them, hundreds of millions of

last seeds into the ground.

next meal will come from. Half the chil-

people from Central America to Sudan

The corn sprouted into healthy green

dren are chronically hungry, and many

to the Mekong Delta will be forced to

stalks, and there was hope — until,

are short for their age, with weak bones

choose between flight or death. The

without warning, the river flooded.

and bloated bellies. Their families are all

result will almost certainly be the great-

Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields

facing the same excruciating decision

est wave of global migration the world

searching in vain for cobs he could still

that confronted Jorge.

has seen.

eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet,

The odd weather phenomenon that

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son

signing away the tin-roof hut where he

many blame for the suffering here —

each packed a pair of pants, three

lived with his wife and three children

the drought and sudden storm pattern

T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed.

known as El Niño — is expected to

into a single thin black nylon sack with a

But after the flood, the rain stopped

become more frequent as the planet

drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned

again, and everything died. Jorge knew

warms. Many semiarid parts of Guate-

his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay

then that if he didn’t get out of Guatema-

mala will soon be more like a desert.

for their transit, another loan the family

la, his family might die, too.

Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

would have to repay at 100 percent

Even as hundreds of thousands of

percent in some parts of the country,

interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. —

Guatemalans fled north toward the

and the amount of water replenishing

they would go that night. They had no

United States in recent years, in Jorge’s

streams and keeping soil moist will drop

idea then where they would wind up,

region — a state called Alta Verapaz,

by as much as 83 percent. Researchers

or what they would do when they got

where precipitous mountains covered in

project that by 2070, yields of some sta-

there.

coffee plantations and dense, dry forest

ple crops in the state where Jorge lives

From decision to departure, it was three

give way to broader gentle valleys —

will decline by nearly a third.

days. And then they were gone.

raleway 9 pt

raleway bold 64pt

mr eaves XL book 20pt

mr eaves XL bold 12pt

mr eaves XL bold italic 18pt

TABASCO, MEXICO. Migrants from Central America riding north on the Bestia freight rail line.

The Great Climate Migration COLLISION COURSE By Abrahm Lustgarten

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

avenir book 11pt

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its

of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starva-

of those changes. As their land fails them,

borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost

hundreds of millions of people from Cen-

get out of Guatemala. The land was turning

everyone here experiences some degree of

tral America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta

against him. For five years, it almost never

uncertainty about where their next meal will

will be forced to choose between flight or

rained.

come from. Half the children are chronically

death. The result will almost certainly be the

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last

hungry, and many are short for their age,

greatest wave of global migration the world

seeds into the ground.

with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their

has seen.

The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks,

families are all facing the same excruciating

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each

and there was hope — until, without warning,

decision that confronted Jorge.

packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, un-

the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep

The odd weather phenomenon that many

derwear and a toothbrush into a single thin

into his fields searching in vain for cobs he

blame for the suffering here — the drought

black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s

could still eat. Soon he made a last desper-

and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño

father had pawned his last four goats for

ate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where

— is expected to become more frequent as

$2,000 to help pay for their transit, another

he lived with his wife and three children

the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of

loan the family would have to repay at 100

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But

Guatemala will soon be more like a des-

percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m.

after the flood, the rain stopped again, and

ert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

— they would go that night. They had no

everything died. Jorge knew then that if he

percent in some parts of the country, and the

idea then where they would wind up, or what

didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might

amount of water replenishing streams and

they would do when they got there.

die, too.

keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83

From decision to departure, it was three

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guate-

percent. Researchers project that by 2070,

days. And then they were gone.

malans fled north toward the United States

yields of some staple crops in the state where

in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state

Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous

mr eaves XL thin 8pt 24

THE GREAT MIGRATION NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

mountains covered in coffee plantations and

Scientists have learned to project such

dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle

changes around the world with surprising

valleys — the residents have largely stayed.

precision, but — until recently — little has been

Now, though, under a relentless confluence

known about the human consequences

domus titling extralight 64pt

avenir black 20pt

avenir medium 12pt

avenir light oblique 18pt

The Great Climate Migration

TABASCO, MEXICO. Migrants from Central America riding north on the Bestia freight rail line.

Collision Course BY ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

domus titling 8pt

avenir book oblique 9 pt

THE GREAT MIGRATION NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

mr eaves XL book 10pt

Early in 2019, a year before the

the residents have largely stayed. Now,

changes around the world with surprising

world shut its borders completely, Jorge

though, under a relentless confluence of

precision, but — until recently — little

A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala.

drought, flood, bankruptcy and star-

has been known about the human conse-

The land was turning against him. For

vation, they, too, have begun to leave.

quences of those changes. As their land

five years, it almost never rained.

Almost everyone here experiences some

fails them, hundreds of millions of peo-

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his

degree of uncertainty about where their

ple from Central America to Sudan to the

last seeds into the ground.

next meal will come from. Half the chil-

Mekong Delta will be forced to choose

The corn sprouted into healthy green

dren are chronically hungry, and many

between flight or death. The result will

stalks, and there was hope — until,

are short for their age, with weak bones

almost certainly be the greatest wave of

without warning, the river flooded. Jorge

and bloated bellies. Their families are all

global migration the world has seen.

waded chest-deep into his fields search-

facing the same excruciating decision

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old

ing in vain for cobs he could still eat.

that confronted Jorge.

son each packed a pair of pants, three

Soon he made a last desperate bet, sign-

The odd weather phenomenon that

T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush

ing away the tin-roof hut where he lived

many blame for the suffering here —

into a single thin black nylon sack with a

with his wife and three children against

the drought and sudden storm pattern

drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned

a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after

known as El Niño — is expected to

his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay

the flood, the rain stopped again, and

become more frequent as the planet

for their transit, another loan the fami-

everything died. Jorge knew then that

warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatema-

ly would have to repay at 100 percent

if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his

la will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall

interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. —

family might die, too.

is expected to decrease by 60 percent

they would go that night. They had no

Even as hundreds of thousands of

in some parts of the country, and the

idea then where they would wind up, or

Guatemalans fled north toward the

amount of water replenishing streams

what they would do when they got there.

United States in recent years, in Jorge’s

and keeping soil moist will drop by as

From decision to departure, it was three

region — a state called Alta Verapaz,

much as 83 percent. Researchers project

days. And then they were gone.

where precipitous mountains covered in

that by 2070, yields of some staple crops

coffee plantations and dense, dry forest

in the state where Jorge lives will decline

give way to broader gentle valleys —

by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such

itc avant garde bold 64pt

courier new regular 20pt

courier new regular 12pt

courier new italic 18pt

courier new 9 pt

The Great Climate Migration

TABASCO, MEXICO. Migrants from Central America riding north on the Bestia freight rail line.

COLLISION COURSE By Abrahm Lustgarten

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

itc avant garde 8pt

itc avant garde 9.5 pt

Early in 2019, a year before the

the residents have largely stayed. Now,

such changes around the world with

world shut its borders completely, Jorge

though, under a relentless confluence

surprising precision, but — until recent-

A. knew he had to get out of Guate-

of drought, flood, bankruptcy and star-

ly — little has been known about the

mala. The land was turning against him.

vation, they, too, have begun to leave.

human consequences of those chang-

For five years, it almost never rained.

Almost everyone here experiences

es. As their land fails them, hundreds of

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his

some degree of uncertainty about

millions of people from Central America

last seeds into the ground.

where their next meal will come from.

to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be

The corn sprouted into healthy green

Half the children are chronically hungry,

forced to choose between flight or

stalks, and there was hope — until,

and many are short for their age, with

death. The result will almost certainly be

without warning, the river flooded.

weak bones and bloated bellies. Their

the greatest wave of global migration

Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields

families are all facing the same excruci-

the world has seen.

searching in vain for cobs he could still

ating decision that confronted Jorge.

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son

eat. Soon he made a last desperate

The odd weather phenomenon that

each packed a pair of pants, three

bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where

many blame for the suffering here —

T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush

he lived with his wife and three children

the drought and sudden storm pattern

into a single thin black nylon sack with a

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed.

known as El Niño — is expected to

drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned

But after the flood, the rain stopped

become more frequent as the planet

his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay

again, and everything died. Jorge

warms. Many semiarid parts of Guate-

for their transit, another loan the family

knew then that if he didn’t get out of

mala will soon be more like a desert.

would have to repay at 100 percent

Guatemala, his family might die, too.

Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. —

Even as hundreds of thousands of Gua-

percent in some parts of the country,

they would go that night. They had no

temalans fled north toward the United

and the amount of water replenishing

idea then where they would wind up,

States in recent years, in Jorge’s region

streams and keeping soil moist will drop

or what they would do when they got

— a state called Alta Verapaz, where

by as much as 83 percent. Researchers

there.

precipitous mountains covered in cof-

project that by 2070, yields of some sta-

From decision to departure, it was three

fee plantations and dense, dry forest

ple crops in the state where Jorge lives

days. And then they were gone.

give way to broader gentle valleys —

will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project

THE GREAT MIGRATION NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

proxima nova italic 9 pt mr eaves XL heavy 76pt

proxima nova light 20pt

proxima nova light 12pt

proxima nova semibold italic 18pt

The Great Climate Migration COLLISION COURSE By Abrahm Lustgarten

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

itc avant garde 8pt

TABASCO, MEXICO. Migrants from Central America riding north on the Bestia freight rail line.

THE GREAT MIGRATION NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

proxima nova light 10 pt

confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy

quences of those changes. As their land

shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew

and starvation, they, too, have begun to

fails them, hundreds of millions of people

he had to get out of Guatemala. The land

leave. Almost everyone here experiences

from Central America to Sudan to the

was turning against him. For five years, it

some degree of uncertainty about where

Mekong Delta will be forced to choose be-

almost never rained.

their next meal will come from. Half the

tween flight or death. The result will almost

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last

children are chronically hungry, and many

certainly be the greatest wave of global

seeds into the ground.

are short for their age, with weak bones

migration the world has seen.

The corn sprouted into healthy green

and bloated bellies. Their families are all

In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son

stalks, and there was hope — until, without

facing the same excruciating decision that

each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts,

warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded

confronted Jorge.

underwear and a toothbrush into a single

chest-deep into his fields searching in vain

The odd weather phenomenon that many

thin black nylon sack with a drawstring.

for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made

blame for the suffering here — the drought

Jorge’s father had pawned his last four

a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-

and sudden storm pattern known as El

goats for $2,000 to help pay for their tran-

roof hut where he lived with his wife and

Niño — is expected to become more fre-

sit, another loan the family would have to

three children against a $1,500 advance

quent as the planet warms. Many semiarid

repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote

in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain

parts of Guatemala will soon be more like

called at 10 p.m. — they would go that

stopped again, and everything died. Jorge

a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease

night. They had no idea then where they

knew then that if he didn’t get out of Gua-

by 60 percent in some parts of the coun-

would wind up, or what they would do

temala, his family might die, too.

try, and the amount of water replenishing

when they got there.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guate-

streams and keeping soil moist will drop

From decision to departure, it was three

malans fled north toward the United States

by as much as 83 percent. Researchers

days. And then they were gone.

in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state

project that by 2070, yields of some staple

called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous

crops in the state where Jorge lives will

mountains covered in coffee plantations

decline by nearly a third.

and dense, dry forest give way to broader

Scientists have learned to project such

gentle valleys — the residents have largely

changes around the world with surprising

stayed. Now, though, under a relentless

precision, but — until recently — little has

Early in 2019, a year before the world

been known about the human conse-

Paragraph Breaks

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too. Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

paragraph break 1 : ___________

paragraph break 2 : ___________

paragraph break 3 : ___________

The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too. Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

Tool Kits

The Tool Kit is where I felt stuck, but I wanted to use symbols, colors, and elements to show movement and intensity that ties into my opening spread headline. I ended up combining elements from all three tool kits and added in elements on the spot when designing my spreads.

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

“

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

”

arly in 2019, a year before the world

of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starva-

shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost

had to get out of Guatemala. The land was

everyone here experiences some degree of

turning against him. For five years, it almost

uncertainty about where their next meal will

never rained.

come from. Half the children are chronically

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last

hungry, and many are short for their age,

seeds into the ground.

with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their

The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks,

families are all facing the same excruciating

and there was hope — until, without warning,

decision that confronted Jorge.

the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep

The odd weather phenomenon that many

into his fields searching in vain for cobs he

blame for the suffering here — the drought

could still eat. Soon he made a last desper-

and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño

ate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where

— is expected to become more frequent as

he lived with his wife and three children

the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But

Guatemala will soon be more like a des-

after the flood, the rain stopped again, and

ert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

everything died. Jorge knew then that if he

percent in some parts of the country, and the

didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might

amount of water replenishing streams and

die, too.

keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guate-

percent. Researchers project that by 2070,

malans fled north toward the United States

yields of some staple crops in the state where

in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state

Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous

Scientists have learned to project such

mountains covered in coffee plantations and

changes around the world with surprising

dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle

precision, but — until recently — little has been

valleys — the residents have largely stayed.

known about the human consequences

Now, though, under a relentless confluence

of those changes.

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its

of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starva-

borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost

get out of Guatemala. The land was turning

everyone here experiences some degree of

against him. For five years, it almost never

uncertainty about where their next meal will

rained.

come from. Half the children are chronically

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last

hungry, and many are short for their age,

seeds into the ground.

with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their

The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks,

families are all facing the same excruciating

and there was hope — until, without warning,

decision that confronted Jorge.

the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep

The odd weather phenomenon that many

into his fields searching in vain for cobs he

blame for the suffering here — the drought

could still eat. Soon he made a last desper-

and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño

ate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where

— is expected to become more frequent as

he lived with his wife and three children

the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But

Guatemala will soon be more like a des-

after the flood, the rain stopped again, and

ert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

everything died. Jorge knew then that if he

percent in some parts of the country, and the

didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might

amount of water replenishing streams and

die, too.

keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guate-

percent. Researchers project that by 2070,

malans fled north toward the United States

yields of some staple crops in the state where

in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state

Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous

Scientists have learned to project such

mountains covered in coffee plantations and

changes around the world with surprising

dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle

precision, but — until recently — little has been

valleys — the residents have largely stayed.

known about the human consequences

Now, though, under a relentless confluence

of those changes.

THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

Early in 2019, a year before the world

of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starva-

shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost

had to get out of Guatemala. The land was

everyone here experiences some degree of

turning against him. For five years, it almost

uncertainty about where their next meal will

never rained.

come from. Half the children are chronically

Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last

hungry, and many are short for their age,

seeds into the ground.

with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their

The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks,

families are all facing the same excruciating

and there was hope — until, without warning,

decision that confronted Jorge.

the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep

The odd weather phenomenon that many

into his fields searching in vain for cobs he

blame for the suffering here — the drought

could still eat. Soon he made a last desper-

and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño

ate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where

— is expected to become more frequent as

he lived with his wife and three children

the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of

against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But

Guatemala will soon be more like a des-

after the flood, the rain stopped again, and

ert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60

everything died. Jorge knew then that if he

percent in some parts of the country, and the

didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might

amount of water replenishing streams and

die, too.

keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guate-

percent. Researchers project that by 2070,

malans fled north toward the United States

yields of some staple crops in the state where

in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state

Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous

Scientists have learned to project such

mountains covered in coffee plantations and

changes around the world with surprising

dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle

precision, but — until recently — little has been

valleys — the residents have largely stayed.

known about the human consequences

Now, though, under a relentless confluence

of those changes.

Thumbnails

First 3 Spreads

For the first spreads I designed, I still was unsure which elements I was using. I experimented with two sets of refined tool kits. I picked what I thought were the best images for the article and I used some of the ideas from my thumbnail sketches to form the layouts.

The New York Times

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

July 23, 2020

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

“ Top: ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.

Bottom: SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.

The New York Times

where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone. For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few

hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.” People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations. Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war. The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively

preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come. Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders. We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years. Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5 percent of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could

will result in death even for the fittest of humans.

”

GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.

be twice as high.)

July 23, 2020

The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes.

ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.

The New York Times

might occur across larger regions. It was also controversial, igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics, who attacked the modeling effort as “guesswork” built on “tenuous assumptions” and argued that a model couldn’t untangle the effect of climate change from all the other complex influences that determine human decision-making and migration. That argument eventually found some traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to model precise migration figures. But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to this well established but amorphous threat seemed worth taking. In the early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that scientists shouldn’t traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice, producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try to steer away from that fate. Trying to project the consequences of climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly provocative efforts. “If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration,” he wrote in 2010, “they should publish them.”

Since then, Oppenheimer’s approach has become common. Dozens more studies have applied econometric modeling to climate-related problems, seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works. Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one. As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate’s subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just two million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger. North Africa’s Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania

to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65 percent of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of people.” The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air-condi-

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?

tioning will simply die.

July 23, 2020

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.

6 8

The New York Times

If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk. Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. A few years ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the future. The idea was to build on the Op-

penheimer-style measure of response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a “gravity” model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants might end up. The resulting report,published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete. The bank’s work targeted climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, focusing not on the emergency displacement of people from natural disasters but on their premeditated responses to what researchers call “slow-onset” shifts in the environment. They determined that as climate change progressed in just these three regions alone, as many as 143 million people would be displaced within their own borders, moving mostly from rural areas to nearby towns and cities. The study, though, wasn’t fine-tuned to specific climatic changes like declining groundwater. And it didn’t even try to address the elephant in the room: How would the climate push people to migrate across international borders? Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience

to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference. The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

“

we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.

”

ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.

July 23, 2020

7 9

The New York Times

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

July 23, 2020

few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.” People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations. Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war. The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

Top: ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.

Bottom: SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.

The New York Times

when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come. Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders. We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30

GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.

million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over

the course of the next 30 years. Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5 percent of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

“

will result in death even for the fittest of humans.

”

Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and polit-

ical chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a

July 23, 2020

ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.

The New York Times

As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if if countries shut their doors. In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted — catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes. The only way to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of mass migration is to prepare for it, and preparation demands a sharper imagining of where people are likely to go, and when. The modeling was a start. But it was hyperlocal instead of global, and it left open huge questions: how cultural differences might change outcomes, for example, or how population shifts might occur across larger regions. It was also controversial,

igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics, who attacked the modeling effort as “guesswork” built on “tenuous assumptions” and argued that a model couldn’t untangle the effect of climate change from all the other complex influences that determine human decision-making and migration. That argument eventually found some traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to model precise migration figures. But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to this well established but amorphous threat seemed worth taking. In the early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that scientists shouldn’t traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice, producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try to steer away from that fate. Trying to project the consequences of climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly provocative efforts. “If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration,” he wrote in 2010, “they should publish them.” Since then, Oppenheimer’s approach has become common. Dozens more studies have applied econometric

modeling to climate-related problems, seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works. Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one almost always an exacerbating one. As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate’s subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just two million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.

The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes.

July 23, 2020

Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk. Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. A few years ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the future. The idea was to build on the Oppenheimer-style measure of response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a “gravity” model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants might end up. The resulting report,published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete. The bank’s work targeted climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, focusing not on the emergency displacement of people from natural disasters but on their premeditated responses to what researchers call “slow-onset” shifts in the environment. They determined that as climate change progressed in just these three regions alone, as many as 143 million people would be displaced within their own borders, moving mostly from rural areas to nearby towns and cities. The study, though, wasn’t fine-tuned to specific climatic changes like declining groundwater. And it didn’t even try to address the elephant in the room: How would the climate push people to migrate across international borders?

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?

North Africa’s Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65 percent of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of people.” The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly onefourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air-conditioning will simply die. If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the

The New York Times

“

we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.

Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.

The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

Left: ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.

” Right: ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.

July 23, 2020

The New York Times

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

July 23, 2020

study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.” People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations. Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war. The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

Top: ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.

Bottom: SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.

The New York Times

project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone. For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017

United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come. Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders. We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years. Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5 percent of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people.

“

GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.

will result in death even for the fittest of humans.

July 23, 2020

”

“

If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration, they should publish them.

Top: ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.

The New York Times

As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors. In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted — catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes. The only way to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of mass migration is to prepare for it, and preparation demands a sharper imagining of where people are likely to go, and when. The modeling was a start. But it was hyperlocal instead of global, and it left open huge questions: how cultural differences might change outcomes, for example, or how population shifts might occur across larger regions. It was also controversial, igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics, who attacked the modeling effort as “guesswork” built on “tenuous assumptions” and argued that a model couldn’t untangle the effect of climate change from all the other complex influences that determine human decision-making and migration. That argument eventually found some traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to model precise migration figures. But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to this well established but amorphous

”

threat seemed worth taking. In the early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that scientists shouldn’t traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice, producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try to steer away from that fate. Trying to project the consequences of climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly provocative efforts. “If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration,” he wrote in 2010, “they should publish them.” Since then, Oppenheimer’s approach has become common. Dozens more studies have applied econometric modeling to climate-related problems, seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works. Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one. As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate’s subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just two million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.

The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes.

ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.

July 23, 2020

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?

The New York Times

Left: ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.

Right: CHIAPAS, MEXICO. Coto (right) hopping a train with other migrants.

“

we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.

”

July 23, 2020

Variations

After recieving feedback, I combined the best layouts from my first three spreads. This balanced the horizontal and vertical flow of my spreads and created a nice eyeline. I also picked the best grouping of elements I was using and simplified them.

The New York Times

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

July 23, 2020

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.

Dominant: GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.

The New York Times

“ here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly

be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

”

SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.

July 23, 2020

“

climate change will result in death even for the fittest of humans.

Dominant: ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.

The New York Times

For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.” People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations. Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demo-

”

graphic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war. The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come. As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration.

The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes.

ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.

July 23, 2020

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?

The New York Times

Dominant: ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.

CHIAPAS, MEXICO. Coto (right) hopping a train with other migrants.

“

we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.

”

underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk. Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. A few years ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the future. The idea was to build on the Oppenheimer-style measure of response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a “gravity” model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants might end up. The resulting report,published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete. Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions

against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference. The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

July 23, 2020

The New York Times

Photograph by Meredith Kohut

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

July 23, 2020

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

“ ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.

Dominant: GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.

The New York Times

tion, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose

between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

”

SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.

July 23, 2020

“

climate change will result in death even for the fittest of humans.

Dominant: ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.

The New York Times

”

The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes.

ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.

July 23, 2020

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?

The New York Times

Dominant: ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.

CHIAPAS, MEXICO. Coto (right) hopping a train with other migrants.

“

we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.

”

July 23, 2020

The Mac is Not a Typewriter

ONE SPACE BETWEEN SENTENCES

QUOTATION MARKS

APOSTROPHES

DASHES

KERNING

Use only one space for any punctuation that separates two sentences

Never use generic marks that symbolize an inch

Use real apostrophes, not the foot marks

Never use two hyphens instead of a dash

Adjust the space between letters according to your sensitive visual perception

HYPHENATIONS & LINE BREAKS

LEADING OR LINESPACE

JUSTIFIED TEXT

10 11

Avoid more than two hyphens in a row; Avoid too many hyphenations in any paragraph; Never hyphenate a heading.

Keep the linespacing consistent

Only if the line is long enough to prevent awkward and inconsistent word spacing

SERIF & SANS SERIF FONTS Serif type is more readable and is best for text; Sans serif type is more legible and is best used for headlines and signage

COMBINING TYPEFACES Never combine more than two typefaces on the same page; Never combine two serif fonts on the same page, and never combine two sans serif fonts on the same page

WIDOWS & ORPHANS Never leave widows and orphans bereft on the page

Justification Settings

word spacing: letterspacing

80% 0%

85% 0%

87% 20%

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watche rs to nonwatchcrs, infecting children and their parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact well alter the children stopped watching the show. * By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. Bui it isn’t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find the kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile.... Television has no potential, no power to do that.” Good teaching is interactive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. * But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner— Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York — set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from television commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or about their own emotions. Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children’s show had, and the extraordinary thing was that it worked. Virtually every time the show’s educational value has been tested — and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history — it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers.

word spacing: letterspacing

80% 0%

82% 0%

84% 40%

word spacing: letterspacing

80% 0%

90% 10%

95% 20%

word spacing: letterspacing

80% 0%

92% 20%

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epid emic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watche rs to nonwatchcrs, infecting children and their parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact well alter the children stopped watching the show. * By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. Bui it isn’t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. “I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child,” he says. “You try to find the kid’s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid’s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid’s profile.... Television has no potential, no power to do that.” Good teaching is intera ctive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. * But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner— Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York — set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from telev ision commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or about their own emotions. Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children’s show had, and the extraordinary thing was that it worked. Virtually every time the show’s educational value has been tested — and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history — it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers.

100% 40%

Final Spread

For my final, I made small, minor changes in detail and image placement. This is where I applied the justification settings and aligned my text to the baseline grid to make the body text more pleasing to read.

The New York Times

Photography by Meredith Kohut

This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center.

The Great Climate Migration ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

July 23, 2020

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained.

“ ALTA VERAPAZ. Jorge A.’s wife, Eva María H., at home with two of their children.

Dominant: GUATEMALA CITY. Crop failures are causing more rural residents to migrate to urban areas.

The New York Times

bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third. Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails

them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen. In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there. From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

”

SAN SALVADOR. Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera (left) and her sister (center) moved to the area after their family’s agriculture work dried up.

July 23, 2020

“

climate change will result in death even for the fittest of humans.

Dominant: ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. Carlos Tiul, an Indigenous farmer whose maize crop has failed, with his children.

The New York Times

”

Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war. The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come. As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration.

The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes.

ALTA VERAPAZ. An ear of maize from a failed crop.

July 23, 2020

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?

The New York Times

Dominant: ALTA VERAPAZ. Residents near the trickle that remains of the river that once flowed through the Nuevo Paraíso Indigenous community.

CHIAPAS, MEXICO. Coto (right) hopping a train with other migrants.

“

we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.

”

more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference. The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

July 23, 2020

Project Reflection

Before diving into this project, I didn’t know much about typography especially, how it lays out in magazines. Designing a magazine allowed me to understand the typographic rules that consist in designing a well balanced spread and the effect typography has on a message. I felt I improved in my Illustrator skills as well as InDesign skills and using the grid. By taking everything I learned just from notes itself, I know the important do’s and don’ts of combining fonts, hierarchy, word and paragraph spacing, and overall organizing a spread. I felt preapred wihth all of the activities we completed before reaching the final result. Throughout the process, I reached a wall where I felt like my ideas weren’t going anywhere and I was regressing. After I pushed through that I was able to convey everything and I’m glad how everything turned out. I hope that when presented to an audience, they agree. I feel as though I accoplished my goal and the message I wanted to get across.