But the hurricane was more than just a meteorological event: the damage it caused was a product of poor disaster planning, consistent underinvestment in the city’s protective levees as well the systematic destruction of the wetlands in the Mississippi delta that might have lessened the force of the storm. [...] It must be recognized that the degradation of the environment is socially and spatially constructed; only through a structural understanding of the environment in the broader political and cultural context of a region or country can one begin to understand the “role” it plays as a factor in population movement”.51 Intuitively we can see that climate change will play a role in future movements of p [...] The resulting need to organise densely packed populations in order to manage scarce resources in restricted areas has been identified as one of the main driving forces behind the development of the first civilisations.54 Much later, during the fourth century CE, growing aridity and frigid temperatures from a prolonged cold snap caused the Hun and German hordes to surge across the Volga and Rhine i [...] A combination of melting permafrost and sea-shore erosion, at a rate of up to 3.3 metres a year, have forced the inhabitants to relocate their village several kilometres to the south.76 It is thought that climate change has directly exacerbated the sea-erosion by thinning the sea ice which used to reduce the force of local tides and currents. [...] One of a number of vanishing islands in the delta, the loss of the islands and other coastal land in the delta has left thousands of people homeless.