A warming climate is exacerbating global inequality by pushing critical natural resources, such as fish stocks, away from impoverished equatorial regions and making them more exploitable by the wealthy, according to astudy released on Wednesday.
While the gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. and worldwide has expanded at a mind-boggling pace in recent decades, the new study, designed by scientists at Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and Arizona State, shows that the frightening speed with which the globe is warming will only compound the economic trend.
The study looked specifically at fish to better understand the phenomenon.
“We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology,” Malin Pinsky, professor of ecology and evolution at Rutgers explained to Rutgers Today. “But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment we don’t have a good understanding for the impacts of human behavior on natural resources affected by climate change.”