An economy that spends all its time rebuilding from natural disasters or simply struggling to survive is never going to be able to develop and bring people out of poverty. At some point the benefits of staying will simply be overwhelmed by the costs of remaining and fighting climate change.

Just as climate change 10,000 years ago lead to people leaving what is now the Sahara desert and heading east to Egypt and beyond to found the first civilisations people should be willing to move when the climate changes. Settlements have been abandoned throughout history due to natural disasters or changes in climate, so for example Greenland was colonised by the Vikings in the 10th century (a particularly warm period) and abandoned in the 15th (when the world was cooling again).

There are equally many examples of people creating prosperity in inhospitable areas, we use irrigation to make deserts bloom, use air conditioning to allow us to work in very hot climates and heating to survive through harsh winters.

One of the main reasons that today's infrastructure is so polluting is that when the building started, we knew very little about how our actions affected the environment. Now that we know about our mistakes, we can change that. As people move away from places affected by climate change and rebuild in other places, they can do so in an eco friendly way, ultimately reducing carbon emissions. Even though the change will be less in case of countries like my one (Bangladesh), it can be a drastic one for the Netherlands, or New Orleans.

It is not totally inconceivable that countries that have plenty of territory (eg Russia or the USA) would be willing to sell small areas of their country to allow a nation state that has been forced to move due to climate change to remain a state.

Many of the countries that are threatened cannot easily get up and move to avoid the worst affects of climate change. People who live in Florida and may be affected by the rises in sea level can move to other areas of the United States with relatively little difficulty. However this is not the case of the small island states, if people from these countries wish to move to avoid climate change they cannot do so within their own country. They would have to move to being part of a much larger country in the process losing their sovereignty

Culture is something that is constantly changing and adapting to requirements anyway. It is only recently that we have begun to conceive of culture as being something that is set in stone and worth preserving in its entirety. Instead cultures should be allowed to change and adapt normally to their altered circumstances. Such big changes may at the same time create new different cultures out of the old.

Islands and coastlines being abandoned would mean an immense loss of cultures that could not be replaced and would be very difficult to maintain elsewhere. Local cultures are often very dependent upon their geographical conditions – so an island culture cannot simply move inland without major repercussions on that culture. This would mean that at best cultures are changed beyond recognition. In many cases the culture would be entirely lost as small communities move into a much larger culture and get absorbed as it no longer has the grounding it once did.

By abandonig those areas, some of species living there (or vitally depending on those areas) can die