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Or the water comes suddenly. In the high tide during a nor’easter that breaks records. Or in the sudden downpour that causes rivers to overrun their banks yet again. Or in the hurricane that floods neighborhoods that never flooded before.

The city stops servicing some of the roads by the beach. And people start saying, “It’s just not worth it.” Or the water doesn’t come at all. The drought pushes people off their farms or out of their traditional pasturing lands. It pushes them into cities. Then protests start.

Then the crackdown. Then people flee. Or the drought pushes them to pasture their animals in unfamiliar territory. Or the island is swallowed by the sea inch by inch. Or the livestock cannot handle the heat.

Or the permafrost melts under the house. Or they don’t have money to rebuild.

A recent World Bank study looking only at Latin America and parts of Africa and Asia sees up to 142 million people migrating within their own countries because of climate change impacts in the coming decades.

And the Union of Concerned Scientists recently estimated that $117 billion of coastal real estate in the United States alone is at risk of inundation by 2045. But displacement and migration due to the effects of climate are already happening.

They’re happening in Syria, Somalia and Kiribati, true, but also in Florida, Texas and New York.

Look, if you’re reading this and you reject the fact that climate change is happening, these pieces probably aren’t going to convince you, because you haven’t been convinced by anything else. But climate disruptions cause human disruptions.

These disruptions are happening, and the way they’re playing out in different places is a complicated knot of local factors, with weather, infrastructure, politics, violence and more playing a part.

“Exodus" is an attempt to pick that knot apart, to discuss what climate science says about our rapidly changing world and how those changes are, in ways both subtle and direct, forcing people to migrate.

This project tells stories of lives uprooted, homes lost and abandoned and what our response to climate migration will mean for humanity’s future. Here are our first three stories. New pieces will be added through the end of the year.