00:00Inhabitants of the island of Jean-Charles already see the consequences of global warming.
00:04A number of them, when they look at the landscape through the window,
00:09say to me, you see, at the time there were forests, trees that extended right in front of our eyes.
00:16Today there is only water.
00:17Since 1955, 98% of the territory has disappeared.
00:23That's almost all, all the territory that has disappeared.
00:30In the past, there was a school, a church, a grocery store, even a dumping,
00:56and all this has disappeared today.
00:58The island will disappear in 50 years, in two generations,
01:03due to several factors.
01:05First, due to global warming, rising water levels, coastal erosion,
01:10but also, and this is a particular situation in Louisiana, due to oil exploitation.
01:15Louisiana is the fourth largest producer of crude oil in the United States.
01:20In the Gulf of Mexico, i.e. off the coast of Louisiana,
01:24we find more than 4,000 oil platforms that transport oil to refineries
01:30through pipelines that perforate the Louisiana subsoil.
01:34As a result, the soil is declining, the water is rising,
01:37and we arrive at a situation as dramatic as this one.
01:50The island today is only 3 km long.
01:53It is surrounded by a single road.
01:57In fact, the end of the island ends with the end of this road.
02:01And on either side of this road, we find wooden houses,
02:04which are either placed on the same ground, so very fragile,
02:08no longer subjected to floods, or piloted by 5-6 meters.
02:13And today, it is surrounded by digs, supposed to protect it from floods.
02:20But this protection device is extremely subdued and fragile,
02:24and the island continues to be flooded.
02:25During the passage of Hurricane Barry,
02:283 meters of water was observed on the island,
02:32with the inhabitants evacuated by the American Coast Guard, by helicopter.
02:36The situation is really very serious.
02:39The scientists I met told me that they were the first official climate refugees in the United States,
02:55in the sense that they officially received a sum of money from the U.S. federal government
03:00to be relocated elsewhere.
03:02In 2016, the U.S. federal government donated almost $50 million to the inhabitants of the island
03:11to be relocated to much more perennial lands.
03:14But the work is taking a long time to be done, and the inhabitants are starting to get impatient.
03:25There are people who do not want to leave their territory because they are too attached to it.
03:31I am thinking in particular of Wenceslas and Denicia Billiott,
03:35who are the oldest couple on the island.
03:38They were born on the island, they grew up there, they made their children there,
03:42they raised them, and they want to die there.
03:45I did not necessarily want to show the island at the time of the hurricanes,
03:49with its inhabitants feet in the water, in catastrophic situations.
03:54I especially wanted to show the last moments of life of its inhabitants on this island,
03:58to show the wait for the last hour, the immobility in which they are stuck.
04:05I think, for example, of this photo of Marc Naquin, Marc in his sixties,
04:10who has always lived on this island and who spends his days on his rocking chair
04:15on the terrace of his wooden house, which is about to collapse.
04:18In my exchanges with the people of the island, I never felt anger,
04:23designation of guilty, or whatever.
04:26I rather had the impression that people were resigned,
04:29accepting the situation they were confronted with.
04:36Many families live on oil and fishing,
04:40while the two activities are anti-nomic,
04:43because you have to join the two ends, you have to survive.
04:47Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the United States,
04:51so people are already struggling every day to make a living.
04:54What I was also interested in showing through this report, this work,
04:59is that, including in the United States, in the first world economic power,
05:05whose president holds climate-sceptic positions,
05:09we find climate refugees.
