My heart is in my throat. We’ve all seen the same footage: black rolling water, splintered villages, floating fires, and the blank haunted stares of survivors.

This is Japan. Right now.

But last year in Haiti we saw similar buildings in similar heaps. We saw vast muddy waters move across Pakistan. We watched buildings disappear in Thailand in 2004, and we saw those same eyes in Indonesia and Iran and Burma and New Orleans. With six nuclear reactors currently in danger of meltdown along Japan’s eastern shore, I am reminded of my ten-year-old self staring at images of the slow scary plastic suits moving their ticking wands across the condemned and contaminated in the Soviet Ukraine.

I couldn’t turn away then, and I can’t turn away now.

The devastating fact is that natural disasters aren’t going away and that climate related disasters are predicted to increase in scale and rate of occurrence. That means that those who lose their homes, neighborhoods or entire towns will be on the move in greater numbers in the coming years.

Some experts predict that 50 million people will be displaced by climate change by 2020. The effects of that change can be as loud as the wind that accompanied Hurricane Katrina or as soft as the sound of the dry ground cracking in Kenya 240 days after the last rain fell.

The people forced to leave their homes under these conditions are often referred to as environmental refugees. They do not, however, have the same rights as those who flee persecution. The persecuted are protected by the 1951 Geneva Convention and served by an international regime dedicated to them.

Those displaced by natural disaster are without such support and are left on their own or with insufficient answers. See, for example, Haiti. One year after the earthquake, more than a million people are still without homes.

We can do better.

This week, we will watch the clean-up begin in Japan and hope that sea water can sufficiently cool a radioactive core. We might remember other earthquakes and other tsunamis. We might think of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.  We might consider natural disasters that have hit this country – San Francisco earthquakes, New Jersey floods, tornadoes wiping away entire prairie towns. And that is fine. It’s good to remember.

But we must start thinking ahead.

A new global response to the environmentally displaced is urgently needed. Of course I want to see foreign aid survive the budget battle in Washington. That is a start. But a new way of thinking about how we help in the long term, that is what’s needed.

If we fail to meet this challenge, if we fail to think through and plan for this future, we will be left with a very heavy burdern: 100,000,000 questioning eyes and our hearts in our throats.