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Environmental refugees: a gathering storm
Climate experts raise concerns about massive population exodus

by Nancy Roc, freelance journalist

Nairobi, 17 November 2006 (Panos) - Global warming and climate change are creating a new kind of casualty: environmental refugees.

If you go with the definition given by noted scholar, Robert Nicholls at the University of Hampton in Great Britain, environmental refugees are "people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems, together with associated problems of population pressures and profound poverty.”

The estimated growth in the number of persons driven away from their homes by natural disasters is becoming a growing concern for some organisations dealing with climate change issues.

According to a 1999 World Disasters Report produced by the International Red Cross 50 million people will flee environmental degradation by 2010, causing a bigger displacement of population than war and persecution.

In 2001, 170 million people were affected by disasters, 97 per cent of which were climate-related, such as floods, droughts and storms. In the previous decade more than 100 million suffered drought and famine in Africa, a figure likely to increase with global warming.

It is an issue that UN officials are struggling to deal with.

“In the developing countries, it is very difficult to make a correlation between people who are forced to move because of climate change and the ones who are forced to move simply because they are too poor and cannot withstand any shocks, including climate change shocks,” Peter Smerdon, Senior Public Affairs Officer at the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Nairobi, told Panos.

“The victims of climate change are the poorest of the poor. We are already living the tragedy of climate change in Africa. The international community is trying to come up with ways to give them a great resilience to climate change,” he said. “The difficulty with climate change is that the areas which are hardest hit by this phenomenon come already from the marginalized areas neglected by the international community and their own governments for many years.”

To Smerdon, a collaborative approach is essential to solving the problems.

“In order to help these areas, there needs to be a common political will from the local governments as well as the international community to give a sort of long term development assistance which would mean that they are no longer marginalized,” he said.

His views are also similar to those of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which has argued that the countries most likely to provide massive climatic migrations are too institutionally weak and that environmental refugees should be dealt with at a national level.

Dramatic Increase in numbers

Scholars are foreseeing a potentially dramatic increase within a hundred years. Some predict the increase of environmental refugees to 200 million within 50 years while others estimate this new global threat even bigger.

Robert Nicholls of the University of Hampton in Great Britain has conducted a study which predictions vary from 100,000 to 100 million people per year between 2020 and 2100. These projections result from demographic growth, economic development and the climatic change. . It is argued that the effects of these population movements are likely to be highly destabilising globally unless they are carefully managed.

Indeed, last year at the conference on climatic change in Montreal, an international investigation conducted by 1360 specialists around the world, revealed that “The harmful effects of the degradation of ecosystem services (the persistent decrease in the capacity of an ecosystem to deliver services) are being borne disproportionately by the poor, are contributing to growing inequities and disparities across groups of people, and are sometimes the principal factor causing poverty and social conflict.”

According to WFP figures, 2.6 billion people have been affected by climate change in the past decade compared to 1.6 billion in the previous decade and that number is likely to increase. The overpopulated Asian and African coastal cities are estimated to be at the highest risk of climate change: 80 per cent of their population might be seeking refuge due to ocean rising and floods. Small island developing states from the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, which are mostly one meter above sea level, Tuvalu included, are also vulnerable.

Similarly, the Stern Review which was presented at the conference this week, made the case that urgent action is needed in the situation.

“The most vulnerable - the poorest countries and populations - will suffer earliest and the most,” the report said. “Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water storages and coastal flooding as the world warms.’

Small Islands might be the next boat people

This was a great concern for delegates from the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean islands.

“We are concerned by this report because with 3 degree rise and 450 parts per million of greenhouse gas emission, that will wipe out the entire oasis of our countries, simply because we are 41 million persons living along the coasts line. The reality of environmental refugees is already in motion,” said Arthur Rolle, General Director of the Department of Meteorology at the UN Climate Change Convention. We know that, in the years to come, with the sea level rise we (in the Bahamas) may be the next boat people”.

He however was hopeful that developed countries would help the small islands.

“We believe that there will be some sympathy from the developed countries to take in some of the refugees if this catastrophe would happen early,” he said.

But head of the delegation of the Cook Islands, Tania Temata, was concerned about the implications of this.

“We are proud to be islanders and if we become environmental refugees, we will loose our cultural identity. We lose who we are,” she said.

The urgent need for international recognition

In a report published in 2003, the New Economics Foundation based in the UK states that managing the issue has been hampered to date by the failure of the international community to properly monitor environmental refugees.

Co-author of the report Andrew Simms strongly argues that more needs to be done to address the issue.

“Hysteria and hypocrisy walk in the footsteps of refugees and migrants. The paranoia of wealthy countries is deeply ironic. We face a ‘homes-for-lifestyles’ scandal, in which people in poor, vulnerable countries pay with their homes for our lifestyles,” he said.

Simms, who is also the Policy Director of the Foundation, thinks that the carbon intensive lifestyles of wealthy countries are driving global warming. To him, it is likely to become the largest single factor forcing people to flee their homes around the world; therefore, there is an obligation on the nations most responsible for historic greenhouse gas emissions, Europe and North America, to make sure that the environmental refugees are recognized and protected. Simms has also strongly argued his case in his book - “Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition”.

For the Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation, it is neither morally nor legally justifiable for the burden to fall on poor countries.

“You can look at what we do about this in one of two ways. You can either kind of wait for the problem to happen, with all the international and security implications and the upheaval that that will represent in terms of the unprotected and unmanaged flow of people across borders. Or you can choose to do something about it, which you can deal with the problem in a planned and orderly fashion,” Simms told Panos in an interview from London.

“The latter would seem to be sort of hugely preferable to the former. There has to be legal recognition and protection under international law for environmental refugees displaced by climate change and ecological degradation, and time is running out. However we decide to approach it in a legalistic manner, the most important thing to keep focused on is that it's a problem that exists and it's a problem that's going to get worse, and unless we manage it it's probably going to manage us.”