so who cares ?
My one year old granddaughter
Climate refugees -- the growing army without a name by Marlowe Hood
Fri Apr 6, 4:07 PM ET
BRUSSELS (AFP) - Global warming could create tens of millions of climate refugees, although numbers are hard to predict with accuracy and the definition itself is open to debate, experts say.
"According to some estimates, there are already almost as many environmentally displaced people on the planet as traditional refugees," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
"As the impacts of climate change strike home, the numbers are likely to rise considerably, possibly as high as 50 million by 2010," de Boer said on Friday on the sidelines of a meeting in Brussels of the UN's top climate panel.
"The issue of environmental refugees promises to rank as one of the foremost human crises of our time," Norman Myers, an Oxford University professor who has long studied environment-driven migration, told AFP.
How many climate refugees there are today and could be in the future remains unclear, and the term itself is considered by critics to be unreliable or politically charged.
Some experts say it can already apply to Inuit communities who lose their homes and livelihoods in North America and Greenland because of melting ice, and to peoples around central Africa's fast-shrinking Lake Chad.
By some yardstick, it could also apply to the tens of thousands who fled New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, they say.
Some scientists, though, say there is no long-term evidence yet for declaring Katrina to have been a storm intensified by global warming, rather than a natural, extremely violent event.
In the future, the ranks of the displaced could be swollen by people fleeing flood-threatened delta cities in Asia, parched farmland in Africa or small tropical island states where tourism revenue has been devastated by the death of coral reefs and beach erosion.
Many of these countries already suffer from environmental problems and fragile communities there could be pushed over the edge by the added impact of global warming, said Thomas Downing, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in Oxford.
"There is going to be a lot of population movement linked to climate," he said.
"Not all will be permanent refugees, but when you add climate to other forces that push people beyond the capacity to cope, the numbers will increase."
A major report on the impact of global warming released by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the Brussels meeting avoided the term "refugee" entirely, referring instead to "environmental migrants."
It made no attempt to quantify them, either now or in the future.
"Estimates of the number of people who may become environmental migrants are at best guesswork," the report said, citing several uncertainties: migrations that are often temporary or seasonal, while motivations are complex and can include the desire to escape from poverty.
Census data is very unreliable, it added, and "there is a lack of agreement on what an environmental migrant is anyway."
The term "refugee" is contested for other reasons.
"The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) doesn't want people to talk about climate refugees," UNFCCC spokesman John Hay said. "They would prefer that the term 'refugee' apply to politics only."
De Boer's figure of 50 million displaced people by 2010 referred to studies that were conducted several years ago or more.
A Red Cross and Red Crescent study in 2000 said 25 million people had left their homes because of environmental stress, roughly as many as the refugees from armed conflict.
In later work, Myers, one of the leading experts on the link between climate change and forced migration, said this number could double by 2010 and reach as high as 200 million "once global warming kicks in."
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