Climate refugees
The number of refugees in the world rose by 3 million people last year after a having been in a short period of decline. And, according to the United Nations, one of the biggest causes is climate change. Antonio Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees tells the Guardian:
“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement, both directly through impact on environment - not allowing people to live any more in the areas where they were traditionally living - and as a trigger of extreme poverty and conflict.”
The 37 million people that the United Nations classifies as refugees does not include those people escaping natural disasters or poverty - only those fleeing conflict and persecution. It also does not include those who flee their homes but remain in their home countries. In 2007 there were estimated to be 26 million of them.
In a case study of environmental refugees the Guardian outlines the situation for the 2.7 million Sudanese displaced from their homes as a result of the Darfur conflict.
[I]t was fuelled by longstanding competition between mostly Arab nomads and African farmers for scarce water and land after years of worsening drought. Herders who were once allowed to graze their camels on farmers’ land because their droppings helped fertilise the soil found themselves increasingly blocked by farming communities…
Some experts have argued that Darfur represents an early example of a new wave of conflicts driven by competition for land and water in a world of increasing scarcity. High food prices, also a result in part of climate change, have also triggered unrest in nearly 40 countries.
Situations like this make the moral imperative to address climate change even more urgent before further people are hurt. But they also add the need to ameliorate the suffering that climate change is already causing.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I said it in another recent discussion, and I’ll say it again.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Indeed DougT. There are a lot of basic commodities that are reaching natural limits, both from profligate use and from growth issues, be they economic or population.
June 20th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
That’s what I’ve been trying to get at all along.
All of these issues are interconnected.
You can’t just look at climate change and AGW without taking into account the increasing human population (whether the growth is slowing or not).
It dosn’t really matter whether we are at the limits of sustainability of the human race, or even if the ultimate carrying capacity is way beyond even 10 billion people. I read somewhere not so long ago that the limit to growth is based on the weakest link (sort of what I have been getting at). Whether that weakest link is food production, availability of potable water or something else is an unknown factor. The only thing that could prevent us from finding out, is to maintain a sustainable population as well as reducing the impact we have on the environment. Both are most likely beyond our reach now though, so I think that trying to understand what is happening is the best thing to do, so that it might be prevented by future generations.
The Values Party policies of zero population growth and zero economic growth were probably right on the money. Only problem is that you can’t prove it without letting the alternative happen.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Isn’t it strange Frog, that when you do a post on what might happen in the wake of climate change, there are so many comments about whether it’s true or not, but when you do a post like this, which is what is actually happening, there is a huge silence.
I often wondered why nobody has really learned anything from the mistakes of the past, but it seems that lessons can’t even be learned from what is happening today.
June 24th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Yeah Doug, where have all the denialists gone?
I guess they are too egocentric to bother even thinking about climate refugees in faraway places.