|
By Lisa Batiwalla
The world is witnessing its biggest ever movement of people forced from their homes as a result of environmental disasters linked to climate change, says a new report by the international charity Christian Aid
The effects of climate change could create up to 300 million ‘environmental refugees’ by the year 2050, estimates a recent report by the international aid agency Christian Aid that says the number of forced migrants will touch 1 billion by the middle of the 21st century. Compelled to leave their homes by the devastating effects of global warming on their environments, these people, most of them from the world’s poorest countries, will swell the ranks of the 155 million people already displaced by conflict, disaster and large-scale ‘development’ projects.
Last year, the United Nations Environment Programme warned of the growing phenomenon of ‘environmental refugees’, or people forced to migrate because of environmental threats brought on by climate change.
Now ‘Human tide: the real migration crisis’, published by Christian Aid in May 2007, warns that the world is facing its largest ever movement of people forced from their homes, larger than the number of people displaced by the Second World War. And climate change is the key driver of this mass movement of populations, chiefly within their own countries.
The report stresses that urgent action by the world community is needed if the worst effects of this crisis are to be averted. “We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world,” says John Davison, the report’s lead author.
While several attempts to calculate the impact of climate change on the environment and on the global economy have been made, only recently is serious academic attention being devoted to calculating the scale of the new human tide that is being influenced by global warming. Existing estimates, more than a decade old, predict that hundreds of millions of people will be forced from their homes by floods, drought and famine brought on by the warming of the planet as a result of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
An earlier report by Christian Aid in 2006, ‘The Climate of Poverty’, highlighted how the process of climate change was already affecting poor populations. It also predicted how the threat of increasing floods, disease and famine sparked by climate change could nullify efforts to secure meaningful and sustainable development in poor countries. At worst, the report said, these ravages could send the real progress that has already been achieved “spinning into reverse”.
The latest report estimates that, over the years between now and 2050, a total of 1 billion people will be displaced from their homes. This comprises:
- 50 million people displaced by conflict and extreme human rights abuses. This assumes a rate of displacement of roughly 1 million people a year, which is conservative.
- 5 million people will flee their own countries and be accepted as refugees.
- 645 million people displaced by development projects such as dams and mines (at the current rate of 15 million a year).
- 250 million people permanently displaced by climate change-related phenomena such as floods, drought, famine and hurricanes. This figure is based on an updated figure calculated by Dr Norman Myers (Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, Environmental Exodus, Climate Institute, 1995). Dr Myers suggested that between 150 and 200 million people would have to permanently leave their homes because of climate change. This was quoted last year in the UK government’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which described the estimate as being based on “conservative assumptions”. Dr Myers stated in an interview to Christian Aid, in March 2007, that he now believes that the true figure will be closer to 250 million.
- 50 million people displaced by natural disasters. Again, this conservatively assumes that around 1 million people will be displaced in this way every year.
Around 25 million people are thought to be displaced at any one time as a result of disasters such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and avalanches. Single incidents routinely cause thousands of people to flee their homes, as frequent appeals issued by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) show.
Case studies in the report spell out how major internal migration crises have already developed in Sudan, in Uganda and in Sri Lanka. The studies seek to highlight equally devastating situations that are still developing and which receive far less attention from the wider global community.
Security experts fear that this new migration will fuel existing conflicts and generate new ones in areas of the world -- the poorest -- where resources are most scarce.
Displaced by disasters
Poor people are especially vulnerable to displacement by natural disasters because their poverty forces them to live in less favourable places which, for instance, are more prone to flooding or landslides. Their poorly-built homes are similarly more vulnerable to destruction by extreme weather conditions and earthquakes.
People who are already displaced from their homes by conflict or large-scale development projects are also badly affected by natural disasters. This was evident among the tens of thousands of people already displaced by conflicts in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, when the tsunami hit on December 26, 2004.
When people return home after a disaster they face new problems. Their homes may have been damaged or destroyed, along with property used to make a living with such as shops, fishing boats or farm equipment. In some cases, governments ban people from returning to their former areas, on the grounds that they are too dangerous. This happened in several countries, including India, in the aftermath of the tsunami.
Impact of climate change
The number of natural disasters in a single year has more than doubled over the last decade, from 193 in 1996 to 422 in 2005, according to the IFRC. The increase is due to a sharp rise in the number of weather-related disasters -- from 175 in 1996 to 391 in 2005 -- an upward trend that will continue because of climate change.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which highlights the huge numbers of people who are predicted to suffer the severe impacts of climate change, presents the same stark picture as that painted by the Christian Aid report. “By 2080, it is likely that 1.1 to 3.2 billion people will be experiencing water scarcity; 200 to 600 million, hunger; 2 to 7 million more per year, coastal flooding,” says the IPCC. “Stresses such as increased drought, water shortages and riverine and coastal flooding will affect many local and regional populations. This will lead, in some cases, to relocation within or between countries, exacerbating conflicts and imposing migration pressures.”
As this suggests, climate change will displace people from their homes, both directly and by intensifying conflicts that cause people to flee. There is, however, a great deal that can be done now to prevent such suffering. Work by the IPCC, for example, shows that reducing the number of people living in poverty will make a dramatic difference to the number at risk from flooding.
Climate change and security
An alarming picture on the potential effects of climate change on global conflict and security is painted in a report by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC). The document studies the links between the two and reveals British military strategists’ latest thinking about the world, over the next 30 years.
Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036 notes: “By the end of the period, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will live in areas of water stress, while environmental degradation, the intensification of agriculture, and pace of urbanisation may reduce the fertility of, and access to, arable land. There will be a constant heavy pressure on fish stocks, which are likely to require careful husbanding if major species are not to become depleted or extinct. Food and water insecurity will drive mass migration from some worst-affected areas and the effects may be felt in more affluent regions through distribution problems, specialised agriculture and aggressive food-pricing.”
One academic who has studied the security implications of migration is Professor Robert McLeman of the University of Ottawa, in Canada. His conclusions about the possible effects of climate change on global security are disturbing, although, like other experts, he believes there is a lot that governments can do to secure better outcomes for the world. “Regions where climate change holds the greatest risk of creating population displacement include countries that are already wracked by conflict and are host to groups that pose security concerns internally and internationally,” he points out. “Polarisation is already developing between groups adversely affected by climate change, and the governments of western nations that are largely responsible for causing the changes due to their high per capita emissions of greenhouse gases… The extent to which such polarisation may contribute to international security tensions remains to be seen, and will be dependent in large part on the commitment western nations make towards addressing their emissions… The time has come for policymakers to cease treating migration, international development, environment and security as independent silos of policy and planning, and seek new ways to develop policymaking linkages across these interconnected fields.”
Bio fuels: The solution or the problem?
At first glance, ‘carbon neutral’ bio fuels appear to offer a way of reducing our contribution to climate change. Ironically, in many instances, what seems like the silver bullet solution to climate change is causing the same problem as climate change is -- forced migration. In many countries, demand is creating a food vs fuel debate and also leading to the displacement of people and disruption of animal habitats, as large areas are cleared to facilitate large-scale cultivation of bio fuel crops.
The market is growing at lightning speed, despite concerns that the carbon sums don’t add up. The US grain and food multinational Cargill, which is making major investments in ethanol and soya production, compares it to a ‘gold rush’. In February, the European Union set a legally binding target that 10% of fuels must be bio fuels by 2020. Much of this will be imported because it will take around 25% of EU agricultural land to meet this target.
Sawit (palm oil) Watch, an organisation that represents millions of Indonesians affected by palm oil plantations, wrote to the European Parliament expressing its ‘deep concern’ over the EU’s promotion of bio fuels. There have been 350 conflicts related to the takeover of land by palm oil developers in Indonesia. Dozens of people have been killed and around 500 tortured. When people are driven off their land, they often have no choice but to work on the plantations. Children and other relatives are co-opted into working for nothing in order to meet tough production targets.
While the European Union says it will only import bio fuels that have been produced in an environmentally sustainable way, it has yet to produce any convincing method of verifying this, says the Christian Aid report.
Soya -- another source of bio fuel -- plantations are the largest single cause of deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest remaining tropical forest. In Brazil, an area the size of six football pitches is razed every minute. The Brazilian Amazon is home to over 20 million people, including some 220,000 people from indigenous Indian communities who depend on plants and animals in the forests for their subsistence. Survival International, an indigenous peoples’ rights group, describes them as having already experienced ‘genocide on a huge scale’. They are considered minors in law and their land rights are not recognised. Many have been forcibly evicted from their land, often at gunpoint. Every year, rural people in Brazil are shot dead as they try to resist the annexation of their lands. In Paraná state alone, 2.5 million people have been displaced by soya production, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Much of the current deforestation in Brazil takes place in Mato Grosso state, where hydroelectric dams are now being planned in the forest to provide power for the soya industry. Survival International reports that the 420 surviving Enawene Indians who live in the state say their entire way of life is being destroyed by soya. WWF predicts that the soya business will increase by 60% in the next 20 years, endangering up to 49,000 sq km of rainforest. This is more than twice the area of Wales.
Given these facts, Christian Aid believes that rich countries need to re-think their rush towards bio fuels and recognise how it will push millions of people off their lands.
The latest IPCC report stresses that there is no simple link between global temperature increases and the number of people affected by climate change. Rather, the human impact of climate change will be strongly influenced by other factors such as poverty. To explore this idea, the IPCC examined how different levels of income, population and technological change affect the number of people at risk from coastal flooding. It found that the number at risk varies as much as 26-fold -- in the worst case, some 26 million people each year will be at risk from flooding in the 2050s, and in the best case only around 1 million. “These studies show that the impacts of climate change can vary greatly due to the development pathway assumed,” it says. “The difference between impacts is largely explained not by differences in emissions but by differences in the size of low-income population, which is generally more vulnerable to flooding.”
Paying for adaptation
According to the Christian Aid report, this highlights the fact that the impacts of climate change are not fixed -- they depend significantly on what we do about them. Madeleen Helmer, who heads the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre at The Hague, says that so far rich countries have concentrated on reducing their own vulnerability to climate change and treated it as an environmental issue rather than one that requires them -- as major greenhouse gas polluters -- to help countries whose people will be worst affected. “In general we can say that the world has not taken on the responsibility to take care of people affected by climate change,” she says. “What we observe now is a kind of ‘our own adaptation first’ policy... That is okay, but it is leading to further inequality between North and South, because we take care of our own adaptation first.”
Although there are no up-to-date statistics to show how many people are being displaced by climate change, it is clear that the numbers, potentially, are in the hundreds of millions. Rich countries must redouble their efforts to help poor countries overcome these effects and must pledge funds in the tens of billions, rather than tens of millions, says Christian Aid.
Rich countries have acknowledged their responsibility towards helping poor countries adapt to climate change, but have yet to back their rhetoric with significant action. As the world’s major polluters, they owe poor countries a carbon debt that, were it realistically priced, would far exceed any debt cancellation or aid flows, says the report.
New international, science-based and equitable agreement is needed along the lines of a ‘global carbon budget’. This must be consistent with the 2°C limit (the tipping point at which global warming will have catastrophic consequences, according to climate experts) and recognise the right of developing and less developed countries to increase the size of their economies and reduce poverty in a way that does not lead to further growth in global CO2 emissions. The agreement should have, at its heart, development-friendly mechanisms with which rich countries will fund adaptation and clean-development activities in poor countries.
In order to alleviate the problem of forced migration due to climate change, the report recommends that:
- In the short term, rich nations should increase financial support for poor countries’ adaptation, with more rapid debt cancellation and increases in overseas development assistance. The World Bank estimates that climate-proofing in the developing world will cost between US$ 10 and US$ 40 billion (£ 5.09-£ 20.36 billion) a year -- considerably less than the defence budget of the UK alone.
There are now three funds dedicated to helping poor countries adapt to climate change: the Adaptation Fund, the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) and the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF). So far, a total of £ 91.5 million has been pledged to two of the funds (the third is in flux due to political wrangling), but only half of it has been delivered by rich countries. The UK has pledged £ 10 million to each of the two operational funds. So far, however, it has only delivered £ 3.5 million to the LDCF and £ 6.6 million to the SCCF. These sums are meagre in the context of what is needed.
- Christian Aid is also campaigning for rich countries that have emitted the most pollution to establish a US$ 100 million a year global fighting fund to support adaptation in the most vulnerable countries. The principle of compensatory payments has already been accepted in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but hardly any money has been made available.
InfoChange News and Features, July 2007
|
