Refugee
crisis: Is climate change affecting mass migration?
“350,000
migrants sought entry into the EU in 2014 but this could rise to 200
million when the full impact of climate change is felt”
TOM BAWDEN Author
Biography Monday 07 September 2015/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/refugee-crisis-is-climate-change-affecting-mass-migration-10490434.html
John Kerry painted
an apocalyptic vision of climate change last week as he addressed a
global warming conference in Alaska. "You think migration is a
challenge in Europe today because of extremism, wait until you see
what happens when there's an absence of water, an absence of food, or
one tribe fighting against another for mere survival," the US
secretary of state warned. Few experts would argue with Kerry's
analysis of the future, but some would argue his vision is already
upon us.
The current refugee
crisis marks a watershed moment in the history of global warming
because it's the first wave of emigration to be explicitly linked to
climate change, according to one leading scientist, who predicts
rises in temperature and increasingly extreme weather will unleash
many more mass movements of people in the future. Professor Richard
Seager acknowledges that there is much more to the Syrian uprising
than the climate, but says that global warming played a key role in
creating the conditions that fuelled the civil war behind the refugee
emergency.
"Syria was
destabilised by 1.5 million migrants from rural communities fleeing a
three-year drought that was made more intense and persistent by
human-driven climate change, which is steadily making the whole
eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region even more arid,"
says Professor Seager, of Columbia University in New York, who
published a report into the role of climate change in the Syrian
conflict in March. "Syria is not the only country affected by
this drying. Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and Iran are too. However
the various social, religious and ethnic wars play out, in the coming
years and decades the region will feel the stress of declining water
resources."
East African
countries such as Somalia and Sudan are also vulnerable to
drought-fuelled conflict, according to Professor Seager, along with
parts of Central America – especially Mexico, which is afflicted by
crime and is politically unstable, short of water and reliant on
agriculture.
But pushing regimes
that are already unstable, poor and short of resources into conflict
is only one way in which climate change is heralding a new era of
mass environmental emigration. "In the future climate change is
going to cause humanitarian crises of a different type and dynamic,
but they're going to be just as real and a catastrophic as the
present refugee crisis," says Neil Adger, professor of human
geography, at the University of Exeter. Dramatic increases in the
frequency and intensity of extreme weather, particularly from drought
and floods but also from wildfires, are forecast for the coming
decades, Professor Adger warns, while rising sea levels will pose a
risk to coastal areas, especially low-lying delta areas such as Burma
and Louisiana.
Africa is another
continent likely to suffer disproportionately from climate change.
"In sub-Saharan Africa we're likely to see increased incidence
of drought, lower crop yields and food price spikes in years to come,
adding to pressures on communities that are already living with other
stresses and where population is increasing," saysRichard Black,
director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence think tank.
Meanwhile, the Sahel
band of desert, stretching from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the
east, and including parts of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Nigeria,
is forecast to suffer huge levels of displacement. A recent report
from the group Organising to Advance Solutions in the Sahel suggested
that over the next three to four decades up to 200 million people are
likely to be without sustainable food supplies. This assumes that
temperatures in the region rise by as much as 5C by 2050, with the
population expected to grow from about 100 million now, to 300
million in 2050 and 600 million by the end of the century.
"It would be
totally implausible to sustainably accommodate this scale of growth,"
said the report. "Without immediate, large-scale action, death
rates from food shortages will rise as crops wither and livestock
die, and the largest involuntary migration in history could occur."
Such warnings are
speculative, of course. But the scale and misery of the current
crisis should act as a warning, reminding us that, when millions find
that they can no longer live safely or tolerably in their own lands,
people in supposedly unaffected nations soon feel the effects.
IS CLIMATE CHANGE
EXACERBATING THE REFUGEE CRISIS?
161
The number of
countries in which environmental disasters, most of them due to
weather-related events, have caused mass displacement of people since
2008
27m
The average number
of people displaced by environmental disasters each year between 2008
and 2013
350,000
migrants sought
entry into the EU in 2014 but this could rise to 200 million when the
full impact of climate change is felt
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário