Natural disasters drive 36m people from their homes in 2008
admin September 25th, 2009
The numbers of people displaced around the world – either by natural disasters or by man-made disasters like wars – is mind-boggling.
And whilst our attention here in the North is grabbed from time to time by a particularly newsworthy disaster, which affects a particularly large number of people, the scale of the ongoing displacements is what should be being noted.
Now two UN bodies, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) have come up with a report that tries to quantify, they say for the first time, the number of people forced to flee their homes because of climate change.
And it’s a big number – 36 million people were driven from their homes by rapid-onset natural disasters in 2008. China’s Sichuan earthquake accounted for 15 million of these, but climate-related disasters displaced 90 percent of the rest.
This compares with 4.6 million people being internally displaced last year by conflict, and 42 million people in total who were living as refugees or internally displaced persons.
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