Climate change “will create 150 million refugees”
admin November 4th, 2009
There’s a lot of noise around at the moment about the causes of climate change. The American people have decided that it wasn’t their fault after all – more now believe that natural causes lie behind global warming than believe there is a human effect – and the ‘deniers’ seeming to grow in number even as the scientific evidence grows stronger by the month.
George Monbiot in The Guardian puts it all down to our fear of death. Another view is that the stronger the scientific evidence gets, the more certain it is that we are going to have to change our treasured lifestyles – lifestyles that have caused the problem in the first place. And it is this threat to our lifestyles that brings out the Inner Denier in everyone.
Now the Environmental Justice Foundation has brought out a report that quantifies the human damage that global warming is going to cause. The report, “No Place Like Home”, highlights the humanitarian plight of an estimated 150 million people whose homes, it says, will be lost as a result of climate change by 2050. These ‘climate refugees’ are not recognised under the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and the report calls for a new international legal agreement to help them survive.
With the Copenhagen conference looming ever larger, and expectations of any legally binding agreement on emissions reduction fading as inconclusive meeting follows inconclusive meeting, the EJF report details the growing economic and humanitarian costs of climate change which it says is the cause of the deaths of over 300,000 people and economic losses of US$125 billion annually. Furthermore, an estimated 500 – 600 million people, around 10% of the planet’s human population are, it says, at extreme risk from the adverse effects of climate change.
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