Norman Myers of Oxford University suggests that 200 million people worldwide could be
forced to move due to environmental factors by 2050. Desertification affecting
Mexico's dry land regions annually leads 600,000 to 700,000 people to migrate.
(Photo: CARE)
Aggressive measures to halt global warming are needed or human migration and displacement will exceed anything that has occurred in history a new report from CARE, U.N University, and Columbia University has found. The report, “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement”, establishes that most displaced people seek shelter in their own country while others cross borders.
“While human migration and displacement is usually the result of multiple factors, the influence of climate change in people’s decision to give up their livelihood and leave their homes is growing”, said Dr. Charles Ehrhart, CARE’s climate change coordinator and one of the report’s authors.
Although there is limited reliable data on the subject, forecasts vary between 25 million to one billion, researchers’ state that climate change already contributes to migration. Desertification affecting Mexico’s dry land regions, for example, annually leads 600,000 to 700,000 people to migrate, and in 2008 the cyclone that struck the Irrawaddy Delta region in Myanmar displaced around 800,000 people.
But with economic and political factors remaining the main drivers of migration and displacement, climate change adds new complexity to the issue.
“In Vietnam’s densely populated Mekong River Delta, for example, a sea level rise of two meters would – assuming current population densities – flood the homes of more than 14.2 million people and submerge half of the region’s agricultural land”, said Dr. Ehrhart.
Still, changes in agricultural- and migration pattern is not the only consequence of climate change, societies may also find themselves in a situation where social safety nets collapse, and tension and violence rise.
“Darfur is a climate change war”, says Carlos Pascual, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. “It is a conflict over land and water”.
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Comments
"Although there is limited reliable data...But with economic and political factors remaining the main drivers of migration and displacement" Seems like the usual speculation, guesses, and wishful thinking to extort more money. And the taxpayers probably paid for this dribble.
Learn to read, Bob. CARE is a charity. U.N. University is part of the U.N. Columbia University is a private institution. And if taxpayer money was involved, so much the better. I'd much rather my tax dollars went to this kind of study than to another useless F-22.
Come on Moonbat get real. Who do you think funds the vast majority of CARE, a UN Agency, and U.N. University? The UN is the biggest con game on earth. And Columbia - ahhh a paragon of Marxist virtue. They probably participated for free since the cost of living in NYC is so very low.
The questions are scientific, but the UN answers are political. The global warming debate is hardly about science. It has become a cause célèbre, championed by activists, politicians and celebrities. To deny their belief that humans are the cause of global warming is to invoke their wrath. Science is not consensus; Science is theory, observation and measurement. Science is not, “let's all take a vote on the speed of light and see what number we get.” Science is dictated by nature's rules.
The U.N. would milk the last cow in the paddock, and leave the cow’s own calf starving!
Hello from another Environmental Examiner, I certainly believe you have captured the information in these, as has been shown here, government/UN spensored publications. I have no problem with that. Taking this stuff at face value is tricky. The UN IPCC, for instance is known to be THE authority on climate change. However they over estimated the climate sensitivity to CO2, they start all their charts from the bottom of the little ice age, they accepted and featured the Hockey stick from Michael Mann and dropped it like a hot potato when it was found to be false (the problem was bad use of PCA, a statistical technique that yields hockey sticks from random noise and that data was deleted from the data set covering the Medieval Warm period), GISS duped the Sept 08 temperature data from Siberia and replaced Oct08 data. Then crowed how warm it was without even checking to see why. Reports can say anything but there was not a single sea level expert on the IPCC sea level group.
Point is, reports can say anything. You have to do research to find the holes and there are usually plenty of them. Just look at the EPA determination of CO2 as a pollutant. They buried the counter data and wrote the report before the comment period started. Someone should go to jail for this but they will probably get a medal. The world is not fair and not everyone is honest.
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