Climate Change possibly Displacing One Billion

Climate Change possibly Displacing One Billion



May 2007 -   At least one billion people will be 
forced from their homes between now and 2050 as the effects of climate 
change deepen an already burgeoning global migration crisis, predicts a 
new Christian Aid report. 
Christian Aid was founded at the end of World War II to help deal with the 
millions of people displaced by the war, and has been helping displaced 
people and refugees ever since, so the British charitable organization 
says it can speak with authority about the impending crisis. 
The report elaborates on the organization's fear that climate change will 
displace a billion people in addition to the 155 million people already 
displaced by conflict, disaster and large-scale development projects. 
The report, "Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis," calls for "urgent 
action by the world community" if the worst effects of this crisis are to 
be averted. 
Published Monday to mark Christian Aid Week 2007, the report warns that 
the world is now facing its largest ever movement of displaced people, the 
vast majority from the world’s poorest countries. 
Mako, 13, holds her sister Asho in a Somalian refugee camp where they fled 
to escape flooding. 
"The impact of climate change is the great, and frightening, unknown in 
this equation. Existing estimates of its potential to displace people are 
more than a decade old and are widely disputed. Only now is serious 
academic attention being devoted to calculating the scale of this new 
human tide," the report finds. 
"The danger is that this new forced migration will fuel existing conflicts 
and generate new ones in the areas of the world – the poorest – where 
resources are most scarce. Movement on this scale has the potential to 
de-stabilize whole regions where increasingly desperate populations 
compete for dwindling food and water," the aid organization warns. 
This displacement is happening already, Christian Aid says, citing the 
deadly situation in Sudan's western region of Darfur. 
"While mired in political complexity, the genesis of the appalling 
conflict in Darfur has been in part attributed to this very downward 
spiral," the aid organization said. "Let Darfur stand as the starkest of 
warnings about what the future could bring." 
The conflict in Darfur has its roots in generations of battles over water 
and grazing rights in this vast, arid region. 
A new round of fighting erupted in early 2003, forcing people to flee 
their villages. By late 2004, some 200,000 Sudanese had fled across the 
border to neighboring Chad and an estimated 1.6 million were displaced 
within Darfur, where militias killed, raped and forced hundreds of 
thousands from their homes, according to the UN High Commission for 
Refugees. 

Thousands of people fled attacks on their villages and gathered under 
trees on the outskirts of Goz Beida, the main town in south eastern Chad. 

Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan politician and environmentalist who was awarded 
the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, said the Darfur conflict is about who will 
draw sustenance from scarce resources. It is "a struggle over controlling 
an environment that can no longer support all the people who must live on 
it," she said in an interview with the "Washington Post." 
Christian Aid is calling on the governments of the rich countries that 
emit the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to establish a US$100 
billion a year fund to help poor, vulnerable countries adapt to sea level 
rises, increasing drought and more extreme weather. 
The money should be taken from existing aid budgets, the organization 
recommends, and should be paid in proportion to countries' carbon dioxide 
emissions with the most polluting countries contributing the most. 
"The alternative, as this report seeks to highlight," said Christian Aid, 
"is a desperate situation that could destabilize whole regions – plunging 
them further into poverty and conflict." 
The growing problem of displacement resulting from large development 
programs must also be addressed. Currently, there is not even agreement 
about whether people forced from their homes to make way for dams or roads 
are covered by existing codes of conduct, the aid organization points out. 

Rich countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and 
Development have had their own guidelines on the impact of their funding 
of development projects for the past 10 years. But it is not known whether 
they are effective or not. 
In more than one third of the conflicts that caused displacement in 2006, 
people were forced to flee by their own national armies or armed groups 
linked to the government, the report found. 
Even if they are not guilty of using violence to displace people, 
Christian Aid reports, most governments fail to fulfil their 
responsibilities towards citizens who have fled conflict. 
Where governments allow the outside world to help internally displaced 
people, most of the practical work – providing food, water, shelter and so 
on – is done by international and local nongovernmental organizations such 
as Christian Aid with its partners. 
Guatemalans displaced by Hurricane Stan in October 2005 line up for food 
aid delivered by the World Food Programme. 
"United Nations organizations tend to coordinate work done by others, 
rather than doing it themselves," the report states. 
Christian Aid says it does not pretend to have all the answers, but says 
"the solution must start with an overhaul of the current UN system for 
dealing with internally displaced people." 
The organization points to the latest scientific research that suggests 
the climate is changing more quickly than was previously predicted. "In 
addition, because of international prevarication over reducing CO2 
emissions, the scale and speed of action needed now is greater than 
previously imagined," the organization says. 
Christian Aid calls for a massive, international effort to reduce carbon 
emissions and keep global average temperature increases below 2°C, widely 
believed to be the tipping point beyond which the consequences of climate 
change become catastrophic. 
But even then, the organization says climate change will cause serious 
disruption, especially in poor communities. 
Global warming and the growing competition for scarce resources are 
together likely to increase the incidence of humanitarian crises. The 
spread of desert regions, a scarcity of water, coastal erosion, declining 
arable land, damage to infrastructure from extreme weather - Christian Aid 
warns that all this could undermine global peace and stability. 
      
      

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