Europe’s next crisis: Climate change could create millions of new refugees

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/europes-next-crisis-climate-change-could-create-millions-new-refugees

By Tony Dokoupil
Sept 8, 2015

Nearly 400,000 migrants have streamed into Europe this year, setting off the continent’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. But the tide of desperation is nothing compared to the flood of environmental refugees that could be created by unchecked climate change, experts and elected officials warn.

President Obama set the tone in a speech last week in Alaska, where he summoned images of “desperate refugees,” “entire industries of people who can’t practice livelihoods” and “political disruptions that could trigger conflicts around the world.” Secretary of State John Kerry dubbed them “climate refugees,” and warned of a global fight for food, water and “mere survival.”

Now, less than 100 days before a major climate change summit in Paris, the president of France is sounding the same alarm.

That’s not just political hot air. Kerry, Obama and Hollande are supported by some of the world’s foremost experts in national security.

David Titley, the former oceanographer of the U.S. Navy and a current member of the CNA Corporation Military Advisory Board, has warned that climate change-induced drought helped spark the Arab Spring, Syria’s civil war, and a roiling storm of related regional clashes.

In a report published last year, he and his co-authors also found that rising sea levels could swamp parts of India, Bangladesh and Vietnam, sending millions of people westward in search of a new life.

“Failure to think through these scenarios is nothing less than a failure of imagination,” he wrote in an email to MSNBC. “Furthermore, these climate impacts rarely happen in a vacuum. They are frequently exacerbated by poor governance, pre-existing grievances within that society, or economic and ethnic conflict. Collectively, the end result is instability and a significant security issue.”

His former colleagues in the Pentagon tend to agree. In the Department of Defense’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, its official outline of global priorities, the Pentagon’s planners declared climate change to be a “threat multiplier,” stirring trouble in all sorts of ways.

“The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world,” the study states. “These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions.”

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http://insideclimatenews.org/news/13092015/migrant-crisis-syria-europe-climate-change

Migrant Crisis: 'If We Don't Stop Climate Change...What We See Right Now Is Just the Beginning'
A Q&A with Frank Biermann, a Dutch researcher who led a controversial 2010 study on climate refugees, who fears crises like Europe's will only get worse.

By Phil McKenna
Sep 14, 2015

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Frank Biermann, a professor of political science and environmental policy sciences at VU University Amsterdam, led researchers in the Netherlands five years ago in a study that warned there may be as many as 200 million climate refugees by 2050. That staggering number first arose out of research in 1995, and it has always been controversial. The study Biermann led in 2010 recommended the creation of an international resettlement fund for climate refugees.

Today's migrant crisis may be due in part to climate change, Biermann said in an interview with InsideClimate News. Syria, where 7.6 million people are displaced inside the country and another 4 million are seeking asylum elsewhere, a severe drought plagued the country from 2006-09. A recent study pinned the blame for that drought on climate change, and the drought has been cited as a contributing factor to the unrest there. Millions of additional refugees may need to leave their homes in coming decades as a result of a changing climate, Biermann said.

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FB: There are a number of scenarios in the literature that are predicting vast numbers of climate refugees in the future, up to 200 million people by 2050. Many of these projections and scenarios are slightly outdated. The current debate is a bit more careful or optimistic because these newer scenarios are all based on assumptions about the adaptive capacities of these countries and the severities of climate change impacts and also on human behavior. Many people would now argue that the numbers that have been published especially in the 1990s and early 2000s are too pessimistic.

On other hand, it's quite obvious that there are certainly areas, especially low-lying coastal areas, that quite likely will be severely affected from sea level rise. You can look at how many people are in low-lying areas in Bangladesh, in Egypt, in Vietnam and the eastern part of China. There are millions of people who are in these kinds of areas, and the same is also true for land degradation, desertification and water shortages. It is likely that a lot of this migration will be internal migration within the country; it’s not necessarily to be expected that everyone will go on a boat to Europe.

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Climate change has the potential of increasing all refugee crises and of creating new refugee crises. It is never a one-to-one relationship that people are leaving just because of climate change. It is always linked to all kind of other factors—economic factors, social factors, political factors, religious factors—but all these factors that are supporting civil war and migration might be increased by climate change.

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FB: We see a direct moral and legal connection between rich countries and the impacts of climate change. The majority of people negatively affected by climate change live in poor countries where they have almost nothing to do with the causation of the problem.

We came up with a proposal to have a separate fund, the Climate Refugee Protection and Resettlement Fund, to address this particular problem. The bottom line is when you are sitting in Tuvalu and you have to leave your island, and you are certainly not responsible for climate change, then you can have a moral and legal right to request compensation and assistance from rich countries.

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