The Current: Part 3

Climate Change – Human Migration

Earlier we heard Lester Brown - a leading thinker on the impact of climate change - make the link with climate change, food security and the refugee crisis in Darfur. He's certainly not alone. Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern has also pointed to Darfur as an early example of a humanitarian catastrophe precipitated by climate change, putting masses of people on the move and in conflict with each other. Nicholas Stern, economic adviser to the British government.

So... waters warm in the Indian Ocean, and this disrupts monsoon patterns in Africa. Rains fail, crops fail, then farmers and nomadic herders who used to co-exist peacefully, end up in a bitter contest over dwindling grazing land and a diminishing water supply. The result is an all-too familiar spectacle on the nightly news. We aired a report from a refugee camp in Darfur.

Drought, desertification and famine are examples of how climate change is forcing people to migrate.But there are other factors too - economic dislocation can happen anywhere even in Canada. Take British Columbia for example - towns in the interior dependent on the forestry industry have fallen victim to the relentless march of the pine beetle … a scourge of the boreal forest that used to be killed off during cold snaps but has thrived without the normal temperature plunges. That's put the long-term future of forestry towns like Quesnel, British Columbia in some doubt. We heard from the mayor describing the situation to us.

While it's an unsettling reality for logging towns like Quesnel to have its the population on the move, the plight of low-lying island states like the Maldive Islands, Tuvalu or Vanuatu, is considerably more dire. Right now they sit just above sea level. But those sea levels will continue to rise.

By some estimates - as much as a metre - by the end of the century as polar ice melts and water expands due to heating. Some island nations expect to be totally submerged or rendered uninhabitable by storm surges and coastal erosion by that time, and are already working on repatriating their citizens to higher, more stable ground. New Zealand, for one, has agreed to allow 75 Tuvaluans per year to migrate there.

But low-lying islands aren't the biggest problem when it comes to rising sea levels. A sizable proportion of the world's population lives at the water's edge in some of the world's biggest and fastest-growing cities many of them barely above and in some cases even slightly below sea level. And we've already seen what a combination of extreme weather, massive storm surges and insufficient infrastructure can do.

We aired a BBC report with the sounds of some of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of thousands of people fled New Orleans after Katrina's storm surge overwhelmed the levees that were supposed to protect the city. Even now, the city remains largely depopulated.

And a new study says that hundreds of millions more people living in coastal areas could be at risk of being flooded out of their homes, from rising sea levels, higher tides and awesome storm surges before the end of the century. In flood-prone Bangladesh alone there could be tens of millions at risk.

Gordon McGranahan is one of the lead authors of that new study. He's the head of the Human Settlements Group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, and he joined us from our London, England, studio.

Climate Change & Migration – McLeman

Some have suggested that the Katrina disaster and Darfur are only dress rehearsals for the sorts of mass migrations of future so-called environmental refugees. Predictions on the sheer numbers of people who'll be on the move are daunting.

British ecologist Norman Myers estimates there could be as many as 200 million people displaced by environmental factors by the end of the century. A United Nations agency says there could be 50 million such refugees within five years.

To give us more perspective on the projected migration and the stresses it could put on rich and poor countries alike, we were joined now by Robert McLeman. He spent more than a decade in the Canadian diplomatic service and now teaches geography at the University of Ottawa -- specializing in what climate change means for human migration and security. Robert McLeman joined us from our Ottawa studio.

o The Current: Part 3

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