Climate Refugees – Alternative Energy NOW
www.ejfoundation.org/No Place like Home
The Global Governance Project defines climate refugees as people who have to leave their habitats, immediately or in the near future, because of sudden or gradual alterations in their natural environment related to at least one of three impacts of climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity.
Although now widely used in the media, the term „climate refugee“ is very controversial. The main concern is that the use of the term „refugee“ for climate or environment-related displaced people lumps them together with the political refugees protected under the Geneva convention which defines a refugee as „a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.“ This, for the purpose of protecting refugees, to many states legally binding definition doesn’t mention environmental reasons at all. Concerns have been voiced that referring to environmental migrants as refugees might weaken the protection of political refugees. And while political refugees cannot turn to their own government for support, environmental migrants often can. The UNHCR was quoted with „Lumping both groups together under the same heading would further cloud the issues and could undermine efforts to help and protect either group and to address the root causes of either type of displacement.“ Read More: > HERE <
A climate refugee is someone displaced by climate change induced environmental disasters. Such disasters are the result of incremental and rapid ecological change and disruption that include increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise, and the more frequent occurrence of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, flooding and tornados. The term climate refugee is seen by some as an inappropriate term, and they would rather see it replaced with environmental migrant. Many people have raised objections to the use of the term ‚refugee‘ in a climate context as it becomes mixed up with the legally defined term in the Refugee Convention of 1951. This Convention classifies refugees as those who are fleeing from violence and political intimidation.
So the debate over environmental refugees has been often criticised on the ground that there is no accepted definition of environmental refugees. An excellent article by Architesh Panda written in May 2010 (click on the link to download the pdf file), explores this idea.
The inhabitants of the Carteret Islands are climate refugees caused by sea level rise, and other inhabitants of low lying islands and Island states are also at risk. Tuvalu is especially susceptible to changes in sea level and storm surges and is likely to be another casualty.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international science body that regularly produces assessment reports on climate change, suggested 200 million environmental refugees would exist by 2050. In this projection, the impacts of climate change, including coastal flooding, shoreline erosion and agricultural degradation were seen as major factors contributing to bulk of environmental refugees.
Freshwater – Seawater intrusion into freshwater aquifers in deltaic and non-deltaic areas is an increasing problem with rising sea level, and has been documented in diverse environments such as the arid Israeli coast, the humid Thailand coast, the Chinese Yangtze Delta, the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, and low-lying atolls. In the Yangtze delta, one consequence of saltwater incursion will be that during dry seasons shortages of freshwater for agriculture are likely to be more pronounced and agricultural yields seriously reduced particularly around Shanghai.
Storm Surges – The most destructive element associated with an intense cyclone is storm surge. Storm surge heights depend on the intensity of the cyclone, i.e., very high-pressure gradient and consequent very strong winds and the topography of seabed near the point where a cyclone crosses the coast. Sea level also rises due to astronomical high tide. Elevation of the total sea level increases when peak surge occurs at the time of high tide. Past history indicates that loss of life is significant when surge magnitude is 3 metres or more and catastrophic when 5 metres and above.
Storm-surge flooding in Bangladesh has caused very high mortality in the coastal population (e.g., at least 225,000 in November 1970 and 138,000 in April 1991), with the highest mortality among the old and weak. Shorelines are inherently dynamic, responding to short and long-term variability and trends in sea level, wave energy, sediment supply, and other forcing. Land that is subject to flooding which is at least 15% of the Bangladesh land area is disproportionately occupied by people living a marginal existence with few options or resources for adaptation. The IPCC have found very few studies that indicate benefits of climate change and sea-level rise in coastal and marine systems. Read More > http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/climate-refugee.html
This trailer is from the documentary Climate Refugees. A film that illuminates for the first time the human face of climate change and the national security issues of our changing climate./Sun Come Up is a lyrical documentary following the relocation of some of the world’s first climate change refugees, the Carteret Islanders.
On November 25, 2003, the Papua New Guinean government authorized the government-funded total evacuation of the islands, 10 families at a time; the evacuation was expected to be completed by 2007, but access to funding caused numerous delays.In October 2007 it was announced that the Papua New Guinea government would provide two million kina (USD $736,000) to begin the relocation, to be organized by Tulele Peisa of Buka, Bougainville. Five men from the island moved to Bougainville in early 2009 to build houses and plant crops. It is planned to bring another 1700 people over the next five years. CNN has reported that the Carteret islanders will be the first island community in the world to undergo an organized relocation, in response to rising sea levels. The people of the Carteret are being called the world’s first environmental refugees. Read More: > Here <
Sun Come Up; www.suncomeup.com an Intimate Look at the World’s First Climate Refugees. The Carteret islanders are moving. Virtually all of them. They are being forced to relocate their entire society, and give up much of what makes them unique as a people. Not because of war, famine or disease, but because of climate change.
The Carteret islanders did not choose to be poster children in the worldwide debate over global warming, yet they are among the first climate refugees in a trend that could affect as many as 250 million by mid-century, according to the UN. This is perhaps surprising for a culture that doesn’t really have a cash economy, roads or an airstrip. They rarely use electricity, live in huts with sand floors and survive primarily on seafood they harvest themselves and vegetables they grow in gardens. Their home is a small line of atolls in the Pacific, off the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea.
Yet the plight of the 3,000 or so Carterets is slowly gaining international attention, thanks in part to documentary filmmakers Jennifer Redfearn and Tim Metzger, who are in the process of making a feature film about these people called Sun Come Up. A shorter version of the film-in-progress, entitled The Next Wave, recently won the Jury Prize at the Media That Matters film festival in New York City. From the looks of the short film, and the feature trailer, the story seems to be beautifully, and powerfully, told. The story of the Carterets is at once heartbreaking and heartwarming, and perhaps prescient of things to come.
The report, „Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit,“ provides a sampling of thousands of on- and off-shore disasters of all types, large and small. These examples from each year shed light on how the oil and gas industry has continued to show negligence and experience accidents all over the country. While not exhaustive, the listing offers a cross-section of spills, leaks, fires, explosions, toxic emissions, water pollution, and more that have not occurred in the last decade – the post- Exxon Valdez era, the post- Oil Pollution Act of 1990 era, when the industry claimed to have mended their dangerous ways.
Comments are closed.
