Climate change causing 'environmental migrants'

THE MALDIVES now has a “safe islands” programme covering 25 per cent of its 196 low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean and is considering abandoning the rest, according to one of the authors of a new study on the impacts of global warming.

Dr Charles Erhart, of Care International, yesterday cited it as one of the countries at risk from rising sea levels. “We’ve never before had to deal with disappearing states. Who’s going to take responsibility for people who are losing their country?”

The report, In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, based on face-to face interviews with 2,000 people in 23 countries, found that many were becoming “environmental migrants”.

“There is a clear signal that the environment, including climate change, is playing a role in deciding whether to move,” Dr Erhart said.

“People are experiencing a loss of livelihoods through the breakdown of ecosystems and that’s likely to become a mega-trend.”

Joint author Dr Koko Warner, of the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security, identified increasing drought in the Sahel region of west Africa and in Central America as a major factor in the migration to cities of hard-hit subsistence farmers.

In Niger, where the land is already dry, Dr Warner said farmers had said the rains “are coming not as much or else torrentially, washing the soil away with flash floods. So they’re moving already. It’s happening; we don’t have to wait till 2020 or 2050.”