50 Million Environmental Refugees by 2010 - BBC

[hatrack]

There will be as many as 50 million environmental refugees in the world in five years' time. That is the conclusion of experts at the United Nations University, who say that a new definition of "environmental refugee" is urgently needed. They believe that already environmental degradation forces as many people away from their homes as political and social unrest.

The UNU issued its statement to mark UN Day for Disaster Reduction. "There are many different environmental issues involved and there can be interactions between them," said Janos Bogardi, director of the United Nations University's Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, Germany. "In poorer rural areas especially, one of the biggest sources of refugees is land degradation and desertification, which may be caused by unsustainable land use interacting with climate change, amplified by population growth," he told the BBC News website.

"A second issue is flooding, caused I would say by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere super-imposed with probably some natural fluctuations."

Worse than wars

The projected figure of 50 million is derived from a number of previous reports, including the 1999 World Disasters Report from the International Red Cross. This calculated that natural disasters in the previous year had created more refugees than wars or other armed conflicts. It said that falling soil fertility, drought, flooding and deforestation drove 25 million people from their homes, with many of these environmental refugees joining already fragile urban squatter communities.

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4326666.stm

[marmar]

1. That I can totally believe...

:scared: :scared:

[Benhurst]

2. Recommended NT

[phantom power]

3. I see you've posted a bundle of good news today.

[hatrack]

8. It's what keeps me going - illogical though that is

:toast:

[Nihil]

4. What's the betting ...

... that the US admin contribution to this debate will be to argue
how "refugee" is the wrong word to use ...?

[DrDoubleplusgood]

5. Limbaugh was talking about this today

In his oxycontin addled world liberals supposedly can't make up their minds about whether things like hurricane Katrina were exacerbated by Global Warming or caused personally caused by Bush himself....fucking moron erecting a strawman....still tkaes in the sheeple, I'll bet:scared:

[DrDoubleplusgood]

6. I am skeptical on one point

The report mentions falling soil fertility. I have been hearing about this for several years now, and supposedly the system was already tight. So if this has been happeing for a while and the system was already tight, why isn't there mass starvation almost everywhere right now? This sounds like the peak oil thing....talking about a problem probably another decade or two way actually lulls people further to sleep if you get hysterical without obvious evidence.

[blindpig]

7. soil erosion just creeps up on you

Tilling of the soil inevitably leads to erosion unless special care is taken. Iraq was once a fertile place but 6,000 years of agriculture and pastoralism has brought it to it's present state. The land that I live on is devoid of top soil:just a veneer of leaf litter hides hard clay and rock. Chalk that up to 150 years of intensive cotton and maize cultivation. Heavily eroded too. Just because something is not in your face doesn't mean it's not a problem.

The Green Revolution has postponed our day of reckoning and that may prove to have been a bad thing. It has allowed for continued overpopulation. As the Green Revolution depends upon petrochemicals the crash will now likely be harder than it might have.