Global Justice

This is not the first time such alarming predictions have been made. Last year the UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security warned that we should expect 50 million environmental refugees within the next five years. Similar forecasts have appeared in recent years in publications of environmental groups and on the editorial pages of many of the world's leading newspapers.

How reliable are these predictions? Should Canada brace to receive waves of environmental refugees as a result?

Such predictions also dwarf the numbers of people displaced by climate in the past. People displaced in North America during the Dust Bowl years, in South Asia by past typhoons, and in Latin America by Hurricane Mitch numbered in the hundreds of thousands in each case. Only the 1998 Yangtze River floods, which temporarily displaced an estimated 14 million people, begin to approach the scale of the predictions made in the U.K. climate report.

The extent to which climate change will lead to population displacements and environmental refugee movements depends on a number of factors. It depends on how the impacts of climate change unfold. If rising sea levels, and changes in temperatures and precipitation patterns, occur in a gradual, linear fashion, estimates of 200 million people displaced may be much too high. This is because many communities, organizations and economic systems will have the opportunity to adapt to new climactic conditions.

If, however, we see increases in the number and frequency of extreme events, or if climate change proceeds in a non-linear fashion (that is, there are sudden shifts in climactic norms), estimates of 200 million displaced are probably much too low.

We have seen how slow and difficult the recovery process has been in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, a single extreme event. No country, not even the United States, would be ready for an increase in the frequency of such storms.

How soon can we expect to see people displaced by climate change? People living on certain small islands in the South Pacific and off the coast of Alaska have already been forced to relocate due to infrastructure damage caused by unusually high sea levels during storms. These people might be the first of many climate change refugees should the trends we are observing continue.

The people most vulnerable to climate change tend to live in developing countries, where they often lack the financial resources and technology to adapt to harsh climactic conditions in the way Canadians can. In many developing countries, migration is already used as a means of adapting to seasonal variations as well as extreme events.

For example, a semi-arid region of West Africa known as the Sahel has been particularly drought-prone over the past several decades. One of the ways households have adapted is by having their young men and women migrate after harvest each year.

Where the young people migrate depends on the success of the harvest. After a good harvest, the family may use its financial reserves to send a member off to Europe in search of work. This is a highly speculative undertaking, for the costs are high and the rewards are uncertain. Also, the chances are the migrant will not be home in time for the next planting season. To reduce the risks, the migrant will follow in the path of friends or relatives who have migrated before, relying on them for assistance in getting established in the destination country.

In a drought year, when harvests are poor, the migrants stay much closer to home. They travel to nearby cities to seek work and to reduce the demand on the household's food reserves. In such years, the risks associated with long-distance migration are too much to bear.

Similar migration patterns have been observed in other parts of the world. We saw them in western North America during the 1930s.

The implications are this: Harsh climactic conditions trigger local or regional-scale migrations. They are less likely to trigger overseas migrations, and those who do migrate will follow established migrant networks. Therefore, the impacts of climate change may displace many people, and most are likely to remain in their home regions.

If Canada is to receive climate-change refugees, they will most likely come from vulnerable, developing countries that are already sources of migration to Canada. The four largest sources of current migration to Canada -- China, India, the Philippines and Pakistan -- all feature regularly in analyses of regions where large populations may be vulnerable to climate-change impacts.

In short, climate change may well increase the number of people seeking to come to Canada from existing source countries. Perhaps not millions, but the increased pressure will be noticeable. Climate change will also increase rural-to-urban migration in many parts of the developing world, placing downward pressure on the economic sustainability of those areas and increasing poverty and political instability.

There are any number of policy options available to Canada. Clearly, building adaptive capacity at home and abroad must be a priority.

Even were the Kyoto Protocol to be successfully implemented worldwide, we would still be locked into a considerably different set of future climactic conditions from what we are used to, with an increased risk of population displacements. Canada's financial contributions to international development generally, and to helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change specifically, have been embarrassingly low in recent years

We can continue ignoring these risks, or we can start constructing greater capacity for change in vulnerable regions. And maybe -- just maybe -- prevent millions from being displaced.

Robert McLeman is an assistant professor in geography at the University of Ottawa. He has written several studies on the links between climate change and migration for scientific journals and international security organizations.

 - post by rowanwolf