Refugee flood predicted

Press, 6 October 1988, Page 17

Refugee flood predicted

NZPA-AAP London The larger nations of the South Pacific — Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand — would have to make room for a flood of "environment refugees” from their smaller neighbours, a London conference has been told. A senior lecturer in geography at Sydney University, Dr John Connell, had a grim message for delegates to the three-day Pacific Way conference at Lpndon’s Commonwealth

Institute. “Already the people from these Pacific island States are being forced to leave their homes for economic reasons but soon they are going to become environment refugees as well,” he said.

It was the same message he delivered in Sydney two months ago at the twenty-sixth Congress of the International Geographical Union. The "greenhouse effect,” where the Earth is gradually warming as-pol-

lution disrupts the upper levels of protection in the Earth’s atmosphere, would cause sea levels to rise one metre in the next 50 years. “That might not sound like much but the highest point of land on some of the Pacific States is only four metres above sea level,” he said. He said there was nothing to stop up to 100,000 people living on the coral islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu being displaced as their islands began to flood.