Environmental refugees number more than 10M

Press, 23 November 1988, Page 57

Environmental refugees number more than 10M

NZPA Reuter Washington People fleeing newly barren environments, such as land poisoned by toxins or overtaken by creeping desert sands, are the largest single class of refugees in the world, says a conservation group.

The Worldwatch Institute estimated in a study that environmental refugees number more than 10 million. It said refugees in all other classes, including political refugees and those escaping wars, total about 13 million. The author, Jodi Jacobson, an economic and environmental specialist at the institute, said the rising number of environmental refugees was the best available measure of changes in the earth’s physical condition.

The Worldwatch Institute is an independent non-profit research organisation. Jacobson cited land and

water poisoned by toxic wastes and natural disasters such as river flooding made worse by watershed deforestation. She said degradation of farm land was displacing more people than any other form of environmental deterioration and such degradation was greatest in Third World countries where the majority of the people were farmers. She cited the recent flooding in Bangladesh and Sudan.

“Throughout Africa, desertification has become so pervasive that whole villages and fields are overtaken by sand. In sub-Saharan Africa, the mass migrations triggered by successive droughts are an enduring symbol of hunger and famine,” she said.

Jacobson said that in the next century global warming could become

the major threat to habitability. Scientists say global warming is being caused by increased use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil whose fumes trap the sun’s rays in the lower atmosphere, gradually increasing the earth’s temperatures. Jacobson said a one meter rise in ocean levels by the middle of the next century — "well within current estimates” — could create 50 million refugees from coastal areas.

“Yet while sea levelrise due to global warming is induced by the industrial world, developing countries stand to suffer the most,” she said. Jacobson said ways to fight environmental degradation were well known, but that in many cases political authorities lacked the money or the will to act.