Update 33: January 28, 2004-2
Copyright © 2004 Earth Policy Institute
Troubling New Flows of Environmental Refugees
In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities discovered
a boat carrying refugees from Africa bound for Italy. Adrift for more
than two weeks and without fuel, food, and water, many of the passengers
had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard. But after a point,
the remaining survivors lacked the strength to hoist the bodies over the
side. The dead and the living were sharing the boat in what a rescuer
described as "a scene from Dante's Inferno."
The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya.
We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental
refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know that
Somalia is an ecological basket case, with overpopulation, overgrazing,
and desertification destroying its pastoral economy.
Although the modern world has extensive experience
with people migrating for political and economic reasons, we are now seeing
a swelling flow of refugees driven from their homes by environmental pressures.
Modern experience with this phenomenon in the United States began when
nearly 3 million "Okies" from the southern Great Plains left during the
Dust Bowl of the 1930s, many of them migrating to California.
Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, France, and Spain are a daily occurrence,
the result of desperate acts by desperate people in Africa. And each day
hundreds of Mexicans risk their lives trying to cross the U.S. border.
Some 400 to 600 Mexicans leave rural areas every day, abandoning plots
of land too small or too eroded to make a living. They either head for
Mexican cities or try to cross illegally into the United States. Many
perish in the punishing heat of the Arizona desert.
Another flow of environmental refugees comes from Haiti, a widely recognized
ecological disaster. In a rural economy where the land is denuded of vegetation
and the soil is washing into the sea, the people are not far behind. Attempting
to make the trip to Florida in small craft not designed for the high seas,
many drown.
The U.S. Dust Bowl refugees were early examples of environmental migration,
but their numbers will pale compared with what lies ahead if we continue
with business as usual. Among the new refugees are people being forced
to move because of aquifer depletion and wells running dry. Thus far the
evacuations have been of villages, but eventually whole cities might have
to be relocated, such as Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, or Quetta, the
capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province.
The World Bank expects Sana'a, where the water table is falling by 6 meters
a year, to exhaust its remaining water supply by 2010. At that point,
its leaders will either have to bring water in from a distant point or
abandon the city.
Quetta, originally designed for 50,000 people, now has 1 million inhabitants,
all of whom depend on 2,000 wells pumping water deep from underground,
depleting what is believed to be a fossil or nonreplenishable aquifer.
Like Sana'a, Quetta may have enough water for the rest of this decade,
but then its future is in doubt. In the words of one study assessing the
water prospect, Quetta will soon be "a dead city."
With most of the nearly 3 billion people to be added to the world's population
by 2050 living in countries where water tables are already falling and
where population growth swells the ranks of those sinking into hydrological
poverty, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be
most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing
the water supply. Villages in northwestern India have been abandoned because
overpumping had depleted the local aquifers and villagers could no longer
reach water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in
parts of Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.
Spreading deserts are also displacing people. In China, where the Gobi
Desert is growing by 10,400 square kilometers (4,000 square miles) a year,
the refugee stream is swelling. Chinese scientists report that there are
now desert refugees in three provinces—Inner
Mongolia, Ningxia, and Gansu. An Asian Development Bank preliminary assessment
of desertification in Gansu province has identified 4,000 villages that
face abandonment.
A photograph in Desert Witness, a book on desertification by Chinese photographer
Lu Tongjing, shows what looks like a perfectly normal village in the western
reaches of Inner Mongolia—except
for one thing. There are no people. Its 4,000 residents were forced to
leave because the aquifer was depleted, leaving them with no water.
In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts and a lack of
water already number in the thousands. In the eastern provinces of Baluchistan
and Sistan alone, some 124 villages have been buried by drifting sand.
In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within an hour's drive of Tehran,
88 villages have been abandoned.
In Nigeria, 3,500 square kilometers (1350 square
miles) of land are converted to desert each year, making desertification
the country's leading environmental problem. As the desert takes over,
farmers and herdsmen are forced to move, squeezed into the shrinking area
of habitable land or forced into cities.
Another source of refugees, potentially a huge one, is rising seas. The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its early 2001 study, reported
that sea level could rise by nearly 1 meter during this century. But research
completed since then indicates that ice is melting much faster than reported
earlier, suggesting that the possible rise may be much higher.
Even a 1-meter rise in sea level would inundate half of Bangladesh's riceland,
forcing the relocation of easily 40 million people. In a densely populated
country with 144 million people, internal relocation would not be easy.
But where else can they go? How many countries would accept even 1 million
of these 40 million? Other Asian countries with rice-growing river floodplains,
including China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea,
Thailand, and Viet Nam, could boost the mass exodus from rising seas to
the hundreds of millions.
The refugee flows from falling water tables and expanding deserts are
just beginning. How large these flows and those from rising seas will
become remains to be seen. But the numbers could be huge.
The rising flow of environmental refugees is yet another indicator that
our modern civilization is out of sync with the earth's natural support
systems. Among other things, it tells us that we need a worldwide effort
to fill the family planning gap and to create the social conditions that
will accelerate the shift to smaller families, a global full-court press
to raise water productivity, and an energy strategy that will cut carbon
dioxide emissions and stabilize the earth's climate.
Copyright © 2004 Earth Policy Institute
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Earth Policy Institute
Lester R. Brown, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).
Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, and Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts, The Earth Policy Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001).
Lester R. Brown, "China Losing War With Advancing Deserts," Eco-Economy Update, 5 August 2003.
Lester R. Brown, "Water Deficits Growing in Many Countries," Eco-Economy Update, 6 August 2002.
Janet Larsen, "Glaciers and Sea Ice Endangered by Rising Temperatures," Eco-Economy Update, 22 January 2004.
Janet Larsen, "Population Growth Leading to Land Hunger," Eco-Economy Update, 23 January 2003.
Janet Larsen, "Deserts Advancing, Civilization Retreating,"
Eco-Economy Update, 27 March
2003.
From Other Sources
IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis; Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; and Mitigation. Contributions of Working Group I, II, and III to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Text and summaries of each report available at http://www.ipcc.ch.
Yang Youlin, Victor Squires, and Lu Qi, eds., Global
Alarm: Dust and Sandstorms from the World's Drylands (New York: United
Nations, 2001).
LINKS
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch
Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat
Desertification (UNCCD)
http://www.unccd.int
United Nations High Commission for Refugees
http://www.unhcr.ch
United Nations Population Division
http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.htm