Environmental Refugees

I just finished writing the last paper of the semester. I was dreading writing it and getting it started was torture, however, now that I am finished I am so glad I chose this topic. Before I wrote this paper I had no idea what an environmental refugee was. To be honest I had never thought of global warming affecting where people lived. I quickly realised that this was quite naive of me. So because I'm sure not many other people know some of the affects I just wanted to take this time to go through some of the stuff I wrote about in my paper.

• The UN is estimating that by the end of this decade there will be upwards of 50 million environmental refugees.

• Environmental degradation is currently displacing more people that war or conflict. (There are 19 million current conventional refugees).

• The main problem is that the majority of the international community does not recognise environmental refugees as refugees therefore these people are not entitled to the same protection offered to conventional refugees.

• Some of the affects of global warming causing this issue are, desertification (productive lands turning to desert land), deforestation, soil erosion, extreme weather (hurricanes), water deficits and droughts, salienation, and of course rising sea levels.

• Because the earth is warming at such a rate, ice in northern regions is melting causing a rise in sea levels. There is an Island in the pacific ocean between Hawaii and Australia that has literally admitted deafeat to rising sea levels and will evacuate the Island. If anyone is interesting in looking further into this the island is called Tuvalu.

50 million people is an insane number. I think it is about time the international community start paying attention to this problem. Emphasis should be put on improving the state of the environment first. kyoto is not enough.