The impact of climate change on the movement of vast populations, the creation of global warming refugees, has been missing from the public debate on the single biggest issue facing governments, business and society.
A British non-governmental organisation, Christian Aid, has released an alarming report, Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis which warns that at least one billion people – almost equivalent to the entire population of India – will be forced from their homes between now and 2050. One quarter of them – 250 million or more than the entire population of Indonesia – will be displaced by "floods, droughts, famines and hurricanes", and that 50 million people will be "displaced by conflict and extreme human rights abuses".
Businesses and governments in the developed world can't afford to sit back and assume this has nothing to do with them. Think of the 1.5 million people displaced by hurricane katrina in 2005. And in a global economy, the climate change refugee is now emerging as the new business risk and could undermine security.
The Christian Aid report warns: "The danger is that this new forced migration will fuel existing conflicts and generate new ones in the areas of the world – the poorest – where resources are most scarce.
Movement on this scale has the potential to de-stabilise whole regions where increasingly desperate populations compete for dwindling food and water."
The tragedy and trauma of Darfur might be a warning of what lies ahead.
The report has several radical solutions. These include a "global carbon budget" that allows developing and less-developed countries to increase the size of their economies and reduce poverty without causing climate change and which would have rich countries bankrolling clean development activities in poor countries. It proposes that the rich countries set up a $100 billion a year global fund to help vulnerable countries to adapt to sea level rises, increasing drought and more extreme weather. More to the point, this money is not to come out of aid budgets. Instead, the report says, it should be based on a formula based on the rich countries' carbon dioxide emissions.
The developed world is unlikely to take up these proposals. But something clearly needs to be done. As United Nations University professor Janos Bogardi says, no country is exempt from the negative effects of climate change. "Vulnerability is with us all,'' he said.
To read more about his views and warnings, check this BusinessWeek report.
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