Aid officials warn of growing climate-related displacement
LONDON (AlertNet) - Close to 15 million people were uprooted by natural disasters around the world last year, mainly caused by floods and storms, a report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said this week.
The number is lower than in recent years, but annual figures go up and down sharply according to the size and number of major disasters such as earthquakes and floods. In 2010, 42 million people were displaced within their own countries by natural disasters, compared with nearly 17 million in 2009.
In 2011, 89 percent of the 14.95 million people internally displaced were in Asia, which saw the 10 largest disasters by number of people uprooted. China and Thailand were badly hit by floods, the Philippines by storms, and Japan by the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Weather and climate-related disasters - including those triggered by floods, landslides and storms - accounted for 92 percent of the total displacement, with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions making up the rest, the IDMC said.
“The impact of climate change such as changing rainfall patterns and increases in temperature, combined with rapid population growth, suggest that more and more people are likely to be affected by displacement,” said Elisabeth Rasmusson, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which runs the IDMC.
The Americas accounted for 7 percent of the global figure with over 1 million displaced, including 280,000 left homeless by a storm in Mexico and 170,000 uprooted by floods in Brazil.
Four percent of the total were in Africa, with Angola having the highest number of people displaced - 220,000 - due to flooding.
Worldwide, China had the largest number of people newly displaced in 2011, with 10 events including floods, storms and earthquakes uprooting 4.5 million people.
Sri Lanka was the country with the largest percentage of its population displaced - 3 percent, or almost 685,000 people - due to heavy seasonal rains and floods.
The report did not cover the impact of slow-developing crises caused by droughts and other forms of gradual environmental degradation.
Releasing the report at the U.N. conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro this week, the NRC called on the international community to help vulnerable communities prepare for disasters and recover from them in a sustainable way.
"Delegates at Rio+20 must ensure that international efforts to reduce disaster risk, build resilience and adapt to climate change include initiatives to strengthen national and local governance, support sustainable livelihoods and improve access to basic services for the millions displaced worldwide by natural disasters,” Rasmusson said.
LITTLE NEW AT RIO?
A draft outcome document for the Rio+20 summit, agreed by diplomats ahead of the gathering attended by more than 100 world leaders, calls for "disaster risk reduction and building of resilience to disasters to be addressed with a renewed sense of urgency in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication".
It urges governments to put sufficient resources into measures to protect cities and communities from disasters, and to make use of early warning systems, besides stepping up technological assistance for developing countries. It also calls for better links between work on disaster reduction and adaptation to climate change.
But there is nothing new in these recommendations, and the text barely mentions displacement or refugees.
On Wednesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, told an event in Rio that the international community should agree to guiding principles to protect those forced to cross borders due to natural disasters linked to climate change.
He also proposed that international agencies and authorities at all levels should partner with local groups and communities to make life easier for the huge numbers of people moving to cities.
The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) and the United Nations University on Thursday published a report based on testimonies from around 150 refugees and displaced people in Eastern Africa, showing that climate change can make people more vulnerable and play a part in driving them into areas of insecurity and ultimately into another country.
Yet cross-border movement as a direct response to climate change was exceptional, it noted.
Norway and Switzerland, with the support of the UNHCR and the NRC, plan to launch an initiative in October to address the current legal and protection gap for people displaced across borders due to environmental change and extreme weather events.
“I am convinced that climate change will increasingly be a driver in worsening displacement crises in the world. It is very important for the world to come together to respond to this challenge,” Guterres said in a statement.
But, given the financial woes afflicting many Western nations and the lack of resources in developing states, there seems to be limited political appetite for finding concrete solutions to the thorny prospect of rising migration related to environmental factors.
Ahead of the Rio+20 summit, Margareta Wahlström, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for disaster risk reduction, warned that more frequent and intense disaster events are a growing threat to hard-won development gains.
The risk of losing wealth in weather-related disasters is now outstripping the rate at which the wealth itself is being created, she noted.
"We can clearly say that preparing for, and coping with, disasters are no longer enough," she said. "If we are to build a sustainable future, addressing the underlying risks and accounting for disaster losses needs to be firmly integrated into our development agenda."
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