19 June 2007Yahoo! News
Global warming could create some 200 million climate refugees by 2040 and the bulk of the affected will be people living in poor countries, Greenpeace warned on Wednesday.
The environmental group said the forecast was based on a study by German academic Cord Jakobeit from Hamburg University.
It found that those most likely to be driven from their homes by weather disasters linked to global warming would be inhabitants of the world's poorest areas.
Environmental experts believe there may already be at least 20 million climate refugees and some have predicted the figure will increase tenfold as the impact of rising temperatures becomes more clearly felt.
They say Inuit communities are being displaced by the melting ice caps in North America and Greenland, and the inhabitants of Africa's drought-stricken Sahel region, the floodplains of Bangladesh and the islands of the South Pacific are suffering a similar fate.
Andree Boehling, a German climate expert with Greenpeace, said a new category of refugee has been created which enjoys no political protection because their plight is not properly recognised.
"The poorest people in the world have had no hand in climate change but will be the first to suffer severely from its fallout.
"In the meanwhile, the industrialised nations that have caused global warming deny the existence of climate refugees and use their refugee laws to avoid having to deal with them," Boehling added.
The term "climate refugee" was coined about a decade ago to describe those forced from their homes by climate change, but it is not officially recognised by individual governments or the United Nations.
A study carried out by the Red Cross and Red Crescent in 2000 found that 25 million people have already left their homes because of environmental stress, roughly the same number as those displaced by armed conflict.
