Climate Refugee is one of many confusing terms in the climate change lexicon. If you take it literally, it surely means someone who is constantly running from mean weather conditions, never able to settle down. As soon as I feel conditions returning to a mathematical average, man, I'm gone.
Unfortunately, that's not what it means. Instead, it refers to populations forced to leave their homes, because sea level rise has suddenly made living on a tidal flat a pretty horrendous idea, or because rainfall stopped bothering to show up in your neck of the woods and suddenly you live in a desert.
I'm talking about this today because UK newspaper the Guardian has launched a news minisite on the plight of Newtok in Alaska, where river erosion is forcing the inhabitants to abandon the village*. This is obviously a very stressful event for all concerned and a sign of things to come for the Alaskan natives. Alaska isn't a very large percentage of the worlds populous though, so what else is going on globally; how big a problem is this, and how big a problem will it become?
Yeah, the thing is, I don't know the answer to any of that. I've nonchalantly poised a question which is far too hard to cover in this short blog post and now I'm going to try and ramble my way to a reasonable conclusion. Wish me luck.
To start with, it's complicated because it's hard to separate the idea of climate refugees from environmental refugees, a term used to differentiate between people fleeing from persecution (political refugees) and natural disasters. Myers (2002) reports a "conservative estimate" of 25 million environmental refugees in 1995. However, as the paper discusses, extreme poverty often serves as a "push" factor for these refugees. A good example of this would be drought in the sub-Saharan Africa region. So it's hard to assess whether changes in number of refugees are due to political factors or an increase in environmental problems.
Even putting aside the political cases, it isn't usually possible to attribute one particular event to climate change. Take the 2012 North-Indian floods, which relocated 6.9 million people out of 34 million environmental refugees globally in 2012. The event occurred because the monsoons brought more rainfall than average in that particular region. Is that going to become a trend over the next fifty years, or is it just part of natural variability? Another question to file under "ongoing research". Besides, not all environmental relocation is linked to climate change. As far as I know, nobody has yet linked Earthquakes to climate change, although the CNN newsreader from my first ever blog might give it a go.
The headline figure for climate refugees is usually 200 million at risk by the year 2050, and the various versions of this prediction were reviewed by Biermann and Boas (2010). A lot of that number comes from an increase in severe weather and storm surges on top of mean sea level rise (which we are confident about). Since we don't really know exactly how severe weather will change, these numbers are very uncertain. This isn't a criticism of the papers I've cited here by the way. We have to get an idea about how climate change will effect society and, although uncertain, examining changes in flooding, droughts, hurricanes and the like seems the only reasonable way to go about it. A very confident prediction of "It'll be slightly hotter most days" isn't as useful for decision making as "we're uncertain, but we think more floods will mean you can't grow anything here anymore. Might think about moving".
So what can we take away from all this? Other than real life sociological problems have lots of co-related causes and it's hard to predict how they will change in the future. Well, I guess you can fall into two camps. a) we don't really know what will happen, let's just hope it's not bad. or b) we don't really know what will happen, let's plan for the future in case we have to suddenly move 200 million people around. I guess as a species we just have to trust our leaders to make the responsible choice. The footnote I've written beneath my conclusion is not helping me here, I'm going to be honest.
*As an irrelevant footnote, the article has some interesting Sarah Palin quotes from when she was back as Governor of Alaska and all about the climate change issue. It's funny how that changed when she became the VP candidate to appease hardcore republicans. It's almost like Politicians base policies and principles on what is most likely to get them elected rather than rationality, any particular manifesto, or some kind of ethical code. What? Oh.
