Climate refugees : Family members, displaced by floods in the
Badin district, Pakistan
A family displaced by floods shelters under a tarp during a
monsoon downpour at a makeshift camp for flood victims in the
Badin district in Pakistan's Sindh province, September 2011.
Photograph: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters
More than 30 million people were displaced last year by
environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts
have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as
climate change exacerbates such problems.
Tens of millions more people are likely to be similarly displaced
in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising
sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural
productivity. Such people are likely to migrate in regions across
Asia, and governments must start to prepare for the problems this
will create, the Asian Development Bank warned.
The costs will be high – about $40bn is the likely price for
adapting and putting in place protective measures, from sea walls
to re-growing mangrove swamps that have been cut down, and that
can help to protect against the impacts of storm surges.
But the problem is already taking effect, though at a much lower
scale than is likely in the future. "While large-scale
climate-induced migration is a gradual phenomenon, communities in
Asia and the Pacific are already experiencing the consequences of
changing environmental conditions including eroding shorelines,
desertification and more frequent severe storms and flooding," the
bank said at a workshop last week. This could lead to a widespread
crisis across the region in coming years, if preparations are not
made to deal with the current and probable future consequences.
Robert Dobias, climate change project chief at the Asian
Development Bank, said that at present climate change is still a
relatively small cause of migration, as economic causes loom
largest and as environmental disasters happen independently of
global warming. However, the problem is likely to increase in
future years, with potentially severe consequences, including
conflict as people are forced to move long distances.
Areas most at risk are low-lying islands such as the Maldives,
whose environment minister, Mohamed Aslam, said the populations of
entire islands in the archipelago had been forced to move. But
coastal cities in developed regions could also face the threat of
higher seas and storm surges, while regions that already suffer
severe floods such as Bangladesh will have their risks
intensified.
The Asian Development Bank warned that governments must start to
make preparations now, to be ready for the multiplying threats,
and because more extreme weather has already started to take
effect, though changes so far have not been dramatic in their
impact. "The number of extreme weather events is increasing and
Asia and the Pacific is the region at the epicentre of weather
disasters," the group said.
The bank is working on a report that will set out in detail the
likely problems and propose a range of potential policy changes to
help to deal with them. The report will be published next spring,
though preliminary research is being disclosed at a series of
regional conferences in the intervening months.
The probable solutions are likely to include measures to improve
vital infrastructure, such as energy provision, transport systems
and communication networks, in order to make such infrastructure
more resilient to the effects of climate change.