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January 28, 2004-2
Copyright © 2004 Earth Policy Institute
Troubling New Flows of Environmental
Refugees
Lester R. Brown
In mid-October 2003, Italian authorities
discovered a boat carrying refugees from Africa bound for Italy.
Adrift for more than two weeks and without fuel, food, and water,
many of the passengers had died. At first the dead were tossed overboard.
But after a point, the remaining survivors lacked the strength to
hoist the bodies over the side. The dead and the living were sharing
the boat in what a rescuer described as "a scene from Dante's Inferno."
The refugees were believed to be Somalis who had embarked from Libya.
We do not know whether they were political, economic, or environmental
refugees. Failed states like Somalia produce all three. We do know
that Somalia is an ecological basket case, with overpopulation,
overgrazing, and desertification destroying its pastoral economy.
Although the modern world has extensive experience with people migrating
for political and economic reasons, we are now seeing a swelling
flow of refugees driven from their homes by environmental pressures.
Modern experience with this phenomenon in the United States began
when nearly 3 million "Okies" from the southern Great Plains left
during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, many of them migrating to California.
Today, bodies washing ashore in Italy, France, and Spain are a daily
occurrence, the result of desperate acts by desperate people in
Africa. And each day hundreds of Mexicans risk their lives trying
to cross the U.S. border. Some 400 to 600 Mexicans leave rural areas
every day, abandoning plots of land too small or too eroded to make
a living. They either head for Mexican cities or try to cross illegally
into the United States. Many perish in the punishing heat of the
Arizona desert.
Another flow of environmental refugees comes from Haiti, a widely
recognized ecological disaster. In a rural economy where the land
is denuded of vegetation and the soil is washing into the sea, the
people are not far behind. Attempting to make the trip to Florida
in small craft not designed for the high seas, many drown.
The U.S. Dust Bowl refugees were early examples of environmental
migration, but their numbers will pale compared with what lies ahead
if we continue with business as usual. Among the new refugees are
people being forced to move because of aquifer depletion and wells
running dry. Thus far the evacuations have been of villages, but
eventually whole cities might have to be relocated, such as Sana'a,
the capital of Yemen, or Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan
province.
The World Bank expects Sana'a, where the water table is falling
by 6 meters a year, to exhaust its remaining water supply by 2010.
At that point, its leaders will either have to bring water in from
a distant point or abandon the city.
Quetta, originally designed for 50,000 people, now has 1 million
inhabitants, all of whom depend on 2,000 wells pumping water deep
from underground, depleting what is believed to be a fossil or nonreplenishable
aquifer. Like Sana'a, Quetta may have enough water for the rest
of this decade, but then its future is in doubt. In the words of
one study assessing the water prospect, Quetta will soon be "a dead
city."
With most of the nearly 3 billion people to be added to the world's
population by 2050 living in countries where water tables are already
falling and where population growth swells the ranks of those sinking
into hydrological poverty, water refugees are likely to become commonplace.
They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations
are outgrowing the water supply. Villages in northwestern India
have been abandoned because overpumping had depleted the local aquifers
and villagers could no longer reach water. Millions of villagers
in northern and western China and in parts of Mexico may have to
move because of a lack of water.
Spreading deserts are also displacing people. In China, where the
Gobi Desert is growing by 10,400 square kilometers (4,000 square
miles) a year, the refugee stream is swelling. Chinese scientists
report that there are now desert refugees in three provinces—Inner
Mongolia, Ningxia, and Gansu. An Asian Development Bank preliminary
assessment of desertification in Gansu province has identified 4,000
villages that face abandonment.
A photograph in Desert Witness, a book on desertification by Chinese
photographer Lu Tongjing, shows what looks like a perfectly normal
village in the western reaches of Inner Mongolia—except
for one thing. There are no people. Its 4,000 residents were forced
to leave because the aquifer was depleted, leaving them with no
water.
In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts and a lack
of water already number in the thousands. In the eastern provinces
of Baluchistan and Sistan alone, some 124 villages have been buried
by drifting sand. In the vicinity of Damavand, a small town within
an hour's drive of Tehran, 88 villages have been abandoned.
In Nigeria, 3,500 square kilometers (1350 square miles) of land
are converted to desert each year, making desertification the country's
leading environmental problem. As the desert takes over, farmers
and herdsmen are forced to move, squeezed into the shrinking area
of habitable land or forced into cities.
Another source of refugees, potentially a huge one, is rising seas.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its early 2001
study, reported that sea level could rise by nearly 1 meter during
this century. But research completed since then indicates that ice
is melting much faster than reported earlier, suggesting that the
possible rise may be much higher.
Even a 1-meter rise in sea level would inundate half of Bangladesh's
riceland, forcing the relocation of easily 40 million people. In
a densely populated country with 144 million people, internal relocation
would not be easy. But where else can they go? How many countries
would accept even 1 million of these 40 million? Other Asian countries
with rice-growing river floodplains, including China, India, Indonesia,
Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Viet Nam,
could boost the mass exodus from rising seas to the hundreds of
millions.
The refugee flows from falling water tables and expanding deserts
are just beginning. How large these flows and those from rising
seas will become remains to be seen. But the numbers could be huge.
The rising flow of environmental refugees is yet another indicator
that our modern civilization is out of sync with the earth's natural
support systems. Among other things, it tells us that we need a
worldwide effort to fill the family planning gap and to create the
social conditions that will accelerate the shift to smaller families,
a global full-court press to raise water productivity, and an energy
strategy that will cut carbon dioxide emissions and stabilize the
earth's climate.
Copyright
© 2004 Earth Policy Institute
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Earth Policy Institute
Lester R. Brown, Plan
B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).
Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, and Bernie Fischlowitz-Roberts,
The
Earth Policy Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy:
Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, 2001).
Lester R. Brown, "China Losing War With Advancing
Deserts," Eco-Economy Update,
5 August 2003.
Lester R. Brown, "Water Deficits Growing in Many
Countries," Eco-Economy Update,
6 August 2002.
Janet Larsen, "Glaciers and Sea Ice Endangered by
Rising Temperatures," Eco-Economy
Update, 22 January 2004.
Janet Larsen, "Population Growth Leading to Land
Hunger," Eco-Economy Update,
23 January 2003.
Janet Larsen, "Deserts Advancing, Civilization Retreating,"
Eco-Economy Update, 27
March 2003.
From Other Sources
IPCC, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis;
Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; and Mitigation. Contributions
of Working Group I, II, and III to the Third Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press). Text and summaries of each
report available at http:/www.ipcc.ch.
Yang Youlin, Victor Squires, and Lu Qi, eds., Global
Alarm: Dust and Sandstorms from the World's Drylands (New York:
United Nations, 2001).
LINKS
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http:/www.ipcc.ch
Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to
Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
http:/www.unccd.int
United Nations High Commission for Refugees
http:/www.unhcr.ch
United Nations Population Division
http:/www.un.org/esa
/population/unpop.htm
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