Environmental Refugees

Environmental Refugees

By Dr Arvind Kumar

With the vast majority of the 2.3 billion people projected to be added to the world by 2050 being born in countries where water tables are falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in northern Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water. A final category of environmental refugee has appeared only in the last 50 years or so: people who are trying to escape toxic waste or dangerous radiation levels. It is high time to stem the tide of environmental refugees by working with developing countries to restore their economy's natural support systems—the soils, the water tables, the grasslands, the forests—and to help people break out of poverty.

People normally seldom leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount due to rising seas, increasing devastating storms, expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation mount, people are forced to flee their homes and become vironmental refugees. The advance of expanding Sahara desert northward is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe. In Brazil, some 250,000 square miles of land are affected by desertification. In Mexico, many of the environmental refugees end up in Mexican cities, others cross the northern border into the United States. Over the last half-century or so some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been abandoned either entirely or partly because of desert expansion.

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