Disaster Displacement Driving Millions into Exile

In 2008 alone, at least 36 million people were displaced by sudden-onset natural disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, IDMC. Of those disasters, more than 55 percent were climate related.

In human terms, what these figures tell us is that one out of every 335 individuals living on earth in 2008 was displaced, either temporarily or permanently, by the unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic reaction of Earth’s ecosystems to increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

These displacements, sometimes of Biblical proportions, as in the case of the late August flooding of India's Kosi River that left 2 million people homeless, strain the resources of the global agencies appointed to help.

Even in a developed nation like the United States, the Iowa flood of 2008 – which official reports say devastated 50,000 homes in one state alone – put the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the second-hardest test it faced in the 21st century; the first was Hurricane Katrina.

The IDMC, a displacement reporting arm of the United Nations, was established in 1998 by the Norwegian Refugee Council. It is the foremost international agency monitoring population displacement worldwide, providing an online database that provides information and analysis on displacement in over 50 countries.

Even so, as IDMC Head Kate Halff notes, the work in incomplete:

“A mechanism for the global monitoring of displacement caused by disasters, which is currently not in place, could be a relatively straightforward process, as outlined in our report, and would allow a monitoring agency to collect data on duration of displacement, on returns, on local integration and relocations, and on the needs over time of people who have been displaced. But it will require the consistent involvement of governments, and relief and development actors.”

2008 was a record year for the IDMC, which jointly compiled a report with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on displacement figures that should alarm any thinking human being. Twenty million individuals were displaced by some catastrophic, climate-related natural event.

The danger from those climate-related natural events, the potential global warming holds for making them worse, are reasons that both the Union of Concerned Scientists and the United Nations Environment Program are calling for limits on global warming emissions to keep atmospheric CO2 below 450 parts per million. The current level is 385 ppm, with levels rising at the rate of 2 ppm per year, except for 2009, the year of deepest worldwide recession.

In spite of 2009’s lower levels, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Secretary Renate Christ notes that some aspects of climate change are happening faster than foreseen in the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, notably the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice.

This unanticipated melting indicates to some climate scientists, like NASA’s James Hansen, that a tipping point has already been exceeded, with feedback mechanisms rapidly exacerbating global warming – a warming which Halff links directly to displacement.

“In the case of climate related rapid-onset disasters, we can make the assumption that the disaster itself is one of the main drivers of displacement – if not the main driver.”

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