Wednesday 1 October 2008

Environmental refugees?

As we seem to be starting a new, shorter, form of post to guarantee that someone keeps writing in this blog, I decided to follow James' example. Here I just liked to mention a short article I read at Harvard's university website. The president of Kiribati, a south Pacific island nation has given recently a lecture at Harvard where he has presented his plan preparing his country for the eventuality (or should we call it certainty) of extinction. Apparently, with the sea-levels planned to raise by 1 meter in the next century due to climate change, the islands are starting to run out of space, and to eventually leave the islands for good seems to be the only option. However, the president seems to want to avoid creating what he describes as 'environmental refugees', a new word that we will perhaps become more and more familiar with in the future, as climate change starts having 'real' consequences that we cannot pretend to ignore anymore.

Read the short article here: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/09.25/13-kiribati.html

3 comments:

Menelaos Symeonides said...

Haha, oops, so much for short posts. At least I'm posting again, right?

Anyway, what you posted is pretty scary, very strange days are ahead. Imagine being told that you have to leave your island because it will be underwater by next year...

Cat said...

lol, the short posts were just a replacement for the long posts if we don't have enough time to write a long one. A longer post is obviously better!

Yeah, it sounded quite scary, that's why I decided to post the link! What other types of environmental refugees will we see in the future?

James Lloyd said...

a mix of posts i think is a good thing, long and short (i have started several long posts but can never finish them, i promise i will try).

anyway, it is very scary what climate change is going to do. i can see people emigrating when the opposite happens, land drys up and more land becomes desert. that will not go down well. wars will be fought over water in the future when people in one country use all the was up do the downstream people cannot get any!

i still think the most worrying thing is global warming is correlated with mass extinction events! this was shown but our very own Peter Mayhew!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17956842?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

this was reported on BBC news website when it was first published in case you missed it.