By Craig Cormick
There is a new and growing category of refugee — environmental refugees. They, like refugees of war, have witnessed their homelands being ravaged, and their only hope is to gather their meagre belongings and flee.
A report by Worldwatch, State of the World, says, "... vast areas are becoming unfit for human habitation. These lands are being despoiled either through long-time environmental degradation or by brief but catastrophic events."
Worldwatch estimates there are about 10 million environmental refugees. Most of them are unseen statistics, as they abandon their land and move to new land, or into cities, seeking a new source of income that often doesn't exist.
Developing countries suffer the most from environmental degradation, and have the least resources to find remedies.
Bangladesh, which has suffered increased flooding in recent decades, sees little hope in the future. Deforestation in Northern India and Nepal directly contributed to the devastating floods that swept the country in 1988, inundating over 60% of the land.
Bangladesh is threatened not only by increased flooding of its rivers, but by increased ocean flooding during cyclones, as the ocean level rises due to the greenhouse effect. Millions of its 110 million people live on chars — bars of silt and sand in the delta. The chars are extremely unstable, and many people have their land washed away each year by large tides and cyclones.
Worldwatch estimates that, with a worst case sea rise of almost 80 centimetres by the year 2050, 16% of Bangladesh's habitable land would be permanently lost and 13% of the population displaced.
Community Aid Abroad estimates that, during the 1988 flooding, 28 million people lost their homes, their land buried under thick sand from the floods. Landless, they joined the growing number of environmental refugees, forced find an income as seasonal labourers. About 30% of the country are without work or underemployed.
Pacific island countries such as Tuvalu and Kiribati lie only a few metres above sea level and have small populations and large areas of coast. If there is a substantial increase in ocean levels, an estimated 120,000 people would have to be relocated in our region.
President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives warned in 1987 that ocean rises could well swamp his country. Most of the land mass of
the 1300 islands of the Maldives lies less than two metres above sea level, and the Maldives may have only 50 years before it drowns, dislocating the 200,000 population.
According to State of the World, a one-metre rise in ocean levels could result in 50 million environmental refugees.
Industrial countries
Although most environmental refugees are in the developing countries, whole towns in industrial countries have been declared unfit for human habitation due to toxic build-ups.
The most well-known case is Chernobyl in the Soviet Union — once a town of 10,000 inhabitants. After the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, an estimated 100,000 people were evacuated from the area and up to 2500 square kilometres of land were deemed uninhabitable.
Recently Nature magazine reported there were contingency plans to evacuate up to 103,000 inhabitants of Byelorussia, north of the Ukraine, due to excessive levels of radiation being detected there.
In the USA, the community of Love Canal was built on a land fill of dumped toxic wastes. The new buildings disturbed the waste, causing leaks to the extent that the New York State Department of Health ordered the evacuation of all pregnant women and children under two years old. Chemicals were found to have entered basements and sewers and were even present in the air. The Environmental Protection Agency said that the residents suffered greater "risk of cancer, congenital malformations in their offspring, and an increased incidence of miscarriage". Eventually more than 600 of the community's 900 families were evacuated.
According to Worldwatch, thousands of similar sites have been identified across the USA, and 1390 families in 42 separate communities have had to be relocated.
Many Eastern Bloc countries have disastrous problems with pollution. The Polish government had to declare five villages unfit for human habitation due to high levels of heavy metals from copper-smelting plants.
In the Soviet Union, the head of the country's Environmental Protection Committee, Fyodor Morgun, has said that industrial waste is "a Chernobyl-like catastrophe". In 1987, Pravda reported that the industrial city of Uta, with a population of 1 million, was "unfit for human habitation".
All around the Aral Sea, thousands of people have had to leave their homes as the now toxic waters which have killed off the fishing industry threaten their own lives. A recent report revealed
that nine out of 10 children born on the coastline of the sea suffered from anaemia, and there were enormous increases in diseases attributed to pesticide poisoning, such as gastric typhoid, cancers and tuberculosis.
In Australia, many farm lands are becoming increasingly marginalised. Salination and topsoil erosion are major problems, and an estimated 50% of agriculture and pastoral land requires some form of treatment. According to the CSIRO, soil degradation costs Australia $1.2 billion annually.
Desertification
In West Australia, where an estimated 250 square kilometres are lost due to salination each year, a government report estimated that up to 50% of cleared land in the southern region could be salt-affected in less than 20 years.
A United Nations survey estimates that 4.5 billion hectares of land are in various stages of desertification worldwide — fully 35% of the total land area of our planet.
According to Worldwatch, about 135 million people live in these areas. If little is done to halt the degradation of their land, many of them will join the growing lines of environmental refugees walking off their land and clogging already overcrowded cities.
During severe drought in the Sahel in 1985, 16% of the population of Niger and over 10% of the populations of Chad and Mauritania left their land.
Farmers in poor countries are being forced into overgrazing, overcropping and other land uses that are leading to long-term land degradation. The urgency to produce more profits is leading to poverty. And when the land is unable to produce a crop, the people have no option but to leave.
The Worldwatch report says, "The vision of millions of persons forced to abandon their homelands is a frightening prospect, one without precedent and likely to rival past and current wars in its impact on humanity".
When our soils are no longer able to feed us, it will be too late to take notice.