EU Told To Prepare for Flood of Climate Change Migrants

[babylonsister]

EU Told To Prepare for Flood of Climate Change Migrants
Global warming threatens to severely destabilise the planet, rendering a fifth of its population homeless, top officials say
by Ian Traynor


In its half-century history, the EU has absorbed wave upon wave of immigrants. There were the millions of political migrants fleeing Russian-imposed communism to western Europe throughout the cold war, the post-colonial and “guest worker” migrants who poured into western Europe in the boom years of the 1950s and 60s, the hundreds of thousands who escaped the Balkan wars of the 90s and the millions of economic migrants of the past decade seeking a better life.


Now, according to the EU’s two senior foreign policy officials, Europe needs to brace itself for a new wave of migration with a very different cause - global warming. The ravages already being inflicted on parts of the developing world by climate change are engendering a new type of refugee, the “environmental migrant”.

Within a decade “there will be millions of environmental migrants, with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon,” predict Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s chief foreign policy coordinator and the European commissioner for external relations. “Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

They point out that some countries already badly hit by global warming are demanding that the new phenomenon be recognised internationally as a valid reason for migration.

The immigration alert is but one of seven “threats” that the two officials focus on in pointing to the security implications and the dangers to European interests thrown up by climate change.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/10/7580/

[enid602]

1. immigration

India is rumored to be building a wall along the Bangladesh border for the same reason. Mexico is set to lose over 50% of its government revenues over the next 5 years (given depletion in the Cantarell field); we'd be smart to fix our looming immigration problem. It's odd that were about the only country in the world that doesn't have a national ID card.