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“… already … engendering a new type of refugee,
the “environmental migrant”.
“The document points out that last year the UN’s
appeals for emergency humanitarian aid were all,
bar one, connected to climate change.”
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The Guardian/UK
March 10, 2008
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”.