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What Happened To the Climate Refugees?

Posted by timothy on from the fake-passports-and-elaborate-backstories dept.

Attila Dimedici writes "In 2005 the UN said that by 2010 there would be 50 million climate refugees. They even provided a map of where they would come from. However since that original story was posted the UN has taken down that page. They apparently don't know about Google cache."

2 of 471 comments (clear)

  1. Didn't know about the UN prediction... by wisebabo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... but here in Vietnam we DO hear quite a bit about the rapid encroachment (and salinization) by the ocean into the Mekong delta. It is clear that with the ocean coming in (I seem to remember an encroachment figure of 1.4km/yr.) and that hundreds of thousands have already been displaced because they can no longer farm there. (This has driven the growth of the big cities which is where I live). The government is constantly projecting that millions more will move in the next few decades (This is from their Thanh Nhien News which is a pretty widely read paper, there's an English website you can visit).

    Of course matters will soon be made even worse as upstream countries start damming the Mekong. (They may be doing so because the freshwater source in the Himalayas is losing its snowpack cover. This may also be due to climate change.)

    Vietnam is supposedly one of the most susceptible countries to sea level rising but I can imagine things could be even worse in an even poorer (and closer to sea level) country like Bangladesh.

    1. Re:Didn't know about the UN prediction... by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Vietnam is supposedly one of the most susceptible countries to sea level rising but I can imagine things could be even worse in an even poorer (and closer to sea level) country like Bangladesh.

      It is. National Geographic has a fascinating article on how Bangladesh deals with things like rising oceans and other types of floods. Note that they also have one of the highest population densities in the world, which makes it even harder to deal with.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."