Climate change ‘will create 2bn refugees’

AN ESTIMATED two billion people could become climate-change refugees by the end of the century because of rising sea levels, experts have warned.

Coastal populations will create resettlement bottlenecks as they flee in search of new places to live inland, say researchers. At the same time, swelling oceans will add to world food shortages by consuming farmland in fertile coastal plains and river deltas, it is claimed. By 2060, about 1.4bn people could be displaced by rising sea levels, with the number rising to two billion by 2100, according to the new research.

Lead scientist Professor Charles Geisler, from Cornell University in New York, said: “We’re going to have more people on less land and sooner than we think.

“The future rise in global mean sea level probably won’t be gradual. Yet few policy-makers are taking stock of the significant barriers to entry that coastal climate refugees, like other refugees, will encounter when they migrate to higher ground.

“The colliding forces of human fertility, submerging coastal zones, residential retreat and impediments to inland resettlement is a huge problem.”

In their study, published in the journal Land Use Policy, the scientists explore a “worst-case scenario” combining the effects of sea-level rises and an escalating world population expected to reach 11 billion by 2100.

Other new research provides evidence that sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate. Scientists writing in the journal Nature Climate Change found global mean sea level (GMSL) rose from 2.2mm per year (mm/yr) in 1993 to 2.9mm/yr in 2014. The trend was mainly due to the Greenland ice sheet.