An unseasonal week of warm weather had people in my hometown celebrating the benefits of climate change. We joked that our homes, in fifty years or so, would be prime real estate; that by then, we would live in a tropical climate and with rising sea levels and the erosion of the coastline, we would have beach frontage.
Yet the impact of climate change on the movement of people around the world — more often than not, the poorest — is almost entirely absent from public debate.
A British non-governmental organisation, Christian Aid, recently released a report, Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis, describing the impact of climate change on forced migration. If the figures contained in the report are to be believed, there is good cause to be alarmed.
Extrapolating from current trends, Human Tide suggests that between now and 2050, one billion people will be forced to leave their homes. One billion human beings! That is equivalent to the entire population of India. Of this one billion people, a quarter — more than the population of Indonesia — will be "permanently displaced by climate change-related phenomena such as floods, droughts, famines and hurricanes".
During recent budget estimates hearings, Greens Senator Kerry Nettle pressed Immigration Department officials about their planning for climate change-related migration. She was told that the department monitors the literature and the studies on climate change, but that it has no specific contingency for the sort of outcome described in Human Tide.
Indeed, reading the transcript of the estimates hearing suggests that the department is not altogether serious about the issue. According to Peter Hughes, Acting Deputy Secretary in the department, "It is not a necessary conclusion that international migration would be the direct consequence of climate change because, for example, in many circumstances an internal movement within a country — depending on the size and nature of the country — would be a solution, as opposed to international migration."
There is some truth to the assertion that the effects of climate change may be met in some instances by internal and not international migration. But Hughes’ statement both implies that if forced migration remains internal we ought not to be too concerned, and reflects the most optimistic of positions, underestimating the potential for these internal movements to blow out beyond borders.
In contrast to Hughes, the Christian Aid report asserts that the new forced migration "will fuel