Natural disasters displacing millions - U.N. study
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
September 23, 2009
LONDON (Reuters) - Floods, storms, drought and other climate-related natural disasters drove 20 million people from their homes last year, nearly four times as many as were displaced by conflicts, a new U.N. report said on Tuesday.
The study tried to quantify for the first time the number of people forced to flee their homes because of climate change.
Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of storms and otherwise altering weather patterns, so disasters are now "an extremely significant driver of forced displacement globally", it said.
The study said a total of 36 million people were driven from their homes by rapid-onset natural disasters in 2008. China's Sichuan earthquake accounted for 15 million of these, but climate-related disasters displaced 90 percent of the rest.
The report said many more people were probably being forced from their homes by slower-onset crises like droughts.
The report was compiled jointly by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a body which normally tracks displacement caused by conflict.
The aim was "to see whether it was possible to put numbers to the problem and come up with a methodology that will enable us to do that over time", said IDMC head Kate Halff.
The answer was a qualified "yes", though Halff warned that the monitoring effort so far "doesn't give us any idea of what time period these people have been displaced or what their needs are. At this stage it's just about a number."
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