The March Of Refugees
By Srestha Banerjee
16 January, 2010
Countercurrents.org
As the climate conference in Copenhagen becomes a part of “conventional” history, the much debatable yet extremely urgent issue continues to remain the centerpiece of global policy discussions. The issue does no more solely have the emblem of the cute polar bear, looking desolate and desperate in its endangered habitat, but the emblem has become human faces: the "climate refugees", standing in the barren lands of our "enriched civilization".
The severity of the situation can be somewhat gauged by few United Nations statistics. As reported by the UN (March, 2008), in 2004, approximately 262 million people were affected by climate disasters, which was more than double the levels reported in the early 1980s, and which represented a overwhelming majority of people from the developing nations. Between 2000-2004, about 68 million people in East Asia, 40 million people in South Asia, and 2 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were affected by flooding; In 2007, severe monsoons and storms displaced 3 million people in China, 14 million in India and more 7 million in Bangladesh; and during the same year 10 million people were affected by drought in sub-Saharan Africa.
A world which is already burdened by refugee pressures, created by political and economic forces, it is interesting to see how our system deals with this new category. Besides balancing between power politics, economic interests, and cultural prejudices, what adds to the complexity is the problem of dwindling of resources: ranging from land, water, forest cover to energy, shrinkage of sinks, and a disproportionately growing demand for all of these, with an exponential growth in population. And the problem is no more territorial, that can allow us to remain content by quarantining it, nor as "civilized" humans can we deny the access of resources to some while saving them for the consumption of others. The crisis challenges our entire being, the alarming signs of which are already evident.
In a globalized society, today we are confronted with the question of being "truly global", standing in front of a global crisis, requiring global action. Our developmental pursuits, which have been so successful in ensuring "lifestyles" for the petite bourgeois, should not fall short in reinstating the unassuming "livelihoods" of this vagrant population. Our anthropogenic ties to climate change which we have denied for so long (along with the phenomenon itself) in the name of developmental pursuits, now challenges the means and ends of those, through a new responsibility towards the casualties.
Srestha Banerjee recently completed PhD in Environmental Policy from University of Delaware
