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BARCELONA (AlertNet) - Seferino Cortes has lived his life at the foot of Illimani, one of Bolivia's tallest snow-capped peaks, tending cattle, fruit trees and fields of maize, beans and potatoes. But in a few decades he and his family expect to have to abandon their land and move on. Illimani's glaciers, which provide his community's water, are shrinking fast as winter snowfall plummets, and are now expected to vanish within 40 years.
"We live from Illimani," said the soft-spoken 45-year-old farmer, who attended international negotiations in Barcelona aimed at creating a new global climate change pact. "Without it, with what water will we irrigate our fields, wash ourselves and our clothes, water our animals?" he said. "If there is no water, we will have to leave our place. We will be forced to abandon our community, our culture and custom."
As the effects of climate change take hold around the world, countries, research institutions and international agencies are debating how to handle what is expected to become a trickle and perhaps eventually a flood of climate migrants. A few nations are including migration as part of their national plans of adaptation to climate change. For many others, it remains a politically perilous subject.
"Would you allow a country that has been displaced to raise its flag and play its national anthem (in a new home nation)?" asked a Bangladesh negotiator, in a session on Wednesday on climate migration. He said Bangladesh was planning for migration "but not willingly, not happily."
Heavily populated, low-lying and storm-vulnerable Bangladesh is widely expected to be one of the nations most likely to produce climate migrants in the decades ahead, but a World Bank study on how the bank might support national adaptation efforts around the world found that Ghana, Ethiopia and probably Vietnam, to name just a few, are also likely to produce climate migrants.
The bank is trying to figure out "how to support migration as an adaptation strategy rather than viewing migration as a failure of adaptation," said Robin Mearns, of the World Bank's social development department. The reality is that migration "may not be people's first choice but it may need to factor in."
Source: Reuters AlertNet
