By ScienceDaily, October 27, 2011
Flooding victims in Pakistan, August 2010 |
Governments
around the world must be prepared for mass migrations caused by rising global
temperatures or face the possibility of calamitous results, say University of
Florida scientists on a research team reporting in the Oct. 28 edition of Science.
If global
temperatures increase by only a few of degrees by 2100, as predicted by the
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, people around the world will be
forced to migrate. But transplanting populations from one location to another
is a complicated proposition that has left millions of people impoverished in
recent years. The researchers say that a word of caution is in order and that
governments should take care to understand the ramifications of forced
migration.
A consortium of 12
scientists from around the world, including two UF researchers, gathered last
year at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center to review 50 years of
research related to population resettlement following natural disasters or the
installation of infrastructure development projects such as dams and pipelines.
The group determined that resettlement efforts in the past have left
communities in ruin, and that policy makers need to use lessons from the past
to protect people who are forced to relocate because of climate change.
"The effects
of climate change are likely to be experienced by as many people as
disasters," UF anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith said. "More people
than ever may be moving in response to intense storms, increased flooding and
drought that makes living untenable in their current location."
"Sometimes the
problem is simply a lack of regard for the people ostensibly in the way of
progress," said Oliver-Smith, an emeritus professor who has researched
issues surrounding forced migration for more than 30 years. But resettlements
frequently fail because the complexity of the task is underestimated.
"Transplanting a population and its culture from one location to another
is a complex process -- as complicated as brain surgery," he said.
"It's going to
be a matter of planning ahead now," said Burt Singer, a courtesy faculty
member at the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute who worked with the research group.
He too has studied issues related to population resettlement for decades.
Singer said that
regulatory efforts promoted by the International Finance Corporation, the
corporate lending arm of the World Bank, are helping to ensure the well-being
of resettled communities in some cases. But as more people are relocated --
especially very poor people with no resources -- financing resettlement
operations in the wake of a changing climate could become a real challenge.
Planning and paying
for resettlement is only part of the challenge, Oliver-Smith said. "You
need informed, capable decision makers to carry out these plans," he said.
A lack of training and information can derail the best-laid plans. He said the
World Bank increasingly turns to anthropologists to help them evaluate projects
and outcomes of resettlement.
"It is a moral
imperative," Oliver-Smith said. Also, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows
that doing resettlement poorly adds to costs in the future. Wasted resources
and the costs of malnutrition, declining health, infant and elder mortality,
and the destruction of families and social networks should be included in the
total cost of a failed resettlement, he said.
Oliver-Smith said
the cautionary tales of past failures yield valuable lessons for future policy
makers, namely because they point out many of the potential pitfalls than can
beset resettlement projects. But they also underscore the fact that there is a
heavy price paid by resettled people, even in the best-case scenarios.
In the coming years,
he said, many projects such as hydroelectric dams and biofuel plantations will
be proposed in the name of climate change, but moving people to accommodate
these projects may not be the simple solution that policy makers sometimes
assume.
A clear-eyed review
of the true costs of forced migration could alert governments to the
complexities and risks of resettlement.
"If brain
surgeons had the sort of success rate that we have had with resettling
populations, very few people would opt for brain surgery," he said.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Florida. The original article was written by Donna Hesterman.Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- A. de Sherbinin, M. Castro, F. Gemenne, M. M. Cernea, S. Adamo, P. M. Fearnside, G. Krieger, S. Lahmani, A. Oliver-Smith, A. Pankhurst, T. Scudder, B. Singer, Y. Tan, G. Wannier, P. Boncour, C. Ehrhart, G. Hugo, B. Pandey, and G. Shi. Preparing for Resettlement Associated with Climate Change. Science, 2011; 334 (6055): 456-457 DOI:10.1126/science.1208821
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