20 Million Climate Change Refugees in 2014: Report

Since 2008, about 26.5 million people have been displaced every year because of natural disasters, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said in a report published Monday, adding that although 2014 estimates were lower than average, there was an increasing long-term trend.

"Disaster-related displacement is on the rise and threatens to get worse in coming decades," Alfredo Zamudio, director of the NRC's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, told a news briefing. "Our historical analysis reveals you are 60 percent more likely to be displaced by disasters today than you were in the 1970s."

"Climate change is expected to play a strong role in the future by increasing the frequency and intensity of such hazards," he added.

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As well as extreme climate events, rapidly growing and poorly built settlements in areas vulnerable to natural disasters are putting more people at risk, Zamudio said, citing areas around cities such as Mexico City, Mumbai, Karachi and Port-au Prince.

The difference between casualties endured by the Haitian and Cuban earthquakes are conclusive. Over 300,000 people were killed in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where 60,000 still live in tents, said William Lacy Swing, director-general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which collected data for the report.

"Cuba is extremely well-prepared for disasters: hurricanes, typhoons, whatever happens. They have a shelter system, they have a public education system. Everyone knows what to do when disaster strikes," he said.

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Yet climate refugees are not a phenomenon limited to poor countries.

"The largest case we found is in Japan, where some 230,000 people are still displaced today following the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami disaster in 2011, including thousands displaced from the area around the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant," Zamudio said.

More than 50,000 people in the United States still need housing assistance following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, he said.

The vast majority of people fleeing disasters remain within their own country, but may still face "an emerging anti-migrant sentiment, particularly in the developed world", Swing said.

"This simply adds to the number of people who will be, in many cases, moving without proper papers and therefore subject to being criminalized, or sent home forcefully, deported or otherwise.

"This is simply a further complication and exacerbation of this global phenomenon of migration in our time," he added.

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Nevertheless, researchers emphasize that the loss of life and personal hardship is much more widespread among low-income countries.

According to the Global Climate Risk Index 2014, which examined who suffered most from extreme weather events between 1993 to 2012, Honduras, Myanmar, and Haiti were the countries affected most during the period measured.

In their list of the 10 countries that extreme weather affected most in both absolute and relative terms, eight were developing countries in the low-income or lower-middle income country group, while two belong to the upper-middle income countries.

In the eleven-year range considered, approximately 15,000 extreme weather events have directly caused the death of more than 530,000 people.