Global warming to multiply world's refugee burden

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

BEIRUT (Reuters) - If rising sea levels force the people of the Maldive Islands to seek new homes, who will look after them in a world already turning warier of refugees?

The daunting prospect of mass population movements set off by climate change and environmental disasters poses an imminent new challenge that no one has yet figured out how to meet.

People displaced by global warming -- the Christian Aid agency has predicted there will be one billion by 2050 -- could dwarf the nearly 10 million refugees and almost 25 million internally displaced people already fleeing wars and oppression.

"All around the world, predictable patterns are going to result in very long-term and very immediate changes in the ability of people to earn their livelihoods," said Michele Klein Solomon of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM).

"It's pretty overwhelming to see what we might be facing in the next 50 years," she said. "And it's starting now."

People forced to move by climate change, salination, rising sea levels, deforestation or desertification do not fit the classic definition of refugees -- those who leave their homeland to escape persecution or conflict and who need protection.

But the world's welcome even for these people is wearing thin, just as United Nations figures show that an exodus from Iraq has reversed a five-year decline in overall refugee numbers.

Governments and aid agencies are straining to cope with the 10 million whose plight risks being obscured by debates over a far larger tide of economic migrants -- and perhaps future waves of fugitives from environmental mayhem.

HARSHER CLIMATE

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which marks World Refugee Day on Wednesday, says the global political climate for refugees has already become harsher.

"They used to be welcomed as people fleeing persecution, but this has been changing -- certainly since 9/11, but even before then," said William Spindler, a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva.

"Growing xenophobia, intolerance, political manipulation by populist politicians who mix up the issues -- the whole debate on asylum and migration has been confused," he said.

People fleeing threats at home and those seeking a better life could be in the same group washing up on a Spanish beach, but Spindler said it is vital to keep the distinction between them to provide effective protection to those who need it.

Whatever their motives, migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and as human beings, he added. "We have seen people in the Mediterranean in boats or hanging onto fishing nets for days while states discuss who should rescue them."

Before sectarian violence exploded in Iraq last year, global refugee numbers had been shrinking. The Taliban's overthrow in Afghanistan, along with peace deals in trouble-spots like Congo, Liberia, Angola and southern Sudan, had allowed millions to return home -- although 2.1 million Afghans have yet to do so.