By year 2100, global warming will displace 50 million from coastal areas

Font Size -

Express news service

Posted online: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 01:53:05
Updated: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 02:15:51

Kolkata, March 25 If the current trend of rising global temperature continues then 50 million people from the country’s coastal areas will be displaced by the turn of the century. Apart from there will be another 75 million people displaced in neighbouring Bangladesh.

This means that the scale of migration will be 10 times bigger than what was seen during the 1947 partition of India or 375 times the number of people displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Project.

The forecast has been made in a report unveiled by the Greenpeace here today.

The report prepared by Sudhir Chella Rajan, a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Chennai, and commissioned by the Greenpeace, shows that if global temperatures rise by about 4 to 5 degrees in the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario through the course of the century, then the South Asia region could face a wave of migrants displaced by the impacts of climate change.

The study puts together the available data on climatic research, including the reports of Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change and Millennium Eco-System Assessment.

The study shows that in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India alone, 130 million people are currently living in low elevation coastal zones (LECZ)—areas that are less than 10 metres above the sea level. Cities like Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai fall in this zone.

The report goes on to show that sea levels in the year 2100 will be higher by 40 cm. A one-metre sea level rise will result in flooding nearly 6,000 square kilometres in India, including parts the three metropolis.

Bookmark this Page

What is this?

Digg

On Digg, users share intersting online content by submitting links to the site. At that point, the Digg audience can vote on whether or not they think it is interesting. Articles with lots of votes, or "diggs," rise up higher on the site's main page and topical subsection pages. Another form of social sharing, this site also lets users categorize the content they are submitting to Digg and label it with descriptions of up to 350 characters. Digg users can also submit comments on each content item submitted to the site.

To register, go to: http://digg.com/register

del.icio.us

At its most basic level, del.icio.us allows users to save their bookmarks online. Del.icio.us also gives users the ability to "tag" their bookmarks with descriptive category names. For example, someone who has bookmarked multiple Web pages that deal with the Washington Nationals baseball team could tag those links with any terms they want, like "baseball," "nationals," "natsfan," etc.

As members of a "social bookmarking" community, del.icio.us sers can also see how many other people have bookmarked the same pages, and they can look at those users' bookmark collections to find other interesting online content.

To register, go to: http://del.icio.us/register

Reddit

Reddit allows users to submit news articles and other online content to the site. Users also give articles a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Reddit then uses those votes to build a user profile and to find articles to recommend to you. Users can also submit comments on items posted to the site.

To register, go to: http://reddit.com/login

Digg

My Yahoo

Fark

del.icio.us

Newsvine

Rate this Article

Rating

Post Comments

Name*		Email ID*
Subject*		Country*
Message*	Characters remaining

TERMS OF USE: The views represented here are not neccesarily endorsed by www.expressindia.com and its allied websites. All messages will be moderated and no message that has inflammatory, abusive, derogatory language or any language deemed unfit for publication by the editor will be displayed. Though it will be endeavoured that as many messages as possible be displayed, there will be time lag between the submission and publication of the messages. The website reserves the right to publish or reject any message.

I agree to the terms of use.