Other key stories below: Rising Sea Levels Will Hit South Florida Hard; 64,000 People in Massachussets Have Clean Energy Jobs.

“Climate change could cause extreme weather leaving millions of people trapped, a new report claims.” Photo: AFP

Climate Change Could Trap Hundreds of Millions in Disaster Areas

Hundreds of millions of people may be trapped in inhospitable environments as they attempt to flee from the effects of global warming, worsening the likely death toll from severe changes to the climate, a UK government committee has found.

Refugees forced to leave their homes because of floods, droughts, storms, heatwaves and other effects of climate change are likely to be one of the biggest visible effects of the warming that scientists warn will result from the untrammelled use of fossil fuels, according to the UK government’s Foresight group, part of the Office for Science.

But many of those people are likely to move from areas affected by global warming into areas even worse afflicted – for instance, by moving into coastal cities in the developing world that are at risk of flood from storms and rising sea levels.

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ThinkProgress Green is reporting live from the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

In a roundtable discussion with a diverse group of bloggers, former President Bill Clinton addressed many facets of the challenges caused by global warming pollution, and also what he believed are the opportunities for building a global green economy. Clinton spoke passionately about the challenge of climate refugees, who are growing in number as floods, storms and droughts grow more intense and frequent:

You have to assume because of climate change there will be a lot more refugees. The laws which exist are built for a different time, when you’d have a surge from a particular country because of a particular disaster or event. That’s almost certainly not going to work now. The countries who take the most refugees should try to reach an agreement on broadbased strategies.

In addition to policy changes that reflect our changing world, Clinton said that the culture of how people in developed countries perceive immigrants and refugees needs to change.

“America needs to become more pro-immigration again. I think it helps our economy. In the refugee category the United States and other countries need to create opportunities for housing and jobs, even if it increases the likelihood they want to stay.” Clinton rejected the idea that it makes sense to have policies that prevent integration of people who can’t quickly return to their homeland. “Keeping people in long-term limbo is a waste of human potential.”

Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager at Refugees International.

Unprecedented rain that has hammered Colombia over the past year has affected three million people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In March, I spent three weeks traveling across the Caribbean region visiting families displaced by the floods. The alarming conditions I encountered more than three months since President Santos declared a state of emergency are described in a new report by Refugees International entitled, “Surviving Alone: Improving Assistance to Colombia’s Flood Victims.”

In the town of Manatí in Atlántico Department I was greeted by the Iraida, an Afro-Colombian mother of four who leads a local women’s organization. “Today we don’t have a glass of water to drink,” Iraida tells me. “The water truck has not come to distribute water. It comes every eight days.” She explains that water rations are not sufficient to allow her to bathe her baby and provide enough water for the other four members of her family.

Watch a personal account from Iraida and her husband:

Iraida points to her house, which is submerged except for the tops of the windows and roof. “We had a store, a business. We took out a loan and now we are unable to pay the bank. We need food, water, clothes – yes, even clothes because we have lost everything.”

Tragically, her story was similar to dozens of others I heard in Atlántico, Córdoba, Bolívar, Sucre and Magdelana Departments. Flood victims received some basic aid during the height of the floods in December; many had been encouraged by news that the government had launched a multi-media campaign to raise flood aid. But more than three months later, what little assistance they had received was tapering off, leaving them to survive on their own. As described in the report, an uncoordinated, bureaucratic process set up by the Colombian government to distribute millions of dollars in flood relief was severely hindering the provision of emergency humanitarian assistance. According to a recent report by the Colombian General Accountability Office, only half of the flood aid has been distributed to date.

In 2010 alone, 300 million people across the globe were affected by natural disasters, the majority of which were climate-related, including 182 floods that affected 180 million people — almost double the annual average for the last decade. Read more

The first in a three-part interview with economist Nicholas Stern on climate policy.

Nicholas Stern, one of the world’s most prominent climate economists, believes that failure to address global warming could eventually lead to World War Three. In 2006, he produced the Stern Review on behalf of the British government, clearly laying out the potentially catastrophic economic consequences of failing to address climate pollution. Since then, the scientific understanding of the damages from global warming has grown, and Stern has warned that his report “underestimated the risks.”

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress, Stern described his current understanding of the stark consequences of inaction, which defy the scope of standard economic language. If no global policy to cut carbon pollution is enacted, there is about a 50 percent risk that global temperatures would rise above levels not seen for 30 million years by 2100, an extraordinary rate of change. The “potentially immense” consequences of this radical transformation of our planet, Stern explained, include the “serious risk of global war”:

The temperature increases, the temperature changes of this kind, transform where people can be. In the upwards direction, you’re going to get some areas that become deserts, probably most of southern Europe. Others that are inundated: Florida, Bangladesh, and so on.

The point is that climate change will change the lives and livelihoods and where you can live all across the globe. We live where we live because of patterns of climate, where the rivers are, where the seashores are. That’s what determines where we are.

What we’re talking about here — this the cost of inaction, the cost of not doing much — is a transformation of where we can be. Over a hundred, 120 years, we can’t be that precise, a serious risk of global war, really, because you’ve got hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people moving. That’s the cost of inaction. It’s potentially immense.

Watch it:

The global climate system gives us both life and death, feeding civilizations and smashing them. Our fossil fuel pollution has already altered that system, pushing it out of natural balance. With the pollution we have already generated, the world now has 25 to 50 million climate refugees.

If we do not change course, and continue to increase the burning of coal and oil as multinational energy companies desire, we will fundamentally transform the very land we live on, the water we drink, the air we breathe in ways that are beyond our ken. The U.S. military dryly describes these consequences as a “threat multiplier.” If we are to learn anything from history, these are the kinds of threats that lead to war, and geometrically growing global warming brings threats on a global scale.

Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, was visiting the United States to receive the Leontief economic prize from the Tufts University Global Development and Environment Institute for his work on the economics of climate change.

On Monday, Refugees International (RI) announced the establishment of a new center to address “the needs of the tens of millions of people expected to be displaced by climate change.” Kenneth Bacon, RI’s president, and his wife Darcy have provided the seed money for the Ken and Darcy Bacon Center for the Study of Climate Displacement, with additional support from the UN Foundation and the Refugees International board. In its press release announcing the center, Refugees International explains the growing climate refugee crisis:

The most immediate threats from climate change are in the form of storms of increasing intensity, such as Cyclone Nargis in Burma; greater incidence of drought and floods that make traditional livelihoods unsustainable; and increased conflicts over access to limited resources. The war in Darfur derives, in part, from conflict over scarce resources as the desert expands. Other dramatic impacts are also predicted in the long term, such as the disappearance of island states like the Maldives. Estimates of the numbers of people expected to be displaced by climate change range from 50 million to 1 billion over the next 50 years. By comparison, there are currently 41.2 million people displaced by conflict.

Ken Bacon’s gift to the future comes at a tragic moment in his life. As he discussed in an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for health care reform, he has life-threatening brain cancer. Ken’s choice to establish this center in a time of personal crisis is a tribute to his integrity and passion for the world he has spent his life making a better place. “The most voiceless people in the world are probably refugees,” Nick Kristof writes, “and for the last decade one the great spokesmen for them has been Kenneth Bacon, the head of Refugees International.”