For a while we heard a lot about climate refugees. Ann put up 18 posts on the subject — see the category in the list to the left.  Here’s a recent post from Gavin Atkins at Asian Correspondent.com, What happened to the climate refugees? He begins:

In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.

He links to a map that shows the places said to be at risk for producing climate refugees. Then he goes down a list of at-risk places that have had censuses since 2005 and shows that their populations have grown since then. Some are islands — the Bahamas, the Seychelles etc.  And —

Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees.

Similarly, many of the fastest growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas identified by the UNEP as at risk of having climate refugees.

In fact, in general those places identified as at-risk for producing climate refugees are growing fast.

The first comment is from the Spokesperson for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), who says it wasn’t his agency that projected the 50 million figure. But —

That does not mean there are not environmental refugees including climate ones. But we do not have any projections ourselves.  There are however quite a lot of universities/research centres around the world trying to unravel this complex issue.

The second comment is more entertaining: