Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century - Hardcover

Wennersten, John R.; Robbins, Denise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253025931 ISBN 13: 9780253025937

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Global climate change and global refugee crises will soon become inextricably interlinked. A new tsunami of climate refugees flows across the earth. We are now at the moment of truth."

Climate change is with us and we need to think about the next big disturbing idea – the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. In 2020 the United Nations projects that we will have 50 million environmental refugees mostly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit? And lastly, who will pay the costs of all the affected countries during the process of resettlement? Environmental refugees are a problem beyond the scope of a single country or agency."John R. Wennersten and Denise Robbins, from the book

About this title

About the Author:

John R. Wennersten is an environmental affairs writer and author of Global Thirst: Water and Society in the 21st Century.

Denise Robbins is a writer and communications expert on climate change issues in Washington, DC. A graduate of Cornell University, she regularly publishes articles dealing with all aspects of global and national environmental change, with a focus on regional politics.

Review:

Rising Tides deals masterfully with a neglected crisis, how climate change is driving migration. The discussion of the interrelationship between conflict-driven migration and climate-driven migration is fascinating. The crisis is upon us: Many of the Mediterranean displaced people are climate refugees, not conflict refugees. Some are both. The work is easily grasped by the general reader, and its source material is a gold mine for interested experts. Wennersten and Robbins don’t shy away from grim conclusions: The climate refugees aren’t going home, and the global community needs to accommodate them. The work broaches solutions both practical, like reforestation, and political, like the need for a new international charter for handling non-conflict refugees. (Christopher E. Goldthwait US Ambassador retired)

A must read for anyone who cares about the present and the future of civilization, and not just in the abstract. (Eugene L. Meyer, journalist)

A passionately argued, well-documented wake-up call on the dire, current and undeniable human fallout from climate change. Looking behind the headlines, it connects the dots in a way that will inform and should alarm us all. (Eugene L. Meyer author of Chesapeake Country)

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0253025931
• ISBN 13: 9780253025937
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280