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Byron Shire
March 29, 2024

Solutions needed now for climate change refugees

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As one of the world’s worst CO2 emitters on a per capita basis, Australia bears a clear responsibility for changes to the environment brought about by climate change, which is now forcing people from their homes.

Simply opposing new international measures to help these people, again places Australia at the tail end of countries when it comes to working to prevent and repair climate displacement.

A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesman said in a recent Guardian article on Displacement Solutions that ‘Australia does not see the creation of the climate change displacement coordination facility as the most effective or efficient way to progress meaningful international action to address the impacts of climate change.’

Climate change is already forcing people from their homes in a wide range of countries including many of Australia’s closest neighbours such as PNG, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Kiribati and elsewhere. If Australia wants to prevent displacement crisis situations such as those now facing Europe it should work to find viable and rights-based solutions to climate displacement in the region and globally rather than again scuttling positive proposals that could have gone some way in alleviating a crisis which will ultimately involve tens of millions of people facing displacement because of climate change.

Rather than opposing new international measures to assist climate displaced people as it did earlier this week, Australia should be at the forefront of the group of nations seeking to find real solutions for the growing climate displaced population of the world, which now numbers in the 10,000s but which will grow dramatically as the effects of climate change are increasingly felt.

Given Australia’s geographical location so close to so many of the countries worst affected by climate change, this recent decision to oppose a new climate displacement facility is nothing short of scandalous. Australia could have been part of the solution, but has chosen again to side with those most responsible for CO2 emissions instead of with the countless victims of climate change who need assistance now more than ever.

Scott Leckie, founder Displacement Solutions


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10 COMMENTS

  1. ok Scott, so it’s not the bullets, bombs and chemical weapons that make people flea their land, it’s this invisible innocuous thing called Climate Change. It’s like this voodoo thing. My cat was run over by a car last night and it’s all because of Climate Change. I demand action to tackle Climate Change because if wasn’t for the burning fossil fuels my cat would still be alive today. So now I’m a Climate Change refugee and I’m going come to your house to share collective guilt. Before I arrive could ensure that the hot water system is tempered to 50 degrees C. My bed sheets should be dried in the sun and not by a clothes dryer. I have a dial up pizza number that’s pretty much global so I’ll need your bank account details and the details of your last 5 tax returns, just to make sure we’re on the same page. See you soon.

    • Bruce (very Pythonesque), your reply is idiotic. A climate refugee is also someone displaced by sea level rise. Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Maldives are all losing land to rising seas. Bangladesh, in some areas, is losing 100m of land per year. There are 150m people in Bangladesh. While 10,000 people sounds like a lot of people, it is in fact just a trickle. This problem is going to become a flood. Millions of people will need to relocate, just from Bangladesh. Then there are all the other impacts of climate change. Food security in the same region is being impacted by changes to glacier run off (less water in summer to irrigate crops). As I said, this problem will become a flood. And your response illustrates both stupidity and ignorance.

      • Saildog, you are factually incorrect. The islands you mentioned are actually growing in area. Your reply shows a total lack of understanding of how coral atolls work.
        A coral reef will not drown with rising sea level …it will rise by growing with the increase in sea level . Coral atolls are formed when coral debris accumulates enough to form sand above sea level . Eventually they become vegetated by floating seeds and bird drop lungs. The atoll may accumulate more sand with wave and storm action and will also rise with the rising reef.
        Satellite photos show large increases in the islands you mentioned compared with earlier ones.

        The worlds first climate “refugee” had his case dismissed in a NZ court and he was deported back to his island home.

    • Well said Bruce.

      Scott needs donations so he can live life & others can feel good about supporting people who flee their country due to climate change ?????

  2. If you took all of Australia’s CO out it would not make a scrap of difference, the total is relatively small. It is the northern hemisphere that has produced the gas. The northern hemisphere made money out of producing the gas they must pay for the cleaning of the air.

  3. Syria has been in drought for years. Water pressures in the middle east drive religious and ethnic divisions to new heights of tension. Like any single bushfire, Climate Change is not the cause, but a significant contributing factor. By the time that this cause and effect is completely obvious it will be far too late to do anything about it. So instead, we have to listen to the global scientific community rather than keyboard warriors who have googled it and now reckon they know more than these pesky experts.

    If a changing climate shuts down the asian monsoon, Australia will disappear under a tidal wave of refugees backed by the armed forces of their home countries. There is no greater threat to our way of life both as a species and as a country.

    Sorry if that upsets you.

  4. We were told that by 2012 the Pacific Islands would be under water. This is obviously a lie. I have had enough of the confidence men who try to alarm us into paying more and more money into the coffers of the UN, the most corrupt organisation in the world, even beyond the catholic church, to supposedly combat all the plagues that they claim are going to overwhelm us.

    Give me the evidence. I have read of the father of the green movement, a respected scientist, who has changed his view on climate change and now claims it is a lie.

  5. Sadly the climate change rent-seekers, carpetbaggers and leaners are still on their hobby-horse. Not because they have the facts and are prepared to argue their case on the facts, but because they want to rip even more money from the pockets of those who support their self-indulgent, parasitic lifestyle here in northern NSW.

    Land masses are not disappearing due to rising oceans, antarctic sea ice is growing, and there is at least a 16-year pause in global atmospheric warming. Yes global climate change happens at regular intervals, and human activity will certainly have an impact. But while alarmists like Tim Flannery continue to buy seaside homes, I’m ok with what’s going on.

  6. This article is so logically unsound that one barely knows where to begin. So why waste the effort. Humans are NOT changing the climate. They are too insignificant and the climate can and has and will change without them. Relax and stop fretting. Enjoy your life and get out a bit more. Go for a cycle ride and get some fresh air. It clears the mind.

  7. Everyone seems to be missing the true agenda here. This is not about climate change-something that has been going on for billions of years. It’s about international socialism, pure and simple. International socialists, from the inception of their power in Soviet Russia and China, want central planning for the benefit of the people of the world. They will control the means of and determine production, they will determine the allocation of all economic resources, including land, i.e. where people will live. Reason has nothing to do with it, and never did. Every country that followed central planning of the economy pretty much committed economic suicide, only North Korea persists, and the so-called Western world, now being at least 65% socialist-including the entire education, pensions, health care and of course central banking (and therefore housing) markets, are totally government controlled and consequently, totally screwed up. The problems in Bangladesh are obviously cultural. Their population has grown from around 40 million at the end of the war to 160 million today. They don’t practice contraception. If the climate changes, as it always does, and it swamps a bit of their low-lying land trying to house 160 million people and rising, international socialism-let’s go and grab someone else’s land-is going to be the most attractive political solution. That’s human nature. The only question for Australians is whether they are dumb enough to believe the relentless, suffocating, propaganda coming out of the government/media alliance e.g. “climate change denier” meaning a person who, understanding that climate change is billions of years old and ongoing, questions the science claiming it is suddenly anthropogenic-which it might be, but I’d have to see evidence of it and concrete refutation of the science-based skeptical arguments against the CO2 as pollutant hysteria, rather than just dumb left-wing slogans. Dumb slogans usually win in the end however, as history clearly shows, so how many million refugees do you want? 10, 30?

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