Natural disasters to create 50 million refugees by 2010

"There are well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially, as the world experiences the effects of climate change and other phenomena," said Mr Janos Bogardi, director of the UN University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn.

"This new category of ‘refugee’ needs to find a place in international agreements," he said. "We need to better anticipate support requirements, similar to those of people fleeing other unviable situations."

So-called environmental refugees are yet to be included in international agreements that defend the rights of political and war refugees and grant them access to money, food, shelter and health care. Mr Hans van Ginkel, rector of the UN university, urged world leaders to prepare for future disasters and to define and incorporate the new breed of environmental refugees into the international framework.

He said such refugees needed to be considered separately from economic migrants, who leave their native countries to seek a better life elsewhere. The Bonn experts said environmental disasters include the rise of sea levels, expansion of deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding, which this year alone caused massive destruction and displaced millions worldwide.

Environmental migration is already an acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Expanding deserts have also displaced millions in the West Asia, China and North Africa, the experts said.

Scientific disaster or Apocalypse?

Tsunami, hurricane, drought and now earthquake and flood. In a single year, the Earth has buckled and lashed out, piling calamity on catastrophe to the point where humanity inevitably asks whether the catalogue of disasters is natural, in the sense of random and routine, or whether these are evidence of a pattern: either global warming, government failure, or God’s wrath.

Writers have always responded to the Earth’s cruelties in this way, searching for an explanation of the forces that lie beyond human control. The biblical flood was evidence of a divine intention to cleanse the world of sin. In medieval Europe, as Norman Cohen has shown, plague and devastation prompted millennial movements, since they presaged Apocalypse and, therefore, redemption. The California earthquake of 1906 led to a sharp rise in religious fundamentalism.

In our own time, there are those who have seen Hurricane Katrina as punishment for the sins of New Orleans, Sodom on the Mississippi. Others allocated the sin elsewhere, in man’s alleged mismanagement of nature. In the aftermath of Katrina, Germany’s environment minister declared: "The American President has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina — in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures — can visit on his country."

Sales of apocalyptic literature have grown hugely in recent times: the doom boom is nigh. While scientists give warning of scientific disaster — Atlantic hurricanes, a new European ice age as the Gulf Stream dies, the disintegration of the Antarctic ice shelf — others foresee Apocalypse, Armageddon and Rapture, the bodily ascent to Heaven of the saved. A recent poll in Newsweek showed that some 55 per cent of Americans believe in the Rapture, and more than a third believe that the world will end as predicted in the Book of Revelation. The 12 novels in the Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic fiction have sold more than 63 million copies.

Alongside the religious and scientific responses to natural disaster lies another, humanist, tradition. This surveys the devastation and finds not God’s vengeance but man’s powerlessness and, perhaps, his courage amid the implacable elements. The tempest puts man in his place in the natural world, like mighty King Lear humbled by the weather: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout."

The best modern example of this genre is Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, an essay in fear telling the story of the great hurricane that struck America’s Eastern Seaboard in October 1991, and the fate of the swordfish boat Andrea Gail, lost 500 miles from land. Junger brilliantly evokes sea weather, "the smell of ocean so strong that it can almost be licked off the air."

Simon Winchester has mined a rich seam of literary post-disaster reconstruction. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (2003) describes the worst volcanic eruption in known history, when Krakatoa vaporised, generating immense tsunamis, engulfing entire towns in hot ash, and forming islands of pumice in a hot sea.