2015•12•02     Paris     Al Jazeera

Climate change is already contributing to an increase in migration around the world, a report released Wednesday shows, as events ranging from rising seas to droughts make parts of places like coastal Bangladesh and Pacific Island nations uninhabitable.There is no widespread consensus on how many climate refugees will be created in the coming decades. The United Nations estimates 200 million by 2050, while other estimates run as high as 1 billion.

Last year natural disasters — 90 percent of them related to weather events — forced 20 million people to leave their homes, according to data from the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a nonprofit organization that tracks migration.Millions from that total were internally displaced within Bangladesh, which is already densely populated and stands to lose much of its coastal land to rising sea levels. Farmland and freshwater supplies in the South Asian country have already been threatened increasingly in recent years by saltwater intrusion.

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