Climate change is a new area of concern worldwide and is estimated to push millions of people into the list of 'environmental refugees.' The Red Cross has identified that 25 million refugees (58 per cent of global total) owe their displacement to climate change. Reports predict that this will grow further and by 2050 there will be over 200 million environmental refugees as a direct result of sea rise, soil erosion and other factors.

Several new crisis and conflict zones will emerge in unprecedented ways. The vulnerability of coastal areas, that are already prone to disasters like cyclones and storms that emerge suddenly would be magnified. A recent World Bank report confirms that the impact of sea level rise from global warming could be catastrophic for many developing countries as even one meter rise in sea levels would render 56 million people in these countries as environmental refugees. The GDP loss to the coastal countries will be huge. Incidence of natural disasters has almost trebled from 1,110 during the 1970s to 2,935 between 1993 and 2002. During the same period the number of people affected by storms and floods skyrocketed from 740 million people to 2.5 billion. The cost of damage has increased five-fold to US$655 billion.

India's recently formulated National Climate Change Action Plan, referring to a study conducted by Unnikrishnan and Shankar that analysed 40 years of coastal tide gauge records, says that India is facing a sea level rise between 1.06 mm to 1.75 mm per year. The NATCOM report had previously mentioned that the mean sea level along the Indian coast shows a long term rising trend of about 1.0 mm/year. The 4th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), however, mentions that sea level rise along the Asia coast which was 1.7 to 2.4 mm/year over the 20th century as a whole has risen to 3.1 mm/yr over the past decade.

All this naturally induces new forms of refugees and conflicts, its impact is already showing up in states like Gujarat, West Bengal and Orissa. The Sunderban islands are vanishing fast and several patches of the 480 kilometer long Orissa coast are facing severe beach erosion. So much that the Orissa government has finally woken up to prepare a more than hundred crore project to check the erosion. While the people of the Satabhaya region, which has shrunk from seven villages to two villages just in a few years, are fighting for proper relocation; the opening of a new mouth in Chilka - Asia's largest brackish water lagoon - has posed a unique form of threat which has caught both the people and the government unawares. The lake's mouth that has been forced to open due to sea rise is changing the hydrological character of the lake and thousands of fisher folks of the lake are going to face a complete shutdown of their occupation. The Satabhaya villagers, which are now only reduced to some hundreds, have been promised relocation about a kilometer away from the sea. The task to rehabilitate the Chilka fisher folks is huge.

This year, on the eve of the World Refugees Day, Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said that climate change could uproot people and provoke conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, such as water. In an interview with the Guardian, Guterres said: "Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement, both directly through impact on environment - not allowing people to live any more in the areas where they were traditionally living - and as a trigger of extreme poverty and conflict." What the UNHCR found difficult to manage was the issue of Internally Displaced People (IDP). Guterres said during the release of a report on that day that, "the task is hindered by the legal distinction between refugees, who flee across borders and automatically become the UNHCR's responsibility, and internally displaced persons, who flee their homes but remain in their home countries. In 2007 there were estimated to be 26 million of them, and only half receive direct or indirect help from the UNHCR. They remain under the protection of their own governments, but the governments are sometimes part of the problem rather than solution."

The people of Satabhaya and Chilka are new entrants into the IDP list and hence pose a new type of challenge to the policy makers who are yet to consider climate change as the real issue and consider this from a 'resettlement' angle. Climate scientists worry that sea rise is going to be more than three times than the current predictions. Anders Carlson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison finds even the IPCC predictions conservative and suspect that by the end of the century, sea levels may be rising three times as fast as they are at present. It is time that states like Orissa realized this.