UN SecretaryGeneral António Guterres warned this Tuesday (14) of the risk of an exodus of “biblical proportions” due to sea level rise caused by global warming, demanding that “the voids are required” by international law, particularly in relation to refugees.
“The danger is particularly acute for the nearly 900 million people who live in lowlying coastal areas, one in ten people on earth,” Guterres stressed before the Security Council.
“Communities living in lowlying areas and entire countries could disappear forever. We would witness a massive exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale,” he added.
Some small, sparsely populated island states are in danger of disappearing altogether. But the effects of sealevel rise caused by melting glaciers, the expansion of the oceans by higher temperatures, and now most importantly, the melting of the polar ice caps go much further.
“In any scenario, countries like Bangladesh, China, India and the Netherlands are all at risk,” Guterres warned.
“Megacities on every continent will suffer severe impacts such as Cairo, Lagos, Maputo, Bangkok, Dhaka, Jakarta, Mumbai, Shanghai, Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, New York, Buenos Aires and Santiago,” he said.
Sea levels rose by 15 to 25 cm between 1900 and 2018, according to experts at the UN Climate Change Panel (IPCC). And a rise of 43 cm is expected by 2100, when the planet experiences a temperature increase of 2 °C compared to the preindustrial period.
In addition, the height could reach 84 cm if the planet warms by 3 or 4 °C by the end of the century.
The rise in sea level is accompanied by an increase in storms and flooding in coastal regions, in addition to flooding in certain areas.
In this context of populations that will be forced into exile, Guterres called for “the gaps in existing legal frameworks to be closed” at the global level.
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“This must include refugee law,” he emphasized. And solutions should also be presented for the future of states that lose their terrestrial territory completely.
The SecretaryGeneral also believed that the UN Security Council “has an essential role to play in addressing the devastating security challenges posed by rising water levels.”
This is a contentious issue within the body.
For example, in 2021 Russia vetoed a resolution making a general link between global warming and world security, a text supported by a majority of Council members.
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