Environmental Refugees

Fifty million environmental refugees will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortage sparkled by climate change. When people are not living in sustenable conditions, they migrate. It is obvious that climate change is impacting both food security and food safety. Southern Europe is already seeing a sharp increase in what has long been a slow but steady flow of migrants from Africa, many of whom risk their lives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain from Morocco or sail in makeshift vessels to Italy from Libya and Tunisia. The flow recently grew to a flood after a month of protests in Tunisia, set off by food shortages and widespread unemployment and poverty, brought down the government of longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Environmental refugees were described  in by 2001 by Norman Myers of Oxford University as a new phenomenon created by climate change. He said: "These are people who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their homelands, because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, deforestation and other environmental problems together with the associated problems of population pressure and profound poverty".