Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have donated $1 million dollars to aid refugees in Pakistan via their Jolie-Pitt Foundation. The donation comes prior to Angelina Jolie, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton meeting in Washington, DC on June 20 to celebrate World Refugee Day.
Jolie also released a 30-second public service video to help raise awareness about the plight of refugees around the world. In her new video, Jolie stresses that "Refugees are the most vulnerable people on earth. Every day they are fighting to survive. They deserve our respect." Jolie calls on the public to "remember them on this day”.
The UK-based CARE International is also asking people to think about refugees. In their recently released report, In Search of Shelter: Mapping the effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, the organization found that climate change will drive unprecedented levels of human migration with an estimated 200 million people on the move by 2050.
“While human migration and displacement is usually the result of multiple factors, the influence of climate change in people’s decision to give up their livelihoods and leave their homes is growing” says Dr. Charles Ehrhart, CARE International’s Climate Change Coordinator and one of the report’s authors.
Mexico and the Central American countries are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change – both in terms of less rainfall and more extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Rainfall in some areas is expected to decline by as much as 50% by 2080, rendering many local livelihoods unviable and dramatically raising the risk of chronic hunger.
“The potential impacts of future sea level rise are at least as startling. In Vietnam’s densely populated Mekong River Delta, for example, a sea level rise of two meters would - assuming current populations densities - flood the homes of more than 14.2 million people and submerge half of the region’s agricultural land,” explains Ehrhart.
Poorer countries are underequipped to support widespread adaptation from climate change. As a result, societies affected by climate change may find themselves locked into a downward spiral of ecological degradation, towards the bottom of which social safety nets collapse while tensions and violence rise. In this all-too-plausible worst-case scenario, large populations would be forced to migrate as a matter of immediate survival, explains CARE International.
June 20th is World Refugee Day.
UNHCR: http://www.unhcr.org/4a37a0466.html
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