And so the evacuation has begun. Just a few weeks ago the first five families from the Carteret Islands, a small coral atoll far off the coast from Papua New Guinea with a population of around 2600 people, abandon their homes. This is the first evacuation of an entire people due to man-made climate change.

“As the Ecologist’s blogger Dan Box witnessed, the first five families have moved to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. There are compounding factors – the removal of mangrove forests and some local volcanic activity – but the main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders’ vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible.”

It is worth noting that these families are not the first climate refugees in the world. People have abandoned their homes due to natural climate changes before. One example of that can be the abandoned olive presses from the Roman Empire which can be found in North Africa – where once trees and olives flourished there is now just deserts.

These five families might not sound as much, but they are just the first of billions of future climate refugees. The European Union has been told to prepare itself for millions of climate change refugees. And Nicholas Stern, the British economist and academic who is probably most known for the Stern Review, has warned that climate change will create billions of refugees and extended world wars.