“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.

How will our coastal cities look like when the ice melts and causes rising sea levels? How can we take care and give room for the millions of climate change refugees in the future? Well, the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut might have the answer.

Vincent Callebaut has designed a “floating ecopolis” called Lilypad. Each of these floating cities has room for 50000 people. The city will be able to generate its own energy with the help from several wind turbines, wave power and solar panels. Lilypad will also be able to collect and clean rainwater for daily use around the city.

“Whereas the Netherlands and the United Arabic Emirates « fatten » their beach with billion of euros to build their short-living polders and their protective dams for a decade, the project «Lilypad» deals with a tenable solution to the water rising! Actually, facing the worldwide ecological crisis, this floating Ecopolis has the double objective not only to widen sustainabely in offshore the territories of the most developed countries such as the Monaco principality but above all to grant the housing of future climatic refugees of he next submerged ultra-marine territories such as the Polynesian atolls. New biotechnological prototype of ecologic resilience dedicated to the nomadism and the urban ecology in the sea, Lilypad travels on the water line of the oceans, from the equator to the poles following the marine streams warm ascending of the Gulf Stream or cold descending of the Labrador.”

“It is a true amphibian half aquatic and half terrestrial city, able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters. This artificial lagoon is entirely immersed ballasting thus the city. It enables to live in the heart of the subaquatic depths. The multifunctional programming is based on three marinas and three mountains dedicated respectively to the work, the shops and the entertainments. The whole set is covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline. The goal is to create a harmonious coexistence of the couple Human / Nature and to explore new modes of living the sea by building with fluidity collective spaces in proximity, overwhelming spaces of social inclusion suitable to the meeting of all the inhabitants – denizen or foreign-born, recent or old, young or aged people.”

Two senior foreign policy officials from the European Union says in a new report that the EU should “brace itself” for a new and much larger wave of migration, caused by the effects of climate change. According to their report climate change “threatens to severely destabilise the planet” and will make a fifth of the worlds population homeless.

Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s chief foreign policy coordinator and the European commissioner for external relations, says that within a decade “there will be millions of environmental migrants, with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon,” and that “Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

The report says that the devastating effects of climate change will be “felt far away from Europe,” but that the problems will eventually come knocking on its door. People, especially the poor, will suffer in places like south Asia, the Middle East, central Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“This could be in the form of mass migration, destabilisation of parts of the world vital to European security, radicalisation of politics and populations, north-south conflict because of the perceived injustice of the causes and effects of global warming, famines caused by arable land loss, wars over water, energy, and other natural resources.”

Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner also say that the new world order caused by climate change will undermine the democratic and civil UN system.

“The multilateral system is at risk if the international community fails to address the threats. Climate change impacts will fuel the politics of resentment between those most responsible for climate change and those most affected by it … and drive political tension nationally and internationally.”

It will be interesting to see if EU will continue on the path to a fortress society or if it will open up its borders to environment refugees. If our leaders doesn’t decide to do anything adequate to stop climate change I personally find that to be, unfortunately, very unlikely.

No matter how much we in the EU need “fresh blood” to keep our welfare systems going, we will probably in a near future have turned the once democratic institution of EU into an ecofascist fortress.