World still waiting for '50 million climate refugees by 2010' | The Australian

A UN climate body has been forced to back away from damaging claims that the world could be flooded with up to 50 million "climate refugees" - by last year.
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The map has since been removed because it was "causing confusion", a UNEP spokesman reportedly told the German news website Spiegel Online. Professor of migration and refugee law at the University of NSW Jane McAdam, who has followed the controversy, said the original figure of 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010 derived from questionable calculations by the Oxford University academic Norman Myers.

"My understanding is that Norman Myers looked at a map of the world, and he said which are the hotspots that we think are going to be affected by climate change; then he looked up the projected populations for those areas in 2010 and 2050 and added them up," she said.

"That's how he got to such a figure, because he didn't take into account that some people wouldn't move."

Professor McAdam said she thought Professor Myers would never have expected his predictions to be "taken up so widely".

Professor Myers also predicted up to 200 million people could be uprooted by climate change by 2050.

Another academic, Cristina Tirado from the University of California, reportedly told a conference in February the UN had revised its prediction to 50 million climate refugees by 2020, although her claim has not been independently verified.