A/HRC/4/30 page 21 homes for environmental reasons, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa.56 However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that, by 2050, there may be as many as 150 million “environmental refugees”57 - people forced to leave their homes and lands for environmental reasons linked to global climate change, including desertification and land degradation. Policies in developed countries are further exacerbating these effects - energy consumption in the North is contributing to global climate change, with the effects felt primarily in the South.58 Agricultural policies in the North are also having destructive effects on agricultural livelihoods and hunger in the South.59 59. Migration has always been a strategy to cope with hunger and famine in Africa,60 but this has not been a matter of choice, but rather of necessity. People leave their homes and lands when they are desperate, when they cannot feed themselves and their families. Although most migration happens in neighbouring countries in Africa, in today’s world no country can isolate itself from the effects of hunger; increasingly desperate people are trying to reach the shores of developed countries. Although the poor and hungry cannot always migrate very far if they cannot afford to pay boat passage or exploitative traffickers, many families gather together to pool all their resources to try to send just one person overseas. In the villages of Mali, for example, many people gather funds to send just one person to Mauritania or to Senegal to catch a boat to Spain. If that person succeeds, then the remittances they send home can feed several families. If they fail, however, then they can never return to their villages for the humiliation of loss and debt to their neighbours. Many thousands therefore stay in Mauritania or Senegal until they can make another attempt. 60. Despite the tragic events in Ceuta and Melilla in 2005, tens of thousands of Africans continued to flee to Europe’s shores in 2006. The Spanish authorities detained at least 28,000 people arriving in the Canary Islands in 2006 after a dangerous journey across the open sea in overcrowded open fishing boats, and at least 16,000 people have reached Lampedusa Island in the last year.61 Nobody knows how many thousands of other people have died trying to make the journey, but bodies regularly wash up on the beaches or fishermen catch them in their 56 Myers, Norman, “Environmental refugees: an emergent security issue”, Economic Forum, Prague, May 2005. 57 Ibid. 58 Conisbee Molly, Simms Andrew, Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition, 2003. 59 Oxfam, “Rigged rules and double standards: trade, globalisation, and the fight against poverty”, 2002. 60 Pottier, Johann, “Migration as a hunger-coping strategy: paying attention to gender and historical change”, in Marcussen, H.S., Institutional Issues in Natural Resources Management, 1993. 61 BBC News, 30 November 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/6160633.stm.