It was nearly two years ago that a group of influential security experts said one of the biggest threats to world economic and political stability was not terrorism or fundamentalism but a warming climate.  Rising sea levels are expected to drive millions of people from their homes.  Throw in increased risk of extreme weather and disease, and you’ve got the recipe for some serious instability.

The Washington Post reports today on the signs that this mass migration–”Ecomigration”–has already begun.  Tens of millions of people world-wide have had to leave their homes and seek out a new place to live and earn a living.  In some cases the migration is driven by more violent storms or deforestation, while a slow but inexorable rise in sea level is driving others from their homes:

The president of Kiribati, a Pacific nation of low-lying islands, said last week that his country is exploring ways to move all its 100,000 citizens to a new homeland because of fears that a steadily rising ocean will make the islands uninhabitable..President Anote Tong of Kiribati asked the international community this month to start thinking of ways to help entire nations relocate to higher ground. He called for an international fund to buy land for such mass migrations and said his nation’s citizens are prepared to pay for a new homeland.

Ecomigrants aren’t just confined to the South Pacific: the article has the stories of those who fled the increasingly hot and arid climate of the Middle East, who left southern Louisiana under the assumption that Katrina won’t be the last monster storm, and even a family from suburban DC who is picking up and moving to New Zealand. Adam Fier is a computer expert who worked at NASA and said he thought long and hard about global warming.  In the end, he decided he wanted to find a safer spot for him and his family and after extensive research he chose New Zealand.  Don’t be fooled–Fier is no sky-is-falling alarmist:

He argued that people who do nothing in the face of risk are the ones who are being irrational: If even a fraction of the consequences of global climate change that scientists are forecasting come true, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina might become the norm, not the exception. In a world afflicted by overpopulation and environmental degradation, he asked, is the irrational person the one who acts or the one who says the future will look after itself?

The Greenpeace video above provides some striking images of what the rising sea levels are doing in Kiribati.