The plight of displaced people, especially Syrian refugees, has been largely ignored by the mass media since this human rights tragedy dominated news headlines during the fall of 2015. Yet this ongoing human rights debacle will not go away anytime soon, and governments, the private sector and NGOs need to find ways to cooperate and strive to do what they can so organizations can transform this crises into opportunities.

That time must happen soon, as yet another study of refugees arrived at a dire conclusion: by the end of the century, the number of asylum seekers to Europe could skyrocket to more than three times the current number of people who currently seek a new or temporary home. And the key trigger, these researchers concluded, is climate change.

Two researchers at Columbia University examined weather variations in 103 countries between 2000 and 2014. They found that temperatures with a large deviation from historical averages correlated with a spike in asylum applications to European Union countries. Depending on the rate at which global temperatures rise this century, EU member states could see asylum applications increase by 28 percent by 2100 – or experience as much as a 118 percent surge in climate change refugees under more extreme scenarios.

Read the full article on climate refugees by Leon Kaye at TriplePundit