
A Plan for Europe’s Refugees
A European problem demands a common, coherent EU policy. Let refugees in, but regulate the flow, says the Economist.
Refugees are reasonable people in desperate circumstances. Life for many of the 1 million-odd asylum-seekers who have fled Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn countries for Europe in the past year has become intolerable. Europe is peaceful, rich and accessible. Most people would rather not abandon their homes and start again among strangers. But when the alternative is the threat of death from barrel-bombs and sabre-wielding fanatics, they make the only rational choice.
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A woman sits on the base of a palm tree in Ghoramara after seawater deluged a rice plantation. Photo: Jordi Pizarro / Foreign Policy
Waiting to Vanish
As their land disappears into the sea, villagers in the Bay of Bengal are struggling to keep their livelihoods. Photographer Jordi Pizarro travelled to Ghoramara island, 90 miles south of Kolkata, for Foreign Policy to document how the villagers are coping with forces beyond their control.
“We are used to seeing images of global warming as an environmental crisis — the glaciers melting, for example,” he says. “I wanted to show how climate change is affecting human beings, particularly in this small place.”
Between 1968 - 1999, Ghoramara, which sits in the Bay of Bengal’s Sundarbans delta, lost 75 percent of its territory to encroaching water, according to the UN. Since then, rising sea levels and coastal erosion have only magnified the consequences of flooding.
Today, with less than three square miles of landmass left, Ghoramara may soon follow in the footsteps of four other islands in the delta, if its inhabitants are forced to flee for good.
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