Since the full effects of global warming and climate change started coming into international focus, some experts have determined that large numbers of refugees, mostly coming form underdeveloped, Third-World countries, will flood the borders of the developed world. Their figures, which stated that millions of immigrants would take to the roads, are apparently flawed, new studies find. They argue that these figures have been greatly overestimated, and that the displaced population will not be as large as predicted, Nature News informs.

Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) migration researcher Cecilia Tacoli explained during a meeting of population and climate experts, held yesterday in London, that the figures set forth by previous studies were “alarmist” and untrue. The expert also urged governments to shift their view on this type of immigration, and to consider it as one of the solutions for global warming-induced adaptation to new living conditions, rather than as a “problematic consequence of climate change.”

The London conference is organized by the IIED and the United Nations Population Fund. Representatives from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as well as from other intergovernmental bodies are also in attendance. The explicit goal of the meeting, which goes on today as well, is to boost global awareness of immigration-related issues higher up the political agenda of the United Nations, so that the subject is included in the documents to be discussed at the Copenhagen Climate Change summit, in December.

In an advanced presentation of a paper she would publish in an upcoming issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization, Tacoli underlined the fact that the predictions made by other studies, which place the number of immigrants until 2050 at anywhere between 200 million and one billion people, were only based “on assumptions that are simplistic, if not outright dodgy.” She also said that the scientific community should not take those estimates for granted, as a fixed number.