LOW-LYING countries like Bangladesh could disappear under rising oceans within 100 years, a Perth conference was told yesterday. 

That was one of several chilling warning delivered not by a radical “greenie” but by a speaker at the International Union of Local Authorities World Congress. 

Mr. Jeb Brugmann, an economist and field programs director of the Centre for Innovative Diplomacy in Massachusetts, said rises in ocean levels caused by the Greenhouse Effect could send a human flood of refugees through India. 

"This could begin extremely volatile mass migrations in the Indian sub-continent:' he said.

Such migrations would increase as people were forced to leave expanding areas of desert such as the Sahara and Central Asia and areas of extreme drought such as parts of South America.