A study of satellite data published by the journal Nature Climate Change in 2016 found that the net amount of land area on Earth grew by about 22,400 square miles from 1985 to 2015, and the amount of coastal land area grew on net by about 5,200 square miles. This is contrary to predictions made in 1989 by officials of the U.N. Environment Program, who said that rising seas caused by global warming would "immediately threaten that large fraction of the globe living at sea level" and create an exodus of "eco- refugees" unless "the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." Contrary to many catastrophic predictions like that, a broad range of environmental and human welfare indicators related to climate change have stayed level or improved over the past 3-17 decades.