In recent years, the concept of “environmental refugees” has gained new importance, as global climate change and desertification have threatened the livelihoods of millions of people, causing many to leave home in search of new opportunities. “Environmental refugee”, a term coined by Essam El-Hinnawi, designates “people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardizes their existence and/or seriously effects the quality of their life.”
As of 1995, the last date where a thorough assessment was undertaken, the number of environmental refugees had reached 25 million, with this number expected to double by 2010. In Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia, for example, over 1,000 square kilometers of productive land is lost annually to desertification, which has led to a wave of North African migrants fleeing to Western Europe in order to escape crop failure and water shortage.17
Although many environmental refugees would like to make it to Western Europe, in reality, the vast majority end up migrating to neighboring countries, which tend to be some of the poorest in the world (with the top 20 refugee migration destination having an average annual per-capita income of only $850). In many of these places, environmental refugees are seen as unwelcome guests, putting further strain on already scarce water and land supplies, with this social mistrust and competition escalating to conflict and violence in some cases.18
According to Oxford-based environmental migration expert Norman Myers, when global climate change takes hold, “there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration, and by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” This exposure to the negative effects of global climate change will, in many cases, lead to massive waves of migration, with a striking example being the small island of Kiribati, whose 94,000 inhabitants risk being totally submerged in water by 2070 as sea levels continue to rise. In preparation for this outcome, the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, has proposed a gradual resettlement program, which would see the population of Kiribati slowly relocated to neighboring islands such as New Zealand.19
What makes environmental refugees such a difficult problem for governments and policy-makers to cope with is the fact that there are a variety of different types of environmental disaster that can have a dramatic impact on the forced migration of people. In Bangladesh, it is the rising sea-levels that have caused many people to flee across the border to India, as mass flooding has caused many coastal areas of Bangladesh to become uninhabitable. On the other hand, in the Sudan, droughts and increasing rates of evaporation have made access to water for consumption and traditional agricultural and pastoral much more difficult, leaving many people without sufficient access to food or water, thus increasing conflict over these resources.
17 http://www.physorg.com/news8213.html; http://www.osce.
org/documents/eea/2007/12/29073_en.pdf
18 http://www.osce.org/documents/eea/2005/05/14488_en.pdf
19 http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/1318360/1829145;
http://www.motu.org.nz/files/docs/Motu_presentation_
bedford.pdf
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