Environmental Refugees
Author: Lt Col Etienne F van Blerk, Staff Officer – Environmental Co-ordination, Department of Defence, RSA
( Article Type: Explanation )
The most compelling feature of so-called environmental refugees is indeed the obscure distinction of an estimated 20–25 million people worldwide forced to abandon their lands through an intricate host of causes involving flooding, drought, soil loss, deforestation, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, toxic spills and the like. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was established in 1951 to act on behalf of one specific group of displaced people – refugees. Refugees are legally defined by the UNHCR in classical terms as persons forced to flee across an international border as a result of a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group.
Socio-political changes in the past few decades have spurred a contemporary debate around this definition. It is felt that millions of environmental migrants, some internally displaced within their own countries and others displaced across international borders, should also be categorised as refugees to receive the kind of legal and material assistance from the international community they would otherwise be denied.
In the late 90s the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies revealed that humanitarian assistance provided to victims of major floods, drought and earthquakes had risen from 500 000 to 5.5 million in only six years. More people were suddenly being affected or displaced for environmental reasons than by the turmoil of armed conflict that was once the norm.
Researchers rank global climate change as an emerging key imperative for a burgeoning 150 million refugees by 2050 as the planet’s warming atmosphere, rising seas and expanding deserts steadily maroon multitudes.
Another key imperative is given as the world’s soaring population growth. Almost 10 400 newcomers arrive every hour, of whom more than 90% will be born into poverty, disease, malnutrition or thirst in the developing world. Here countries now suffer acute land shortage as people urbanise around over-saturated cities in their droves to flee deprivation in remote rural areas. At the same time, 40 of the world’s fastest growing cities – being located within earthquake zones – are under constant threat of natural disaster.
Technological disaster constitutes a further imperative for instigating longer-term mass exodus in the wake of arable lands contaminated by landmines, industrial or nuclear toxins and waste or the four million people per year who are displaced by public works projects such as large new dams.
As this problem deepens, the leaders of the world are just beginning to redefine the state’s responsibility toward environmental refugees with the ultimatum to either stem key migration imperatives or find homes for a further 125 million people in decades to come.
