Environmental refugees

Definition: People forced to leave their home sites, permanently or temporarily, because of environmental degradation or environmental hazards resulting from natural or human-induced disasters

When environmental conditions force large numbers of people to relocate, the result is often political and social instability. In addition, the ecosystems of the regions to which environmental refugees migrate are in turn stressed by the influx of population.

With accelerating human population growth come increased demands for raw materials, food, water, and energy. In many places, human beings have reduced nature’s ability to maintain a healthy carrying capacity for their survival needs. In addition, environmental degradation from human activities, natural disasters, and changes in global climate have further stressed living conditions for many people. When environmental conditions become so severe that people must move to other areas to seek healthier living conditions to thrive, these people become environmental refugees. Soil erosion, deforestation, pandemic disease, desertification, air pollution, lack of fresh water, and overpopulation are some of the conditions that can push a population out of an area. Natural disasters or human-caused disasters—such as industrial accidents, lack of resources caused by plundering, and war-related environmental degradation—may be the causes of such conditions. Estimates of the numbers of people who are environmental refugees around the world at any one time range from 25 million to 300 million. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, in 2021, 23.7 million people had been displaced due to natural disasters, with floods and storms causing the majority. Slow-onset phenomena, such as drought, also contributed to these numbers. In the near future, Global Climate Change will likely lead to population displacements in developing island states in the Pacific region.

Persons who are displaced in this way are often considered nonmilitary threats to security in the regions or countries that receive them. If a region undergoes extreme environmental stresses, its political and social structures also become stressed. Natural disasters, resource depletion, landlessness, and environmental degradation can lead to social unrest and political upheaval. The people who flee these situations as environmental refugees can become a destabilizing factor in international relations if they are perceived as an unacceptable burden on the regions to which they migrate.

Human-Induced Disasters

Unnatural disasters to the environment are those that are caused directly by human actions; many result in such complete degradation of ecosystems that inhabitants must migrate to survive. A major environmental threat to the well-being of many nations is land degradation. Human actions such as overfarming of erodible soils, depletion of aquifers, overgrazing of lands, deforestation, poor irrigation practices leading to salt deposition, and land capture for urban and industrial growth force many people into landlessness, and landless people become environmental refugees.

One of the most basic unnatural disasters to the environment is war. People who flee fighting in a conflict zone are war refugees, but inhabitants who are forced to leave their home areas because of contamination caused by war are environmental refugees. War and its by-products wreak havoc on the physical, chemical, and biological environment, rendering many ecosystems unfit for habitation. Unexploded ordnance, especially land mines, often make areas unfit to reoccupy or farm. Buildings and industrial sites that have been struck by explosives release toxic substances and airborne pollutants that contaminate water supplies and soils. Military defoliants destroy vast tracts of wood resources and croplands. Battle-generated firestorms combust highly toxic products, decimating downwind wildlife and animal stocks. Residual weapons with radioactive components, such as nuclear bombs and depleted uranium rounds, contaminate environments for years after their usage. Dead bodies contaminate water supplies and promote the spread of disease. These environmental factors all force people to abandon lands contaminated by war. Data from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shows that ninety-five percent of conflict displacements in 2020 could be traced to global regions vulnerable to climate change.

Pollution resulting from industrial processes, mining operations, or congested living conditions may result in environmental degradation to the point where inhabitants must migrate to healthier environments. Poor air quality, lack of sanitation, and polluted water supplies all result in rapid health decline. Mining wastes are often toxic and can contaminate large swaths of land. Industrial accidents can contaminate large areas, rendering them uninhabitable; examples include the 1984 leak from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, and the 1986 explosion of a nuclear power reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Those forced to move from their home sites because of such problems are environmental refugees.

Hurricane Katrina was a large tropical storm, but the massive extent of the damage done to communities struck by Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi was a direct result of poor engineering, poor land-use management and zoning, negligent preparation, and abysmal postdisaster response. The result was an ecocatastrophe that displaced tens of thousands of inhabitants. Other human-induced disasters resulting in masses of environmental refugees can be correlated to the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In both cases, results of the natural disaster were amplified by human actions prior to the events: building in known hazard zones, poor construction practices, lack of warning systems, and minimal government preparedness. A series of hurricanes which struck Puerto Rico between 2017-2022 resulted in immense damage to the island's infrastructure. This included the destruction and forced closing of 180 schools. As a result, Puerto Rico is estimated to have suffered a population decline of almost twelve percent.

A consensus exists among scientists that human activities are altering the earth’s climate, and it has been suggested that if climate change continues unchecked, billions of people are likely to become increasingly vulnerable to drought, flooding, disease, and famine. Global climate change is expected to alter zones of biodiversity, cause greater extremes in weather patterns, make crops vulnerable to changes in precipitation and temperatures, and raise sea levels, with devastating impacts to nearshore communities and freshwater aquifers. A globally altered climate is likely to have greatest impact in regions that are vulnerable owing to environmental stress. Already stressed marginal lands will respond most severely to changes in precipitation and temperature, and the destitute from these lands will migrate as environmental refugees.

Natural Disasters

Natural disasters are second only to land degradation in creating environmental refugees. Annually, more people are killed and displaced as a result of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis, landslides, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, and wildfires than as a result of warfare. In most cases the effects of these natural disasters are exacerbated by human activities. Most ecosystems in a natural state can handle normal stresses such as severe weather events or earth movements, but as human pressures on the environment increase, ecosystems become less resilient to stress. Human pressures on an ecosystem’s soils, forests, landscapes, hydrologic cycle, and carrying capacity often magnify the outcomes of natural events. In 2017, the occurrence of three major hurricanes, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which proved particularly and, in some cases, historically devastating and costly to areas of the United States and Puerto Rico as well as other parts of the Caribbean, prompted concern from experts about the potential link between the number of powerful storms and climate change. After Hurricane Irma hit, everyone on the island of Barbuda was forced to relocate indefinitely, leaving the island deserted for the first time in hundreds of years.

Land degradation is the greatest factor in turning a natural event into a catastrophe. Degraded land inhibits an ecosystem’s ability to absorb natural stresses, and many areas in which land has been degraded are also prone to natural disasters. Population, cultural, and financial pressures force large numbers of underrepresented and often poor people onto marginal lands, where they try to live off limited resources, and marginal lands exploited by humans trying to thrive at any cost quickly lose their sustainability. Overfarmed and overgrazed soils are easily swept away by high winds. Deforested hillsides become prone to landslides. The destruction of riparian zones and coastal watersheds increases the severity of floods. After a catastrophic natural disaster, diseases often spread rapidly through a population. When these stress conditions become manifest within a region, the population will move, often to land even more marginal than that they left behind.

Scientists have suggested that if the effects of global climate change continue unabated, extensive nearshore communities will be inundated by rises in sea level and coastal flooding, storm tracks will alter monsoons and hurricane strikes, precipitation and drought patterns will shift, island nations in the Pacific and Indian oceans will be submerged, seasonal temperatures will become unpredictable, agricultural zones will alter; and regional diseases will spread to new locations around the planet. As a result, massive numbers of people will need to relocate to thrive, and such large-scale migration will pose a threat to international stability. Many poor and undereducated environmental refugees are likely to want to seek a better life by relocating to developed nations; the developed nations may see these environmental refugees as a security threat and respond accordingly.

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