All around the world, 20 to 25 million people have been forced out of their homes, almost completely due to natural forces out of their control.1 As high as the number of environmental refugees currently is, climate change is expected to vastly increase that amount to around 150 million by 2050.2 Hurricanes, monsoons, droughts, and floods will become more frequent and more destructive. Rising temperatures will worsen desertification. Rising sea levels not only threaten to flood 100,000 km of coastal and island regions by 2050, but salt water reaches more inland soil, increasing soil salinity and contributing even more to desertification.3Unfortunately, countries most affected by these consequences of climate change have the least power to stop it.4
Deforestation, desertification, drought, flooding, pollution, soil erosion, rising sea levels and natural disasters are some of the natural forces which already displace more people than war and political repression combined.5 If those forces were political or social, those people could be granted official refugee status by the United Nations (UN) under Resolution 429. Unfortunately, environmental refugees aren’t granted refugee status. The UN is obligated to provide food, shelter, medical care, and financial aid to refugees until they can be resettled. However, the UN is under no obligation to help those merely displaced by environmental forces.6
Why doesn’t the UN classify environmentally displaced persons as refugees? One reason is the problem of defining who is an “environmental refugee.” The phrase “environmental refugee” was coined in the 1970’s by the World Watch Institute to describe those who could no longer make a living off of their land due to environmental changes. However, in reality, the environment is rarely the only cause of displacement. Unemployment, smaller agricultural plots, rapid urbanization, industrialization, faulty infrastructure, political strife, and market forces often coincide with and worsen environmental problems.7 Natural resources often get overexploited or exported to create jobs. Farmers may leave their farm because there is no water, because the soil has become degraded, or just from an inability to compete on the global market.
International budgets do not have the funds to relocate even those who fall under the most conservative definitions of environmental refugees. Additionally, because economic and environmental factors overlap and reinforce each other, it’s extremely difficult to distinguish environmental refugees. Another reason is that first world countries find that distinction very important. While many nations are willing to provide a home for faultless victims of circumstance, most developed countries discourage or restrict migration for economic reasons.
It is easier to simply clump together both environmental and economic migration as merely national issues. For example, the United States continually monitors and deports Mexicans who migrate across the American border. One million of those who migrate to the U.S. from Mexico are actually leaving due to the increasingly degraded quality of soil.8 Over 60% of Mexican land has complete or rapid soil erosion, and that number is increasing.9 As more arable land is dedicated to export crops, poor farmers are pushed further to hills, forest, and less arable agricultural lands. Farmers then chop down trees and over-cultivate the land to produce enough to live on. Or, they raise cattle on these small plots, which overgraze on the plot’s vegetation.10 Plants no longer hold the soil together, preventing the soil from storing water, which makes the land desert.11 This process of land degradation, known as desertification, makes poor farmers even more destitute.
The line drawn between migrants seeking a better life for themselves and migrants forced to move by the natural environment can only be arbitrary, especially so to migrants themselves.12 What is happening in Mexico is also happening around the world, including Latin America, Africa, China, India, the Middle East, and Australia.13Desertification now affects one third of land on Earth14 and threatens to displace 135 million people. Desertification is at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where millions have already been permanently displaced.15 In Africa especially, policies that confine nomads in dryland areas can actually cause desertification. Nomadic pastoralists who used to rotate their cattle around the land sustainably were then confined to property boundaries, where cattle would overgraze a much smaller area of land, eliminating any plants that would normally persist through a dry season.16
In other areas around the world, changes such as those of Mexico and Africa, along with a few other factors are causing land degradation. Soil salinization, which occurs when salt water permeates the soil, limits crop growth. Floods, storms, and changing seashores can all cause soil salinization.17 Water pollution and natural droughts also use up local water sources, drying up vegetation even further.18
Much more widely known are the more dramatic disasters. Earthquakes, floods, and storms are natural causes of displacement, but the strength of their impact is often exacerbated by human action or inaction. The massive destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, for example, was not just a fluke of nature. Were it not for the infamously faulty levees, most of the city would have remained dry.19 There are also plenty of clearly man-made environmental catastrophes, such as oil spills, nuclear accidents, and other catastrophic industry accidents. While NGOs and non-profits may contribute aid, the country itself is expected to support and relocate the victims, whether or not it actually can or does.20
However, the government itself is often the main cause of massive environmental displacement. In India and China, public works projects are responsible for displacing around 50 million people.21 Dams are built with the specific intent of changing the environment in order to provide irrigation, electricity, and a steady source of freshwater through the dry season.22 The cost is massive environmental changes along the river, including the flooding of villages with stagnant water above the dam and the soil erosion on riverbanks on the other side.23 Those displaced generally have had no right to compensation or to be able to stay on their land. The poor and indigenous peoples are hit hardest since they usually only can settle on less fertile land.24
In the face of imminent climate change, many have argued that international law has been rendered necessary for dealing with such dauntingly large numbers of displacement. Individual countries may not be able to handle the volume of migrants and all the conflicts and political issues that might ensue as a result.25 Others argue that international law does not apply, since most of the environmentally displaced migrate locally and, unlike groups who are socially or politically persecuted, environmental migrants have an ability to pressure their own governments to help them.26 The debate will likely continue to rage on as those displaced become increasingly impossible to ignore.
