Environmental migrant

Environmental migrants are people who are forced to leave their home region due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment which compromise their well being or secure livelihood, such changes are held to include increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise, and disruption of seasonal weather patterns such as monsoons. Environmental migrants may flee to or migrate to another country or they may migrate internally within their own country. However, the term "environmental migrant" is used somewhat interchangeably with a range of similar terms, such as environmental refugee or climate refugee, although the distinction between these terms is contested. Despite problems in formulating a uniform and clear-cut definition of 'environmental migration', such a concept has increased as an issue of concern in the 2000s as policy-makers, environmental and social scientists attempt to conceptualise the potential societal effects of climate change and general environmental degradation.

The term "environmental refugee" was first proposed by Lester Brown in 1976, since then there has been a proliferation in the use of the term at which "environmental migrant" and a cluster of similar categories, including "forced environmental migrant", "environmentally motivated migrant", "climate refugee", "climate change refugee", "environmentally displaced person (EDP)", "disaster refugee", "environmental displacee", "eco-refugee", "ecologically displaced person" and "environmental-refugee-to-be (ERTB)" have been utilized. The differences between these terms are less important than what they have in common: they all suggest that there is a determinable relationship between environmental drivers and human migration which is analytically useful, policy-relevant and possibly grounds for the expansion of refugee law.

Under the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951, a refugee is more narrowly defined (in Article 1A) as a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country". While the concept of a refugee was expanded by the Convention's 1967 Protocol and by regional conventions in Africa and Latin America to include persons who had fled war or other violence in their home country, in its present state the convention does not provide long-term legal protection to refugees due to environmental change.

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