The rise of the environmental refugee: nightmare in the making?

Is environmental degradation set to create new waves of displaced people seeking asylum in the north? Will refugee camps and shantytowns foster civil disorder, pandemics and political extremism to threaten the interests of the developed world? Or is the concept of ‘environmental refugee’ a dangerous distraction from central issues of development and conflict resolution?

A paper from the UNHCR's Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit sets out to bridge the divide between ecology and the study of forced migration. Picking out themes from the research literature, it argues the need for wider public understanding of the issues and realities behind the debate between the voices warning of a pending apocalypse and those who take a more humanitarian approach to understanding the linkages between environment and forced migration.

Scholars in the former camp locate the causes of environmental displacement in desertification, deforestation, water shortages, salinisation of irrigated lands and bio-diversity depletion. Competition for diminishing resources between rising populations is being made worse by global climate change. Devastation on a large scale from extreme weather events, natural and man-made disasters is, they argue, thus more likely.

The paper sides with those who find no evidence that such factors have caused permanent large-scale displacements. Migration in places like the Sahel is a traditional coping strategy which does not lead to significant population changes. The key problem is not environmental change itself, but the challenge of boosting the capacity of communities and countries with efficient, open governments to cope with it.

The paper argues that:

• Deductive arguments – that country X has environmental problems and also has large numbers of emigrants and refugees and that therefore there must be a causal linkage –are problematic when applied to future prognoses.
• The crisis in Rwanda – often portrayed as a classic case of how rising population worsened land competition and precipitated conflict – can more accurately be analysed as a political struggle in which ethnicity, natural resources and Belgian divide-and-rule policies played a major part.
• In Bangladesh, population density and exposure to cyclones and flooding are not, as is often argued, the sole determinants of environmental displacement.
• Transmigration in Indonesia, and the violence between settlers and locals which followed the collapse of the Suharto regime, illustrates the complex relationships between migration, environmental change, ethnic conflict and displacement. 

Concluding that there does not appear to be a convincing case that environmental factors cause major violent conflicts which trigger massive flows of forced migrants, the paper argues that the term ‘environmental refugee’ simplistically implies monocausality which rarely exists in practice. The paper further argues that:

• We must recognise that environmental change has always been a part of human development.
• Adoption of a category of ‘environmental refugee’ could further weaken the 1951 Refugee Convention as it would enable those bent on restricting asylum opportunities to claim that refugees do not have well-founded fears but are simply fleeing environmental degradation.
• The real issue is not to protect and assist people forced to migrate but rather to adopt policies which will deal with the root causes of all types of forced migration and make them unnecessary.

 

Source(s):
‘Environmental change and forced migration: making sense of the debate’, New Issues in Refugee Research, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, by Stephen Castles, 2002 Full document.

Funded by: Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

id21 Research Highlight: 3 April 2003

Further Information:
Stephen Castles
Refugee Studies Centre
University of Oxford
21 St Giles
Oxford OX1 3LA
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1865 270724
Fax: +44 (0)1865 270721
Contact the contributor: stephen.castles@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House (QEH), UK

Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
CP 2500, 1211 Geneva 2
Switzerland

Contact the contributor: hqep00@unhcr.ch

Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, UNHCR

Other related links:
'Responding to displacement: Balancing needs and rights' Insights #44

'Victims of progress: resettling people displaced by development'

'Rights for the world's evicted. Are development projects harming people they're meant to help?'

'Safer haven: Brazil’s emerging refugee programme'

see id21's links page on displacement issues