Environmental refugees

Abstract

In the world about 22 million people are officially recognized as “refugees” and a further 30 million are displaced within their State borders. According to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is 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 their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country”. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which counted 8,400,000 refugees worldwide at the beginning of 2006. In these statistics, the governments do not officially include the unconventional category of “environmental refugees”, even though the number of people forced to move by environment-related conditions is already similar to, and may someday dwarf, the number of officially-recognized “persons of concern,” recently calculated at 19.2 million. Since the Convention of Geneva was approved as the legal frame for refugees, the situation, the characteristics and the origin of refugees have changed radically. A refugee is now not only someone who flees from political repression or armed conflicts. Some refugees are not victims of political upheaval, but of such problems as the rising sea level, expanding deserts and catastrophic flooding, which have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions. About 25 million people are now officially recognized as “persons of concern”, persons who have been necessarily displaced from their homes by droughts, desertification, soil erosion, industrial accidents or other environmental reasons. The number is predicted to grow to about 50 million by the year 2010, at the alarming rate of 16,986 per day. The UN estimated that there will be 150 million environmental refugees by the year 2050. Red Cross research shows that more people are now displaced by environmental disasters than war. Extrait de l'ouvrage : Le droit international face aux enjeux environnementaux Colloque d'Aix-en-Provence Société Française pour le Droit International S.F.D.I. © Editions A. PEDONE – PARIS – 2010 Ean : 978-2-233-00590-8