Environmental Migrants And Refuge Essay

The need of the hour is combating environmental degradation and climate change. Climate change, or specifically, global warming, is a phenomenon that occurs when carbon dioxide, methane and other “greenhouse” gases accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere and trap the sun’s heat. In 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the warming of the Earth’s climate — including an average global surface temperature increase of about 1 degree Celsius during the 20th century — is “unequivocal” and due largely to anthropogenic activities such as burning fossil fuels in automobiles, factories and power plants . The recently concluded COP21 Climate Conference at Paris in December 2015 proposes to give to the world,

Refugees No.127. Geneva, p. 12

24 million "environmental refugees

The chart highlights that although there could be varying numerical statistics as to the gravity of the problem, there is consensus as to the existence of a grave problem.

1.1 NEED FOR A COMPREHENSIVE DEFINITION

Any problem starts out with a focus point. In the present case, there is a lack of such a focus point. Terms and concepts such as environmental migration, climate change-induced migration, ecological or environmental refugees, climate change migrants and environmentally-induced forced migrants are used inter-changeably throughout the literature. A lack of a definition to address or refer to people affected by the environment is due to several reasons. Olivia V. Dun and Francois Gemenne in their article are of the opinion that the main reason for the lack of definition relating to migration caused by environmental degradation or change is linked to the difficulty of isolating environmental factors from other drivers of migration. Another major difficulty lies in the confusion of “forced” versus “voluntary” migration.

• Is environmental migration inherently a form of forced