Lester Brown: Environmental Refugee

The term "environmental refugee" was first proposed by Lester Brown in 1923, since then the term has adapted a different name "environmental migrant”. According to Lester, “Environmental refugees are people who are forced to leave their home region due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment.” These are changes in which their everyday life routine is compromised. Some changes that may cause this type of migration include deforestation, sea level rises, increased droughts, and disruption of seasonal weather patterns. The term environmental refugee doesn’t only have one other way of saying it, other than "environmental migrant" it may also be described as ecological refugee or climate refugee. According to the United Nations Convention associated to the status of refugees of 1951, a refugee is someone 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"

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According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, in 2014, 19.3 million people around the globe lost their homes due to climate change, and previous studies have been leading us to believe that the number will drastically increase to 250 million by the year 2050. However, not only are the disasters affecting the environmental refugees, because by them being affected, the government gets affected as well. The factor that makes environmental refugees such a challenging problem for governments and policy-makers to cope with is the fact that there is a variety of different forms of natural disasters that could affect the destination that the affected refugees will choose to flee to and call their new