Environmental refugees

Abstract

In the past years, natural disasters and climate change have become a growing concern. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimations 19.2 million people were displaced by climate or weather-related events only in 2015. As reported by the UN's science advisory board - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - an increase in the number of displaced people is projected over the course of this century. Due to climate change people will be forced into increasing poverty and displacement, a fact that will exacerbate the factors that lead to conflict, rendering both the humanitarian needs and responses even more complex in such situations. Environmental refugees are not a phenomenon of our century. Since the beginning of civilization, people were forced time after time to change living places due to the climate. But what makes this topic so special nowadays is that human beings did not have such a strong influence on the environment earlier, so a migration process was unexpected previously. Unfortunately, this situation has changed now. Population growth and big disparities make this process more complicated. However, with new technology and progress in IT sphere we can predict possible changes, but at the same time we are one of the main causes of these climate and environmental changes. In fact, a lot of researchers has been working on this topic. In worldwide practice, there are conventions, policy documents etc., yet environmental refugees still stay in a non-place, taking part in frameworks for refugees or economic migrants.