Tóm tắt

The term environmental refugees was first coined in 1985 as a report title for the United Nations Environment Programme (El-Hinnawi 1985). It has since been widely diffused in both political and academic circles (Castles 2002). This growing concern of the international community about the consequences of migration resulting from environmental deterioration was reinforced in 1990 by the publication of the first UN intergovernmental report on climate change which stated that The gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration as millions will be displaced (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1990, 20). In 1993, the prediction that there would be 150 million environmental refugees by the end of the 21st century, as forecast by Norman Myers, further fuelled the fear of mass migrations (Myers 2003). In the review Population and Environment this respected environmentalist wrote, four years later, the issue of environmental refugees (...) promises to rank as one of the foremost human crises of our times (Myers 1997, p. 175). Filmmaker Roland Emmerich dramatized this fear in 2004, in a scene from the film The Day After Tomorrow where American citizens flee en masse from lightning and a terrible climatic disturbance from the north only to find themselves – and here is the irony – running up against the fences of the American-Mexican frontier. Today, for the Israeli geographer Nurit Kliot, who has led a synthetic overview on the subject, the fear of mass migration of environmental refugees has become a major issue in the international community (Kliot 2004, 69). With the increasing certainty of global warming, the more precise term of climate refugee has been swiftly diffused in public discourse. This is exemplified by the Citizen's guide to climate refugees found on the website of the Australian NGO, Friends of the Earth (Friends of the Earth Australia 2007). Other instances include the recent series of reports entitled Avec les réfugiés climatiques by the French photographic collective Argos (http://www.collectifargos.com/ - visited 21 July 2007). The links between climate and human migration are not new (Beniston 2004). Thus, the droughts of the 1930s in the plains of the American Dust Bowl forced hundreds of thousands of migrants towards California, and those that struck the Sahel between 1969 and 1974 displaced millions of farmers and nomads towards the cities. Notwithstanding the present media focus, the amount of systematic research on environment and migration remains quite limited. There is much vagueness surrounding the concepts employed, the underlying mechanisms involved, the number of persons affected and the geographical zones concerned. The use by numerous authors of the term refugee has also led to certain confusion because it evokes the juridical status recognized by UN Convention of 1951 referring to any person having a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.