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What distinguishes environmental refugees from other refugees-or other migrants? Are all environmental refugees alike? This essay develops a classification to begin to answer these questions and facilitate future policies and research on environmental refugees. Environmental refugees may have considerable control over the decision to migrate, but this varies by the type of environmental disruption. The origin, intention, and duration of environmental disruptions shape the type of refugee. Refugees from disasters and expropriations have limited control over whether environmental changes will produce migration. Gradual degradation allows "environmental emigrants" to determine how they will respond to environmental change.
KEY WORDS: environmental refugee; environment; refugee; migration; emigration.
Just over ten years ago, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) reported that "as many as 50 million people could become environmental refugees" if the world did not act to support sustainable development (Tolba, 1989, p. 25). Since this time, advocacy groups and social scientists have produced a burgeoning literature about this category of migrants. Norman Myers, the most prolific writer on this topic, estimates that environmental refugees will soon become the largest group of involuntary migrants (Myers, 1997; Myers, 1995). Whether or not Myers' assertion is true, the concept of "environmental refugee" remains somewhat vague. What situations have created these population flows? What distinguishes environmental refugees from other refugees-or other migrants? Are all environmental refugees alike?
Social scientists who study environmental refugees have produced several valuable reviews of this existing literature (O'Lear, 1997; Hugo, 1996; Ramlogan, 1996; Perout, 1995; Suhrke, 1994; Westing, 1992). These reviews have more or less uncritically preserved the concept of environmental refugee developed by the United National Environmental Programme (UNEP) in 1985. UNEP defined environmental refugees in a manner consistent with the humanitarian mission of their agency rather than using more analytic criteria. UNEP researcher Essam El-Hinnawi first defined environmental refugees as:
those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life [sic]. By 'environmental disruption' in this definition is meant any physical, chemical, and/or biological changes in the ecosystem (or resource base) that render it, temporarily or permanently, unsuitable to support human life....