Environmental migrant

• 1. Introduction

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  Environmental migrants are people who leave their homes not by choice but because the ground beneath them has shifted, flooded, or dried up. The term itself was first proposed by Lester Brown in 1976, decades before climate change became a household concern. Today, millions of people around the world fall into this category, and the numbers are projected to grow dramatically by the middle of this century.

  Who counts as an environmental migrant? What forces push people from their homes? And why do the communities least responsible for environmental destruction so often bear the heaviest burden of displacement? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. Defining the Displaced

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  In 1985, Essam El-Hinnawi, a researcher with the United Nations Environment Programme, offered one of the earliest formal definitions of environmental refugees. He described them as people forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption that jeopardized their existence or seriously affected their quality of life.

  The International Organization for Migration, known as the IOM, later expanded this framing. Its definition covers anyone who leaves their habitual home due to sudden or progressive environmental changes, whether they move within their country or cross international borders, and whether that move is temporary or permanent.

  The vocabulary surrounding this phenomenon has proliferated ever since. Scholars and policy-makers use terms including ecological refugee, environmentally displaced person, disaster refugee, and even environmental-refugee-to-be. Critics of these definitions argue that they miss the structural drivers of displacement: colonial legacies, racialized land use policies, and unequal resource extraction.

  The IOM organizes environmental migrants into three broad types. Environmental emergency migrants flee temporarily after a sudden disaster. Environmental forced migrants leave because conditions have deteriorated gradually over time. Environmental motivated migrants, also called environmentally induced economic migrants, choose to relocate in order to avoid problems they see coming. A study conducted between 2014 and 2018 in several major river deltas found that only 2.8% of respondents cited environment directly as a reason for leaving; the majority cited economic reasons, even while a third of migrant households reported increased exposure to environmental hazards.

• 3. Counting the Uncountable

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  In 1988, Jodi Jacobson became the first researcher to calculate a total figure for environmental migrants. She estimated there were already up to 10 million environmental refugees at that time. Drawing on worst-case projections about sea-level rise, she argued that all forms of environmental refugees combined would eventually be six times as numerous as political refugees.

  By 1989, Mustafa Tolba, who served as Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, warned that the number could exceed 50 million people if the world did not begin moving toward sustainable development.

  In the mid-1990s, British environmentalist Norman Myers became the most prominent voice for large projections. He stated that 25 million environmental refugees existed in the mid-1990s and claimed that figure could double by 2010, with an upper limit of 200 million by 2050. Myers broke down his projections by country: 30 million in China, 30 million in India, 15 million in Bangladesh, 14 million in Egypt, 10 million in other delta areas and coastal zones, and 1 million in island states, with another 50 million people displaced by agricultural collapse. More recently, Myers revised his 2050 estimate upward to as high as 250 million.

  Viktor Kolmannskog has stated that Myers' work can be criticized for being inconsistent, impossible to check, and failing to take proper account of opportunities to adapt. Myers himself acknowledged that his figures are based on what he called heroic extrapolation. The debate over numbers reflects a deeper problem: there is still no uniform, universally accepted definition of who qualifies as an environmental migrant, which makes counting them extraordinarily difficult.

• 4. Small Islands, Large Burdens

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  Over 65 million people spread across 39 countries live in Small Island Developing States, or SIDS. Rising sea levels, increasing natural disasters, and the depletion of fresh water supplies have made these islands among the most vulnerable places on Earth. As of 2020, an estimated 11.5 million individuals originating from SIDS were living outside their country of birth.

  Pacific islands such as Kiribati, Vanuatu, and Fiji face immediate threats from sea-level rise. In the Caribbean, islands including Barbados have experienced a significant rise in environmental migrants due to climate-related challenges. Over two-thirds of Caribbean migrants were residing in the United States as of 2020.

  SIDS face multiple financial, legal, and political barriers to addressing migration. They are generally low on resources and economic stability. International support mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund have been developed to help. In September 2014, representatives from SIDS gathered in Apia, Samoa to form what became known as the SAMOA Pathway, a ten-year plan addressing climate change in the islands.

  In the Philippines, legislators have proposed House Bill No. 10490, which would amend the Philippine Immigration Act of 1940. The bill aims to expand the criteria for refugee status to include climate change, beyond the traditional categories of persecution, religion, and politics. Political figures such as Mia Mottley have called for a major increase in global investment and support to address the limitations facing SIDS and the people who leave them.

• 5. Security, Scarcity, and Conflict

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  In 2022, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a code red for humanity. He warned that many changes to the climate were already irreparable and that the consequences would be widespread for the world's capacity to maintain peace.

  The link between environmental stress and conflict is not purely theoretical. When fights between farmers and herders broke out in Nigeria in 2018, the over 1,000 casualties represented several times more than civilian deaths in conflicts with Boko Haram. Two billion people currently live in areas where violence and instability already threaten development.

  Scholars describe two broad pathways from environmental change to security risk. In scarcity-conflict scenarios, populations that depend on a specific resource such as soil fertility, precipitation, or water access find that resource diminishing. As competition for what remains intensifies, violence becomes more likely, and violence in turn makes those resources harder to reach. In abundance-competition scenarios, regions holding valuable resources such as lithium or diamonds become theaters of factional fighting as those in power seek economic control.

  The Arctic presents a distinct case. It is possible that the Arctic zone will lose all its ice by 2035, according to projections cited in the source. Nations including China, Russia, and the United States are preparing to compete for control of new shipping lanes and access to untapped natural resources as that ice retreats. Heatwaves killed 15,000 people in France in 2003. An estimated 356,000 people were killed by excessive heat globally in 2019. By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion of the world's population are projected to be living in areas where the average annual temperature exceeds 84 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 6. Who Bears the Weight

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  Oil extraction in the Niger Delta in Nigeria has led to severe pollution and the displacement of local communities, many of whom are Indigenous or Black, while multinational corporations continue to profit from the region's resources. This pattern reflects what scholars describe as environmental racism: the systemic exposure of racialized and Indigenous populations to environmental hazards combined with their exclusion from decisions about land, development, and resource extraction.

  Kiribati and Tuvalu face heightened risks from sea-level rise despite contributing minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions. The village of Satabhaya in the Kendrapara district of Odisha, India, has been described as one of the foremost victims of coastal erosion and submergence due to rising sea levels, with villagers losing homes to the encroaching sea and cultivable lands to saline ingress. In Nepal, villages in the Sivalik Hills and Chure regions have seen mass migration due to water scarcity. In the eastern highlands of Nepal, 10 households in Chainpur in Sankhuwasabha district, 25 households in Dharmadevi, and 10 households in Panchkhapan were forced to migrate due to water crises.

  Environmental migration is also shaped by gender. Women, particularly Indigenous and Black women, often face compounded exposure to environmental harm because of their roles in caregiving, food production, and community survival. Feminist scholars describe a global health hierarchy in which gender, race, and class intersect to determine who bears the burden of environmental degradation.

  Addressing these inequities, according to scholars in environmental justice studies, requires moving beyond technical or economic solutions toward policies that center Indigenous sovereignty and the redistribution of resources and decision-making power.

• 7. In Culture and Memory

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  The notion of the environmental migrant has entered popular consciousness through art and storytelling. John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath gave the idea one of its most enduring representations, depicting the displacement of families driven from their land by ecological and economic collapse.

  Documentary filmmakers have continued to explore the subject. Refugees of the Blue Planet, directed by Helene Choquette and Jean-Philippe Duval, appeared in 2006. Eco Migrants: The Case of Bhola Island, directed by Susan Stein, followed in 2013, starring Katherine Jacobsen, Nancy Schneider, and Bogumil Terminski. The Land Between, directed by David Fedele, arrived in 2014.

  These works reflect a growing public recognition that environmental migration is not a future possibility but a present reality shaping lives across the world. The SAMOA Pathway, adopted in Apia in September 2014, gave the issue a formal political stage.