Environmental Refugee : May be 50 Million by 2020

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Multidimensional Problem of environmental refugees. 3. Refugee. 4. Environmental migrant. 5. Refugee Camp. 6. Environmental Refugees : A Growing Phenomenon of the 21st Century. 7. New Issues in Refugee Research. 8. Conservation Refugee. 9. Sri Lankan Diaspora. 10. Environmental refugees: Climate change affects people’s lives. 11. Pre-assessment of the Environmental Impact of Refugees. Bibliography. Index.

The term refugee first meant one seeking asylum but has since evolved to mean one fleeing home. According to the United Nations, a refugee is a person who flees their home country due to a wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationally, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) defines 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. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an environmental refugee is a person displaced owing to environmental causes, notably land loss and degradation, and natural disaster. It is expected that the book would serve the interests of the students as a source of information for understanding and appreciating the finer aspects of Environmental Refugee.