This broad category includes millions of people displaced directly or indirectly by environmental degradation and natural or man-made disasters. The rise in the number of victims of natural disasters over the past decade and ever-greater levels of displacement caused by development projects have added millions to the number of forcibly displaced people in the world. According to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the total number of people affected by natural disasters has tripled over the past decade to 2 billion people, with the accumulated impact of natural disasters resulting in an average of 211 million people directly affected each year.[47] This is approximately five times the number of people thought to have been affected by conflict over the past decade.

It is increasingly recognized that the recent escalation in the numbers of those affected by disasters is due more to rising vulnerability to hazards than to an increase in the frequency of hazards per se. However, it is recognized that climate change may be playing a part in intensifying the number and severity of natural hazards.[48]

In many ecological and economic crises, mobility and migration represent crucial survival strategies. It can therefore be very difficult to distinguish between forced disaster-induced displacement and mobility linked to people's coping mechanisms. Sometimes, restrictions on mobility are a major factor in the development of famine, as was seen when Eritrea's borders with Kenya and Sudan were closed.

Displaced populations and other migrants are often disproportionately vulnerable to disasters because their normal livelihoods have already been disrupted or destroyed, or because their presence has contributed to environmental degradation in their areas of refuge. Where disasters occur in conflict zones, the destruction of infrastructure and lack of state services can seriously hamper the provision of relief and recovery assistance.

The tsunami of December 2004 exemplified the interaction between politics and the impact of natural disasters. In the Indonesian province of Aceh, conflict, violence and a massive counter-insurgency campaign by the Indonesian military against separatist rebels had displaced more than 300,000 people since 1999. A further half-million or so Acehnese – 12 per cent of the population – were displaced by the tsunami. Relief efforts were complicated by the fluid and complex displacement that resulted from the combination of political causes and the immediate devastation of the tsunami.[49]

'Self-settled' refugees and internally displaced persons living in urban areas are often highly vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters; many live in informal and unsafe settlements where they have no legal entitlement to their homes and are not served by any risk-reduction measures. But all those displaced by disasters have specific needs, including access to assistance, protection from violence, and the restoration of their livelihoods. The UN's Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement suggest that those uprooted by natural or man-made disasters are entitled to protection and assistance. However, this does not apply to those displaced by development policies and projects.

'Mixed migration', trafficking and smuggling

Development-induced displacement

Notes

47. Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), Disaster Reduction and the Human Cost of Disaster, IRIN Web Special, UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), www.IRINnews.org, June 2005, pp. 3 and 7.

48. Ibid.

49. E. Hedman, 'The Politics of the Tsunami Response', Forced Migration Review, Special Issue, July 2005, pp. 4-5.