Bogumil Terminski Environmentally-Induced Displacement ... - Cedem

displacement. Recalling them, however, helps us to grasp the importance of great naturaldisasters for significant spontaneous population exoduses. Watching television reports fromareas devastated by natural disasters, we often do not realize the many subtle effects the localcommunities will have to deal with; demographic, social, economic, and health-relatedconsequences of major natural disasters can be visible and palpable years after the imminentthreat is gone.In a sense, the implications of environmental hazards are affecting all of us, whether or not weare aware of it. The threats monitored in recent years call for far-reaching research on therelationship between environmental change, natural disasters, and human migration. Suddendisasters, as well as gradual environmental problems become increasingly important securityissue. An intensification of research on environmentally-induced displacement may also beassociated with a nexus of other migratory topics. It seems particularly relevant at this point tohighlight changes in the way global migration looks in the last decades.Over most of the last century, population movements remained primarily a politicalphenomenon. The partial depoliticisation of global mobility observed since 1989 is related toa decrease in the number of armed conflicts and thereby the number of refugees in many partsof the world. Migration research, like security studies in the late eighties, becomes less andless dependent on the dynamics of international armed conflicts. Acting as a corollary to thesevital transformations is an observable economisation of the migration process. Economicmotivations now appear the most common reason for the decision to change one’s place ofresidence. An important complement to these processes is the feminisation of global mobility,and an at least partial deterritorialisation of migration movements (the separation of aperson’s spatial mobility from the previously rigid and static categories of space and time).From the perspective applied here, it is time to study somewhat different phenomenon thatseems to be particularly significant today: the environmentalisation of contemporary humanmigrations.Environmentally-induced displacement currently constitute one of the dominant humanconditions for forced mobility within national borders. Environmentally-induced displacement