EOEdu - 10 Years of Imaging Africa - The uprooted legions

A refugee is someone who "owing to a well-founded fear or being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country..." (Source: UNHCR)

” Internally displaced persons (IDPs) and those forced to move within their own country because of war, persecution or environmental disasters, rather than cross national borders. (Source: UNDP)

This includes 16 million refugees, of whom 11.4 million fall under UNHCR's mandate and some 4.6 million Palestinian refugees under the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The number of IDPs is estimated at 51 million worldwide; some 26 million were displaced as a result of armed conflict and another 25 million were displaced by natural disasters.
Three quarter of these displaced persons come from Asia and Africa. Since the 1950s, many nations in Africa have suffered civil wars and ethnic strife, thus generating a massive number of refugees of many different nationalities and ethnic groups.

The division of Africa into European colonies in 1885, along which lines the newly independent nations of the 1950s and 1960s drew their borders, has been cited as a major reason why Africa has been so plagued with intrastate warfare.

In Africa, the top refugee producing countries are Sudan (with 686,000 of its nationals outside the country), Somalia (460,000) the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi (about 400,000 each).

Environmental refugees
In addition to traditional refugees, there are also more and more environmental refugees, "people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life".

An inability to gain a livelihood due to environmental degradation, natural disasters, or development projects obligates environmental refugees to migrate from their homelands. Reasons for displacement include land degradation, drought, deforestation, natural disasters, and other environmental changes that interact destructively with poverty and population pressure. There are currently between 25-30 million environmental refugees worldwide, and their numbers are expected to swell to 200 million by mid-century, largely as a result of climate change. Unlike traditional refugees, environmental refugees are not recognized by the Geneva Convention or the UNHCR, and therefore do not have the same legal standing in the international community.

Environmental degradation can exacerbate conflict, which causes further environmental degradation, creating a vicious cycle of environmental decline, tense competition for diminishing resources, increased hostility, inter-communal fighting, and ultimately social and political breakdown.

Ecological warning signs related to conflict and its impacts include limited habitable space and decrease in agricultural production.

Dadaab Refugee Camp
The 1987 satellite image shows a fairly intact landscape dominated by shrub vegetation that is characteristic of the semiarid area. In the 2000 image, the Ifo, Dagahaley, and Hagadera
refugee camps stand out distinctly, revealing the presence and impact of a high concentration of over 100 000 refugees on the environment. Shrublands have been reduced largely to bare spots with sparse and stunted shrubs and grasses while riverine vegetation has also suffered loss and degradation.
(Source: UNEP )