Drought-Induced Migrations in Syria and Turkey

Human migration has, without a doubt, become one of the most significant consequences of environmental degradation. Although there cannot be exact predictions, “future forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050” (Rahman, “Climate-Induced Migration”). While there is a substantial body of scholarship analyzing the effects of migration on the environment, the impact of environmental factors on population flows has only fairly recently begun to attract researchers’ attention. This may be, in part, due to the difficulty of untangling environmental and social factors leading to migration. As Olivia Dun and François Gemenne remark in “Defining ‘Environmental Migration,’” Terms and concepts such as environmental migration, climate change-induced migration, ecological or environmental refugees, climate change migrants and environmentally-induced forced migrants are found scattered throughout the literature. The main reason for the lack of definition relating to migration caused by environmental degradation or change is linked to the difficulty of isolating environmental factors from other drivers of migration. (10)