Escaping climate change: Who are the “environmental migrants” in international law?

The term “environmental refugees” was used for the first time in 1985, when the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) researcher Essam El-Hinnawi defined these persons as those “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.”