Environmental "Refugees"?

Time to update your lexicon! Quick, tell us again what a "refugee" is?

If you've been schooled in the language of the United Nations, a refugee must meet extremely strict criteria: "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, [a refugee] 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."

Yet in common parlance, we toss around the word to refer to anyone trying to escape a place or duty. The New York Post recently published an article on "refugees" fleeing the taxes of New York. A friend of mine jokingly declared himself a "refugee from math." (Okay, it was funny.) Merriam-Webster's defines the term as "a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution." By that definition, we could almost categorize someone fleeing the law as a refugee.

I bring up this rather pedantic discussion for one particular reason: I am increasingly hearing talk of "environmental refugees," and as concerns about the implications of climate change grow, I expect to hear the term more. But if climate change renders a particular region uninhabitable without discriminating against a particular group residing therein, can we really refer to the victims as "refugees"?

Of course, if we use a warped and extended logic in which we say that by failing to protect the climate, the rest of the world is inadventently discriminating against those that reside in vulnerable zones. But who'd use that logic?

More appropriately, we must decide between expanding the technical definition of a refugee and creating a new term for those fleeing environmental hazard. I'd argue for the latter, for removing the strict criteria around the original "refugee" term renders it less meaningful. So what term should we use?

"Environmental migrants" is not strong enough. "Environmental victims" a) fails to indicate the movement factor that is so central to this group's plight and b) disempowers those that flee by referring to them as nothing more than "victims" rather than individuals that are exerting extraordinary strength in order to survive. "Environmental displacees" is a better possibility -- broad enough to include all those, such as those hit by Hurricane Katrina, that have to flee because of environmental conditions, yet narrow enough to exclude other "migrants" that might just prefer Florida's climate to that of wintry Connecticut.

Thoughts?