Environmental change and migration: governmental compensation policies to natural disasters victims and urbanization process; a case ctudy of wildfires in Russian Federation in 2010

Abstract

"The paper discusses migration related to natural disasters analyzing a summer 2010 wildfire crisis in Russia. The paper starts with a review of a contemporary discussion on global environmental change, urbanization, climate change, migration, environmental refugees, and migration issues. The factual core of the paper is presented by a description of wildfires which occurred in the period of 22 July – 30 August 2010 in central Russia and covered an area of about 6 million hectares. Wildfires took place in 19 administrative regions affecting 199 human settlements and made 3591 families (or 7237 persons) homeless, 1799 persons needed medical attention, and 62 persons died. Russian government provided a variety of compensation measures to the victims, including monetary contribution and building a new house options. Analysis of statistics on the victims’ choice on which alternative governmental compensation packages to take, as well as statistics on actual new housing construction, have shown that about 30 to 50% of victims has moved to a bigger settlement. The paper concludes that natural disasters facilitate urbanization process, due to associated "push" and "pull" migration factors; some of these factors are represented by governmental policy to create bigger settlements to provide cost-effective fire protection services. The author argues that these policies can be viewed through a concept of ecosystem and infrastructure services, and extrapolated on land use analysis in other disaster prone regions." [author's abstract]