Population Displacements from the Perspective of Environmental Demography in the Anthropocene
Planet Earth is undergoing a profound process of transformation, both in scale and in intensity. The magnitude is so wide, that authors suggest that the planet would have left the geological era of the Holocene to a new era, the Anthropocene. This thesis does not bring a geological discussion about the planet, but a social characterization of the Anthropocene, that is, a concept that symbolizes environmental changes on a global scale and driven by the activities of the human system. The human system is composed of processes such as urbanization, industrialization, energy production through fossil fuels, large-scale agriculture; and activities like these drive big changes in society. The Anthropocene suggests that the human way of life is capable of transforming the biogeochemical dynamics of the planet on a scale never seen before; on the other hand, these transformations also have consequences for the human system, in the form of climatic imbalances (floods, droughts, hurricanes, storms), for example. A very prominent issue is inequality, because despite the changes occurring everywhere (differing in frequency and intensity), their impact does not occur homogeneously; on the contrary, they affect more specific groups, such as those most vulnerable, both in physical, economic and social concepts. Nevertheless, one of the main contemporary challenges concerns the forced displacement of people as a result of these changes and imbalances in the planet's dynamics, making the number of environmental displaced persons practically three times greater than that of those displaced by conflict and violence. Thus, this work is constructed in two ways: one theoretical and the other more empirical. In the first part, the objective is to make a theoretical construction of the Anthropocene and Environmental Demography in order to characterize the displacements, that is, to understand the most vulnerable groups, why mobility has been the central dynamic in contemporary times and how the political- economic aspects of human society interfere in these dynamics. The third part, which is empirical, was constructed through a systematization of data on the internally displaced persons, that is, within the territorial boundary of the national space, from these initial formulations, some examples were brought up, such as that of Syria, Bangladesh, Somalia and Nigeria, in order to understand how theory and empirics complement each other and help to understand the question proposed in this dissertation.