Norman Myers BA PhD (Berkeley 1973) (born 24 August 1934), is a British environmentalist specialisting in
biodiversityBiodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions...
. He is an influential figure among policy and institutional circles, although much of his more prominent work - such as on environmental refugees' - is widely viewed as lacking academic credibility. He is the father of marathon runner
Mara YamauchiMara Rosalind Yamauchi is a British long distance track, and road running athlete. She currently holds the second fastest time by a British woman over the marathon, behind the world-record holder, Paula Radcliffe....
, and lives in
HeadingtonHeadington is a suburb of Oxford, England. It is at the top of Headington Hill overlooking the city in the Thames Valley below. The life of the large residential area is centred upon London Road, the main road between London and Oxford.-History:...
, UK.
Professional career
Myers has written on a broad range of environmental issues, notably population pressures, developing country poverty, over-consumption, unsustainable agriculture, climate change, and environmental security. More recently, he has written about
climate refugeeEnvironmental migrant refers to the people who are purportedly forced to migrate from or flee their home region due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment, which is held to include increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise, and disruption of seasonal weather patterns...
s; perverse subsidies; food and hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa; and new consumers in developing and transition countries. His main contributions include work on
mass extinction of speciesThe Holocene extinction refers to the extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch . The large number of extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods; a sizeable fraction of these extinctions are occurring in the...
and the problems of tropical
deforestationDeforestation is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a nonforest use. Examples of deforestation include conversion of forestland to farms, ranches, or urban use....
. He was integral to the development of the concept of biodiversity hotspots. His work on
political ecologyPolitical ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena....
is notable for its neo-Malthusianism and he is a patron of Population Matters (formerly the Optimum Population Trust).
Myers has been an advisor to organizations including the United Nations, the World Bank, scientific academies in several countries, and various government administrations worldwide. He is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at
Green College, OxfordGreen College was a graduate college of the University of Oxford in England. It was centred around an architecturally appealing 18th century building: the Radcliffe Observatory, which is modelled after the ancient "Tower of the Winds" in Athens....
University, and an Adjunct Professor at
Duke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
.
Criticism
Myers' widely cited work on 'climate refugees' has been criticised by social scientists, and migration scholars in particular. Myers has himself described his conclusions regarding 'environmental refugees' as 'heroic extrapolation' due to a lack of actual data on the phenomenon. However, his work on this issue is nevertheless widely cited among non-specialists, and as such continues to inform much of the contemporary discussion on 'environmental refugees'. Although his work is particularly influential among NGOs and policy actors, as it provides estimates of future 'environmental refugee' flows, it has significantly less currency among many professional migration researchers, who cite the continuing controversy regarding the definition of 'environmental refugee', and thus the impossibility of enumerating them.
In April 2011, the UN was reported to have been 'embarrassed' by relying on Myers' prediction, in 2005, that there would be up to 50 million 'environmental refugees' by 2010. One academic has stated that "my understanding is that Norman Myers looked at a map of the world, and he said which are the hotspots that we think are going to be affected by climate change; then he looked up the projected populations for those areas in 2010 and 2050 and added them up....that's how he got to such a figure, because he didn't take into account that some people wouldn't move."
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