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Ecological disasters are, at their foremost, human disasters which also affect the environment. Sudden and immediate impacts as well as those more gradual or long term affect both humans and the environment, tragically confirming that humanity and the environment are "inseparable," as stated in the Rio Declaration, or "indissociable" as stated in the preamble to the March 1, 2005 french Charter of the Environment. If the effects of disasters on the environment are issues of environmental law, the effects on humans belong to human rights law, with the particularity that they concern both classic human rights and the new human rights to the environment recognized both at international level and in many national constitutions and laws. An ecological disaster brings the irreversibility of death, as well as physical injury and destruction of property. Victims usually must flee whether they wish to or not. After a factory explosion, flooding or a tsunami, the only choice is evacuation and therefore the forced departure from one's home. It is impossible to remain alongside the AZF factory in Toulouse nor in New Orleans after Katrina's passing, nor in Port-au-Prince after the Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010. Departure is inevitable. The result is a new type of widespread population displacement, not caused by war, as in Poland and Germany in 1945, nor by civil war, as in the Congo, but by the violent effects of a disaster, whether natural (including climate change) or accidental, as with Bhopal or Chernobyl. The flight of environmental displaced persons is a manifestation of their fundamental right to life, expressed as the right to survive by fleeing.

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