According to UNEP’s Governing Council, “environmental emergencies are sudden-onset disasters or accidents resulting from natural, technological or human-induced factors, or a combination of these that cause or threaten to cause severe environmental damage as well as loss of human lives and property (UNEP/GC.22/INF/5, 13 November 2002).
These scenarios are described in more detail below. From its inception, the Joint Environment Unit has responded to a wide variety of cases; the reports on these response activities.
Classic environmental emergencies
Environmental emergencies in the narrow sense are technological or industrial accidents and usually involve some type of hazardous material and can occur at any location where these materials are produced, used or transported. Common locations include pesticide storage sites, hospitals, railway marshalling yards, and numerous different industrial manufacturing sites.
While radiological and biological emergencies are typically excluded as they require a different specialized response, large forest and wild land fires are generally included in this definition as they are often ‘human-induced’ and can create serious humanitarian suffering, as was clearly the case in the haze covering south east Asia in 1997 and 1998.
Natural disasters
Large sudden-onset natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcano eruptions can have big negative impacts on human health and the environment. Examples of how secondary impacts have caused further death and suffering are: Floods causing landslides, earthquakes resulting in fires in refineries, volcano eruptions leading to petrol stations explosions, gas exploration works resulting in mud volcanoes and typhoons sinking ferries containing large quantities of hazardous pesticides.
Complex emergencies
In situations of complex emergencies, such as in Somalia, Darfur (Sudan) and Iraq, the break-down of authority, looting, and attacks on strategic industrial installations can all cause environmental emergencies. For example, the bombing of the fuel storage tanks of a power station in Lebanon, led to a spill in the Mediterranean of 15,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil.