By: Alexia Gardner, USCRI Policy Analyst, and Anum Merchant, USCRI Policy Intern
Extreme weather continues to drive new large-scale displacement, with 2024 ranked among the highest years recorded. From typhoons to droughts, climate-related disasters threaten people’s ability to sustain themselves in their homeland, forcing them to seek safety elsewhere. Marginalized communities, despite contributing little to the burning of fossil fuels, will disproportionately face the devastating effects of climate-related disasters. Refugees are among those most vulnerable to the effects of climate shocks. By 2050, the United Nations predicts that many refugee camps will be rendered nearly uninhabitable by extreme weather events.
Refugees fleeing conflict and persecution desire a safe place to call home. Approximately 22 percent of the world’s refugee population lives in camps. Refugee camps are settlements usually designed to provide temporary shelter to those fleeing across borders, although they increasingly house people for decades, if not generations. Many of these camps are in countries facing high to extreme climate hazards, placing already displaced populations at heightened risk of further displacement as these compounding pressures grow.
In 1991, Kenya’s Dadaab camp was built to host Somalis fleeing the country’s civil war. Over time, it has become one of the world’s largest refugee camp. More than 400,000 people call it home. Some have lived there for decades, their children born as refugees.
Increasingly, Somalis flee not only civil war and political strife, but environmental disaster. Somalia is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change. One year, floods spoil the crops; the next, drought sucks the soil dry of nutrients. Dadaab now hosts many Somalis displaced in part by climate impacts, sometimes referred to as “climate refugees” or people who have crossed borders seeking safety as drought, floods, and other climate-related shocks intensify in their homeland.
In 2024, Dadaab was hit with extreme flooding, forcing its refugee residents once again from their homes. 20,000 people were displaced to higher ground. The incident illustrates that forced migration, contrary to popular narratives, is often not a singular event. Double displacement refers to situations in which people, displaced at least once already, are uprooted again. As the Earth continues to heat, climate-related environmental disasters are increasingly a driver of double displacement.
Refugees flee camps that, despite becoming home over years or decades, were often temporary by design and ill-equipped to weather the climate disasters now striking them. Displacement ruptures the relationship between a person and the land. Repeated displacement from one’s home, whether temporary or prolonged, carries severe psychological and social consequences. As extreme heat, rising sea levels, and intensifying storms reshape the planet, more people will be unsettled many times over.
Climate Displacement from Refugee Camps
Most of the world’s refugee camps are in climate hotspots, or regions of the world particularly affected by the effects of climate change. Climate change, driven by fossil fuel emissions, refers to the long-term warming of Earth’s atmosphere. With emissions from fossil fuels increasing unabated, weather patterns alter. In some places, this means extreme heat; in others, extreme cold. The soil might become parched by lack of water or flooded by an increase in monsoons. The African continent, home to many of the world’s largest refugee camps, faces high risk of extreme heat, flooding, and drought. By 2050, the hottest 15 refugee camps in the world, all in Africa, are projected to face nearly 200 days or more of hazardous heat stress per year.
The perception of refugee settlements as short-term solutions to humanitarian crises perpetuates their vulnerability to extreme weather events. The camp’s infrastructure and design reflect their intended impermanence. Settlements are often densely organized with limited protective structures. Often constructed with wood and plastic sheeting, they are unable to provide residents with adequate insulation.
Weak infrastructure and amenities also increase the camp’s vulnerabilities to climate-related risks. Poor-quality housing, along with weak water and sanitation systems, mean that extreme heat and intense rainfall translate more directly into harm. Over time, repeated exposure to such conditions can render settlements uninhabitable, undermining health and basic safety for the refugees. The camp’s design, in this way, does not merely reflect climate vulnerability but deepens it, pushing refugees closer to the threshold of having to move once again.
From Chad to Bangladesh to Jordan, refugee camps around the world are increasingly exposed to climate disasters. The cases below illustrate the pattern of double displacement, where refugees who have already fled conflict or persecution find themselves uprooted once again by climate conditions.
Chad
In July 2024, severe rainfall killed 341 people and destroyed over 164,000 homes in Chad. Estimates show that the flooding impacted 1.5 million people across the country, including the over one million refugees who fled conflict in Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon. Hundreds of these refugees found themselves searching for refugee, even temporarily, again. The situation that unfolded in Chad is not an anomaly, but rather an emerging pattern resulting in the double displacement of refugees.
Bangladesh
Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh is home to one of the largest refugee settlements in the world. Comprised of approximately 34 camps, it is primarily populated by more than one million Rohingya refugees who have fled Myanmar (Burma). Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts including extreme heat, saline intrusion, flooding, extreme rainfall, cyclones and storm surges.
Cox’s Bazar sits in a cyclone-prone region where climate change is driving more frequent and dangerous storms. The cruel irony is that building the camp itself amplified these dangers. Mass deforestation for shelter construction has stripped hillsides bare, accelerating erosion and leaving residents even more exposed to landslides and monsoon floods.
Rohingya refugees are regularly impacted by fires, including one in 2021 that displaced 45,000 people. Just last month, another fire destroyed 400 homes, affecting 2,000 refugees. Without alternative sources of energy, refugees are left to burn firewood to prepare food. Fires, in turn, have amplified existing climate vulnerabilities and increase the risk of fires breaking out in the camps. Shortly after the 2021 fires, the camps were affected by intense floods, killing 11 people.
Jordan
Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan was established in 2012. It houses around 65,000 Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war and resulting humanitarian crisis.
In Za’atari, 62% of refugees are considered highly vulnerable to climate impacts. The camp is in a desert region, where arid land and water shortages are exacerbated by looming desertification and climate change. The UNHCR Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) found that 40% of refugees in Jordan are already vulnerable to climate change in the form of increasing dust storms and heat waves. Refugee camps are most vulnerable to such phenomena because of poor infrastructure and shelter.
The vulnerabilities evident in Za’atari are not isolated incidents but rather symptoms of a systemic crisis facing refugee populations globally. The displacement of refugees from their camps due to worsening climate conditions embodies a slow and often invisible double displacement. This operates on two levels: the immediate shock of natural disasters and the long-term consequences of situating camps in climate change hotspots.
Estimates from the United Nations project that nearly all current refugee settlements will eventually face unprecedented levels of hazardous heat. Hence, even if refugees aren’t displaced again by a sudden natural calamity, they will be slowly pushed out by deteriorating climate conditions from their supposed new home—displaced for the second time. And even if refugees initially choose to remain in camps despite degraded land, continuing to live in these areas may become untenable as global warming intensifies. Refugees are then left with two choices: living in inhospitable environments with threats to their life, or to be displaced again, rupturing their relationship with yet another land that they called home.
For the Home to Come
Reaching a refugee settlement is often portrayed as the end of displacement, as if those forced to flee have finally found a new home. For most refugees, however, camps are meant to be temporary while awaiting more durable solutions, which increasingly remain out of reach. Many refugees have spent generations in camps, building permanence, and home, where it once seemed impossible. As climate impacts intensify however, displacement will only worsen—leaving those who have found temporary refuge in camps in an increasingly precarious position.
This invisible double displacement of refugees from camps underscores the gap between how we perceive a refugee’s experience and how it is unfolding in a warming world. As climate disasters intensify, this pattern will only accelerate. Yet, despite the rising threat that climate change poses to the safety of the world’s refugee camps, solutions to protracted displacement—a way out of the camps or displacement, wherever it exists—only seem to shrink. ‘Warehousing’ or the “practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of restricted mobility, enforced idleness, and dependency” often translates to keeping refugees in camps for decades, if not generations. Refugee camps were never designed as a long-term solution. Durable solutions, such as resettlement to another country or full integration into a host community, will become increasingly important for the world’s refugees as climate-related disasters make camps less habitable and put their homelands at growing risk. Every individual deserves the opportunity to build a life without fear that floods will wash it away, fires will consume it, or extreme heat will make it uninhabitable.
