The land itself becomes hostile, and there is nowhere left to go.
In July 2024, floodwaters tore through Chad after severe rains killed 341 people and collapsed more than 164,000 homes. Among the 1.5 million people affected were over a million refugees who had already crossed borders to escape conflict in Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon. For hundreds of them, the flooding meant searching for shelter all over again — not for the first time, and almost certainly not for the last.
This is the reality of double displacement: people who have already been uprooted by war or persecution, now uprooted again by the planet's changing climate. It is a pattern playing out across refugee camps from East Africa to South Asia to the Middle East, and it is accelerating. Alexia Gardner and Anum Merchant, policy analysts at the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, have documented the scope of the problem in a report that makes one thing clear — arriving at a refugee camp has never been the end of the story, and increasingly, it is not even a stable chapter.
Kadaab camp in northern Kenya offers the starkest illustration. Built in 1991 to shelter Somalis fleeing civil war, it has grown into one of the largest refugee settlements on earth, home to more than 400,000 people. Some residents have lived there for decades. Children have been born there, grown up there, had children of their own. Then, in 2024, extreme flooding struck the camp and forced 20,000 people to higher ground. Somalia itself — already one of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations, cycling between devastating floods and punishing droughts — continues to push new arrivals toward Dadaab, many of them fleeing environmental collapse as much as armed conflict.
About 22 percent of the world's refugee population lives in camps, and most of those camps sit in what researchers call climate hotspots — regions already bearing the heaviest burden of rising temperatures, intensifying storms, and erratic rainfall. The African continent, which hosts many of the largest camps, faces acute risk of extreme heat, flooding, and drought. By 2050, the 15 hottest refugee camps in the world — all of them in Africa — are projected to experience nearly 200 days or more of hazardous heat stress every single year.
The camps themselves compound the danger. Built as temporary structures, they were never designed to withstand the conditions now battering them. Wood frames and plastic sheeting offer little insulation against extreme heat or driving rain. Sanitation systems buckle under flooding. Densely packed layouts leave little room for drainage or firebreaks. In Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh — home to more than a million Rohingya refugees spread across roughly 34 camps — the construction of shelters required clearing hillside forests, which stripped away the natural buffers against landslides and monsoon floods. A fire in 2021 displaced 45,000 people. Just recently, another fire destroyed 400 homes and displaced 2,000 more. Without reliable energy sources, residents burn firewood to cook, which feeds the cycle of fire risk.
In Jordan, Za'atari camp was established in 2012 to house Syrians fleeing their country's civil war. Around 65,000 people live there now, in a desert region where water is already scarce and desertification is advancing. According to the UNHCR's Climate Vulnerability Index, 40 percent of refugees in Jordan are already exposed to worsening dust storms and heat waves. At Za'atari, 62 percent of residents are considered highly vulnerable to climate impacts.
What makes this crisis particularly cruel is its invisibility. A sudden flood or fire registers as a disaster. But the slow degradation of land — soil turning to dust, heat becoming unsurvivable, water tables dropping — pushes people out gradually, without the drama that draws international attention. The United Nations projects that nearly all current refugee settlements will eventually face unprecedented levels of hazardous heat. Even refugees who are not swept out by a single catastrophic event will eventually find their camps untenable, forced to move again from a place that had, over years or decades, become home.
Displacement is not a singular event, and it was never meant to be treated as one. The camps were supposed to be temporary waypoints toward durable solutions — resettlement, integration, voluntary return. Those solutions have remained out of reach for most. Generations have been born into camps that were designed to last months. Now the climate is making even that fragile permanence impossible to hold. The question is not whether more refugees will be displaced again. The question is whether the world will build systems capable of responding before the next flood, the next fire, the next summer that simply does not end.
Notable Quotes
By 2050, many refugee camps will be rendered nearly uninhabitable by extreme weather events.— United Nations projection, cited in USCRI report
Even if refugees aren't displaced by a sudden disaster, they will be slowly pushed out by deteriorating climate conditions — displaced for the second time.— Alexia Gardner and Anum Merchant, USCRI
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When we talk about double displacement, are we talking about something new, or has this always been part of the refugee experience?
It's always existed in some form, but climate change is making it structural rather than exceptional. The camps were built for conflict refugees, not for a world where the land itself becomes hostile.
Why are refugee camps so much more exposed to climate risk than other communities?
Partly location — they're often in marginal, unwanted land that nobody else wanted precisely because it's flood-prone or arid. And partly design — temporary structures were never built to absorb what a changing climate throws at them.
The deforestation at Cox's Bazar struck me. The act of building shelter made the danger worse?
Exactly. Clearing hillsides to build homes removed the very thing that held the hillsides together. It's a trap with no clean exit — you need shelter, but building it increases your exposure to the next disaster.
Is there a meaningful difference between someone fleeing drought and someone fleeing war, in terms of how the international system responds?
Legally, yes — and that gap matters enormously. Climate displacement doesn't fit neatly into the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was written around persecution. So people fleeing environmental collapse often have fewer protections.
The 2050 projection — 200 days of hazardous heat in the hottest African camps — what does that actually mean for daily life?
It means outdoor activity becomes life-threatening for more than half the year. Water systems fail. Food spoils. Children and elderly people are at acute risk. It's not a future crisis; it's a present one accelerating.
You mentioned that reaching a camp is often portrayed as the end of displacement. Who benefits from that framing?
It lets the international community treat the problem as solved. If the camp is the destination, there's no pressure to find something better. But for the people inside, it was never the destination — it was supposed to be a pause.
What would actually change the trajectory here?
Durable solutions — resettlement, integration — that have been promised for decades and not delivered. And infrastructure investment that treats camps as long-term communities rather than temporary inconveniences, because that's what they've become.