Mapping exposure to climate-related hazards of refugees and IDPs

By the Climate Centre

The Climate Centre today publishes new research shedding light on the exposure and vulnerability to climate hazards of forcibly displaced people worldwide.

The research was part of the Complex Risk Analytics Fund (CRAF’d) and led by the Climate Centre’s senior technical adviser and expert on refugees, Evan Easton-Calabria.

It brings together climate science, GIS methodology, and a new dataset on the locations of over 60 million forcibly displaced people in the top 20 countries hosting refugees and internally displaced people.

Currently, at least 122 million people worldwide have been forced by violence, persecution or conflict to move inside their own countries or across international borders – mostly affecting low and middle-income countries.

‘Urgent assistance’

Research highlights include:
*Seventy-six per cent of forcibly displaced people mapped, or 46 million people, were exposed to three or more hazards.
*Countries with the largest populations exposed to at least four hazards are Syria (5,550,000), Yemen (3,360,000) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (2.1 million).
*Extreme heat is the most common hazard globally, affecting almost all the countries analysed.
*Flooding in already flood-prone areas is expected to increase in at least four countries hosting IDPs: the DRC, Nigeria, Sudan and Yemen.

Launching the brief to mark World Refugee Day, Climate Centre Director Aditya Bahadur said: “It is crucial to understand the conditions faced by millions of people living in precarious conditions in camps or irregular settlements around the world, many of them bearing the terrible scars of war and poverty.  

“This CRAF’d-funded research was also supported by our colleagues in the IFRC and ICRC, and included feedback from UNHCR; it will hopefully encourage urgent assistance for people living at the intersection of climate, conflict and displacement.”

CRAF’d is the only multi-agency initiative “to finance, connect and re-imagine data to save lives … driven by the belief that data, analytics, and AI can help global partners to better anticipate, prevent, and respond to complex risks,” its website says.

In the back of a truck made into a temporary paddling-pool, Syrian IDP children cool down from the deadly heatwave aggravated by climate change. In 2021, drought was a growing concern in the country, with poor rainfall and the Euphrates at a historic low. The UN was trucking millions of litres of water to families, as well as other measures. (File photo: Ali Haj Suleiman/OCHA)