Displaced from Home and Sheltered in an Extreme Environment

WhoWhatWhy - In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, scientists analyzed refugees’ exposure to extreme weather events in Kakuma and 19 other large refugee settlements. The results confirmed that refugee camps are exposed to harsher conditions than those found in the rest of the host country. Worldwide, more than 6.6 million people live in refugee settlements (as of 2022). And although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recognized that countries in East Africa and South Asia — areas that host some of the largest refugee settlements — are global hot spots of human vulnerability, little work has been done to measure the exposure of refugee settlements to extreme weather events.