Challenge: Most refugees in Mbera camp cook with firewood or charcoal, which contribute to deforestation but can be acquired in small, affordable increments. LPG – a cleaner fuel – is cheaper over time, but a full cylinder, its only available format, is a high upfront cost, as is equipment to make the switch. 

Solution: Create a more affordable pay-as-you-go solution by enabling local providers to refill LPG cylinders up to smaller requested amounts. Providers will receive hand pumps and training, while households will receive cash assistance to purchase LPG stoves and refillable cylinders. 

Expected results: Diminished health and environmental impacts of charcoal use, benefitting 5,000 individuals directly and 3,500 more indirectly. Local businesses are supported and households save money with a sustainable supply and demand link. Awareness raising campaigns boost already high potential for uptake.

Challenge: The port city of Turbo is highly transited and houses a large informal settlement. Its mangrove ecosystem is highly impacted by the settlement’s waste management issues. Land rights are being sought to ensure durable solutions for forcibly displaced people, but limited local opportunities contribute to onward movement.

Solution: Building on the legalization process, create an environmental committee and train community members to promote community-led restoration and sustainable management of the mangrove. The committee will investigate commercial opportunities for sustainable livelihoods.

Expected results: Diverse community members gain capacity to undertake restoration and waste management work. Improved environmental health and possible commercial avenues for livelihood opportunities – selling seedlings, scientific research, academically focused eco-tourism – explored in collaboration with local stakeholders.

Challenge: Fields and gardens essential to livelihoods of refugees in Tongogora Refugee Camp are often damaged by animals, requiring extensive fencing. Crop damage has led to tension between agricultural and pastoral households, while fencing needs have sped up deforestation. 

Solution: Collaborate with communities to grow local plants as natural barriers around crop fields. This will reduce the need for wood, create a carbon sink, boost biodiversity, and improve social relations. The plants can also provide other benefits, including food and resources. 

Expected results: The solution, which was identified by host and refugee farmers, will benefit 2,610 individuals directly and 6,000 indirectly. It will grow local capacity, enhance livelihood options, provide sustainable resources, promote social cohesion, and contribute to biodiversity.

Challenge: Among Ukrainian refugees’ critical needs is mental health support to manage stress, adaptation, trauma. Few have accessed specialized care, due to lack of availability and stigma and, although Poland’s solidarity toward Ukrainian refugees has been exemplary, signs of compassion fatigue are starting to emerge, leading to increasing tensions.

Solution: Based on emerging evidence of the impact of green spaces on mental and physical wellbeing, UNHCR will establish diverse, multigenerational nature and gardening clubs, implement quick-impact green projects with local stakeholders, and hold citywide activities that foster human connections and build more inclusive communities. 

Expected results: This approach will harness the potential of community gardens as a vehicle for protection, bringing together 650 refugees and hosts from diverse demographics to improve wellbeing, strengthen resilience, and grow support networks. It will green urban spaces, promote dialogue, follow a skills-for-psychosocial-recovery strategy, and monitor impacts.

Challenge: Environmental degradation has driven gully formation around Nyarugusu refugee camp, posing an immediate danger to Congolese and Burundian refugees. Up to 3m deep, the gullies increase the risk of further erosion and flash floods, threatening infrastructure and ecosystems.

Solution: UNHCR will replace the current approach to control erosion – costly stone-pitched gabions – with a community-led nature-based solution whereby refugees nurture barriers composed of various native species to support soil stabilization, prevent further erosion, and boost biodiversity. 

Expected results: Community members are trained on plant care to ensure longevity, and nurseries are established to grow plants for use to prevent gully formation. More than 2,700 households are expected to benefit directly, while the entire camp benefits from a safer, healthier environment.

Challenge: The transition to solar energy has faced diverse challenges across different contexts, including a lack of linkages to national grids, high up-front costs, limited viability of market-based models, limited community ownership, low capacity for repair and maintenance, among others.

Solution: An aligned but contextualized approach across multiple countries to experiment with different forms of community-based models for the design, establishment, tariff setting, management, and financial sustainability of solar mini-grid systems, accompanied by robust monitoring for potential scalability.

Expected results: This approach to several linked pilots is an opportunity to systematically support operations with technical design and optimize processes while enabling locally relevant, flexible implementation in collaboration with communities. Diverse approaches will produce essential learnings about effective shifts to sustainable energy.

Challenge: In Nakivale Refugee Settlement, plastic-bag use remains high, despite Uganda’s ban on plastic production and consumption. Available recyclable and biodegradable bags are more costly, less sturdy, and less versatile. Waste management is limited, with few recycling options.

Solution: SEEDS, a refugee-led social enterprise employing youth with disabilities, will partner with UNHCR to ramp up production of waterproof, biodegradable paper bags. SEEDS will use profits to purchase raw materials for a community seedling scheme to sustain production and conduct routine waste collection to produce recycled building blocks.

Expected results: The project will reduce the cost of eco-friendly options, help clean up the camp environment and reduce carbon emissions. UNHCR’s partnership will amplify the reach of grassroots innovation, supporting livelihoods for refugees with disabilities.

Challenge: Many solar powered systems have been installed across camps in Cox’s Bazar to provide essential needs, but limited repair and maintenance support and lack of local capacity means many do not function adequately, contributing to e-waste issues. 

Solution: Develop and train young energy ambassadors to lead energy infrastructure repair and maintenance as well as community-based learning to promote behavior change on sustainable energy use. These ambassadors could potentially be remunerated through CBI approaches.

Expected results: Awareness raised across the camp to encourage environmentally friendly choices, and local capacity built to maintain solar energy systems, improving energy efficiency and longevity of energy infrastructure. 5,000 individuals directly benefit.

Challenge: Human-elephant conflict has increased significantly since the mass arrival of refugees to Cox’s Bazar. This has led to fatalities, injuries, crop loss, and livelihood limitations, while also exacerbating tensions between refugee and host communities – particularly given the limited success of efforts to manage this challenge in local settlements.

Solution: With a focus on host farmers, test the introduction of beehive fencing and crops that are unappealing to elephants to create natural barriers, reduce human-elephant conflict, and create alternative livelihoods options for host communities, facilitating peaceful co-existence.

Expected results: 385 individuals from host communities directly benefit, with a further 30,000 individuals, from both host and refugee communities, indirectly benefited through improved relations, reduced elephant-human conflict, and enhanced food security.

Challenge: Plastic sheets distributed to Lebanon’s tented settlements are often layered thickly to reinforce shelter roofs. Old sheets that destabilize shelters should be removed, replaced, and responsibly disposed of, but local recycling options are scarce and limited resources constrain options for maintenance and settlement improvements. 

Solution: Remove and replace old sheets in Northern Lebanon, while stabilizing and reinforcing structures. Retired sheets collected and sold to local recyclers to help cover costs. Test different methods to process plastic into useful, necessary items and train residents on their production, creating livelihood opportunities. 

Expected results: Improved shelters for at least 300 households. Income generated thanks to a recycling profit of 80 USD per tonne of plastic. Livelihoods boosted due to capacity-building activities and hiring for labor needs. Useful infrastructural materials more readily available, and a viable plastic recycling system established.

Challenge: More and better shelters are needed in Ayasita refugee camp, but its remote location and the cost of materials makes building durable housing difficult. High temperatures and low rainfall make the current, poorly insulated shelters uncomfortable and limits local livelihoods. 

Solution: Support the production of traditional debora matts from locally available materials, including date palm fibre, to provide insulation materials. Local women will be trained on mat production while sustainable date palm farming will be promoted, creating income opportunities. 

Expected results: More than 2,000 women artisans and farmers will be linked to each other to facilitate smooth supply and demand. Improved housing and livelihood opportunities, as well as more environmentally friendly farming techniques. 

Challenge: Dzaleka camp is overpopulated and exposed to significant climate change impacts. Restricted land access and freedom of movement limit opportunities, with most residents dependent on food aid. There is an urgent need to build resilience and expand options for self-reliance. 

Solution: Parallel investments in climate-smart agriculture and development of skills and knowledge as key tools for longterm self-reliance of refugees to manage future shocks, to complement investment in parametric insurance to provide life-saving support to refugee communities if risk thresholds are met. 

Expected results: Improved resilience and food security, enhancing preparedness. The twin tracks of practical resilience-building and parametric insurance will provide both the financial resources and capacities for effective responses to impending crises, reducing the vulnerability of displaced communities.

Challenge: Outlying areas of Medellin, where forcibly displaced people often settle, lack adequate waste management, leading to pollution, water contamination, and resource over-extraction, affecting environmental and human health. Vulnerable groups often engage in informal waste picking for income, which is dangerous, undignified, and poorly remunerated. 

Solution: Establish a community association to collectivize and formalize waste pickers, developing – with the support of an NGO and an academic institution – an elderly- and disability- inclusive community-based waste management system with value-addition activities for enhanced income, improved health standards, and community empowerment. 

Expected results: 100 people from refugee, internally displaced, and host communities, with vulnerable groups represented, benefit from improved livelihoods and working conditions. Best practices developed in terms of waste processing and value addition (e.g., urban composting for sale of fertilizer).

Challenge: Most forcibly displaced people in Ecuador work in the informal sector and live in areas with few income-generating opportunities. The green economy could offer a solution, but opportunities and methods to successfully leverage it have not been fully explored or understood.  

Solution: Work with refugees, host communities and stakeholders to identify and test how they could successfully develop green products and businesses not only for income, but to address key local challenges, such as food waste in wholesale markets, and associated negative environmental and human health impacts. 

Expected results: 128 refugee entrepreneurs will directly benefit from capacity-building and other support, with further benefits derived from improved livelihoods, greener practices, and a method to follow with other refugees. Evidence generated on the viability of transitioning to green economies presented to local stakeholders and relevant actors.

Challenge: Solar appliances and devices have been distributed or established across refugee settlements in Cox’s Bazar to meet energy and protection needs, but limited skills, maintenance issues, and sometimes quality-control limitations impact the equipment’s lifespan, creating e-waste.

Solution: UNHCR is developing a system for e-waste collection, value-chain analysis, recycling, and repurposing, by developing refugee skills to refurbish appliances and other products, and assessing a take-back scheme for recycling and potentially refurbishing solar appliances.

Expected results: Improved waste management to reduce negative environmental impact, creation of livelihood opportunities, and extended equipment lifespans. More than 40,000 people are expected to benefit, directly or indirectly, from the programme.

Challenge: Low-income displaced families need alternative housing solutions that are environmentally sustainable and appropriate for the local climate and needs.

Solution: UNHCR and the Federal University of Roraima will test new construction techniques to build housing units with locally available, sustainable materials that can withstand local conditions and provide better protection for families.

Expected results: Fewer emergency shelters used, refugees and migrants in settlements close to the Venezuelan border learn sustainable construction techniques, environmentally friendly construction methods to improve transitional shelters identified.

Challenge: Palorinya refugee settlement is located in seasonal floodplains that become a breeding ground for mosquitoes in the rainy season – a situation aggravated by climate change and deforestation. Efforts to respond to the increased malaria risk have had limited success.

Solution: UNHCR will test the use of products derived from locally available resources, such as lemongrass and neem trees, as a natural mosquito repellent to boost malaria prevention efforts.

Expected results: Improved malaria prevention, environmental restoration and revegetation from planting of lemongrass and neem trees to reduce the impact of rains and flooding, livelihoods opportunities related to tree-care and repellent production. Nearly 35,000 households are expected to benefit from the initiative.

Challenge: Humanitarian items distributed to newly arrived refugees and displaced people can have high environmental impacts on host areas, fostering a negative image that refugees contribute to poor environmental health.

Solution: UNHCR will assess the supply chain, waste generation, and carbon footprint of activities supporting refugee arrivals to determine potential adjustments to supply activities that will integrate environmental considerations in procurement criteria.

Expected results: Solutions and opportunities to promote circular material use, consider end-of-life options for items provided to refugees, and inform a more sustainable response.

Challenge: Medellin’s periphery has seen an increase in settlements due to waves of displacement from armed conflict and arrival of Venezuelan refugees. The displaced face limited livelihood options and challenges integrating locally, resulting in neighbourhoods with environmental degradation and water pollution.

Solution: UNHCR will establish community hydroponic gardens and employ traditional cultivation methods to grow native organic vegetables for community use with the aim of building bridges between displaced communities for better inclusion and shared livelihoods.

Expected results: Improved environmental restoration through dialogue and cooperation, restored environmental health, potential livelihoods creation, and the promotion of environmental knowledge and social cohesion amongst the various refugees, IDPs, returnees and hosts.

Challenge: Lima faces absolute water scarcity worsened by pollution, climate change and the depletion of water sources. Limited access to potable water and dependence on industries affected by water shortages threaten refugee health and livelihoods.

Solution: UNHCR will pilot the use of fog nets – atmospheric water harvesting units – at a household and family scale, training refugee families in their installation and use, to test their effectiveness at addressing water scarcity.

Expected results: A community-based method of installing and maintaining fog nets that improves water security and environmental health while providing livelihood opportunities. Around 150 people are expected to directly benefit from the pilot.

Challenge: In displacement settings, ineffective waste management can create environmental issues that impact human and ecosystem health – but closed-loop energy systems can reduce negative impacts and make better use of waste to power other activities.

Solution: UNHCR will introduce a closed-loop system in the Tongogara refugee settlement that uses household waste as an input for livestock farming – and pig-farming waste as inputs for biogas production.

Expected results: Better waste management, improved environmental and human health, increased livelihoods opportunities, and more sustainable energy to power further livelihoods activities.

Challenge: The thousands of people displaced in the Sahel every year – a number likely to increase due to climate change impacts – need housing, but affordable temporary shelters are made of inadequate materials, while more durable ones are costly and carbon intensive.

Solution: This cross-border collaboration will explore using traditional building techniques that are environmentally friendly and make use of local materials and skills. Adobe shelters using the Nubian vault technique have already been tested in Burkina Faso and will be piloted in Somalia.

Expected results: Establishing a technique for sustainable, context-appropriate housing will provide new shelter options and potentially open pathways to use carbon credit schemes as an innovative financing mechanism. Around 150 people are expected to directly benefit from this initiative.

Challenge: Increasing climate change impacts are compounding vulnerabilities in northern Ecuador, with high impact weather events leading to cycles of displacement for Ecuadorian communities as well as refugees and migrants from Venezuela and Colombia.

Solution: UNHCR will test a variety of mitigation and adaptation solutions based on traditional and Indigenous knowledge tailored to five distinct ecosystems in northern Ecuador.

Expected results: Enhanced environmental management, skills and knowledge-exchange systems developed, improved social and economic resilience. This initiative is projected to benefit 270 people, with up to 10,300 experiencing indirect benefits.

Challenge: The ongoing arrival of forcibly displaced people in Uganda – with limited support available and rising food insecurity – is leading to environmental degradation, with wetland ecosystems exploited for livelihoods and agriculture.

Solution: UNHCR will introduce fish farming in swamps around the settlements to provide more sustainable livelihood opportunities, boost food security, and reduce destructive agricultural practices.

Expected results: Empowerment of local communities (particularly women and youth), provision of sustainable livelihoods and food sources, maintenance and regeneration of wetlands.