UNHCR: The Impact of Environmental Degradation on Refugee-Host Relations: a Case Study from Tanzania

While the majority of literature in the field of refugee studies centres on refugees specifically, recent years have seen an increasing amount of research that looks beyond the refugee communities to the other groups and individuals also affected by refugee emergencies. In particular, these studies look at how the host communities – the communities living in the areas where refugees eventually settle, either formally or informally – are impacted by a rapid and often unexpected influx of refugees.

The document is available for download from Reliefweb.

Sometimes refugees bring positive changes to host communities, such as economic growth or the funding of various development projects by international aid organizations that have come to the area in response to the refugee emergency. However, the influx and presence of refugees has also been shown at times to have negative impacts on individuals within a hosting community, or even on the community as a whole. In light of this, it is important to not only investigate the impact of the presence of refugees on the hosting communities, but also to consider how these impacts have then influenced the overall relationship between the two groups. In particular, it is important to determine what might contribute to a contentious or even conflictual relationship. A better understanding of this can ultimately assist those working with refugees in other situations, to plan and implement projects that may lessen the likelihood of such conflict.

One of the most frequently cited negative impacts in recent years, emphasized in particular by the host country governments, is environmental degradation and natural resource depletion. However, it is not only the host governments that claim that refugee camps cause environmental degradation: over the past several decades, there has also been a growing acceptance by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other organizations working with refugees, as well as by independent researchers, that the presence of refugees often leads to environmental degradation and natural resource depletion both within and around the refugee settlements. As written in the UNHCR manual entitled Key Principles for Decision Making: “Evidence shows that large-scale dislocation of people, characteristic of many recent refugee crises, can create adverse environmental impacts. The scale and suddenness of refugee flows can rapidly change a situation of relative abundance of local resources to one of acute scarcity” (Engineering, 2005: 3).