Refugees innovating for inclusive climate action

It’s hot, dry and dusty in Tongogara refugee settlement, southeast of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare — except when it’s flooding. Over the past 20 years, the camp’s population expanded rapidly, and it now hosts around 22,000 people, driving demand for local resources. The expansion of essential agricultural fields increased contact with wildlife, while the need for fencing to protect those fields from livestock damage led to more logging. This contributed to deforestation that has exacerbated the camp’s vulnerability to extreme heat, cyclones, and heavy rainfall — all of which are due to intensify with climate change.

Young refugees in the settlement identified these challenges — and chose to act. These activists formed the Refugee Coalition for Climate Action (RCCA) in 2020 and started planting trees, picking up trash, and raising awareness. In 2024, with support from UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund, RCCA took the lead on trialling a nature-based solution to resolve the challenge of how to protect their livelihoods — propagating, selecting, then planting out, with the help of farmers, 3,000 cactus and sisal species to create a 3.2km-long (and counting!) thorny barricade around precious cropland.

On the frontlines

“Climate change is affecting everyone everywhere, but in very different ways,” says Tala Budziszewski, who leads UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation Programme. “For refugees, its devastating impacts are a daily reality.” As detailed in UNHCR’s No Escape reports, three in four people forced to flee live in countries facing high or extreme exposure to climate-related hazards. Nearly all refugee camps are projected to face a future of extreme heat.

These climate-related risks have a significant impact not only on displaced people, but also on UNHCR’s efforts to protect them and achieve solutions. UNHCR has set an ambitious goal of reducing the number of refugees living in protracted displacement and reliant on humanitarian assistance by 50 percent by 2035. But in early 2025, half of all returnees returned to climate-vulnerable locations. “You can’t talk about long-term solutions and self-reliance, key to delivering our mandate, without considering how climate is affecting the places refugees live in or might go to,” Tala says.

UNHCR’s role, as she sees it, is at multiple levels: Working with refugees to ensure they have the tools necessary to adapt to how climate change affects their lives, choices, and opportunities; and ensuring they can participate and are included in adaptation planning, financing and decision making, to help shape these processes in a way that responds to their lived experiences.

New solutions to enduring challenges

Innovation is essential to adapt and respond to the heightened risks of climate change in contexts of forced displacement. UNHCR Innovation’s programming aims to nurture new solutions in this space as well as supporting the groundbreaking contributions refugees are making in this space.

“Refugee-led organizations like RCCA are doing remarkable work in frontline communities yet with limited financial resources,” says Gawaar Juich, Director of RCCA. “It is time RLOs receive adequate support — either through direct donor funding or meaningful partnerships”. UNHCR’s climate action innovation work is about creating the enabling environment for those locally initiated innovations to grow.

Climate action led by communities

Supporting inclusive climate action, driven by communities, starts with ensuring refugees are involved right at the beginning, in defining the challenge. This ensures climate action responds to real needs, as in Zimbabwe, rather than simply imposing a generalized idea of what a climate solution should look like.

One thing this process reveals time and again is that, while climate change impacts are often thought about on a long timeframe, communities are being affected in the here and now. Their key concerns often centre on, for instance, how climate and environmental hazards shred their incomes and limit the choices available to them. To respond to these concerns, climate-positive programming must deliver on meeting basic needs in equitable and inclusive ways.

That’s why, in Zimbabwe, RCCA is working with UNHCR to protect farmers’ livelihoods using a solution that will also reduce climate vulnerabilities. The biofencing project also promoted gender inclusion, ensuring women were key decision-makers. “Their participation not only contributes to the success of the initiative but also enables them to earn a monthly income, helping to support their families and improve household stability,” says Gawaar.

Investing strategically to support protection

Delivering on UNHCR’s mandate to protect and include people forced to flee requires addressing not only the immediate impacts of the climate crisis, but also ensuring solutions create protective environments. “Activities focused on environmental regeneration and green skills have been key entry points for bringing refugee and host communities together and showing that refugees can contribute to building better futures for everyone” Tala says. In Zimbabwe, refugees and host community farmers worked together to protect common agricultural lands. Participants are now sharing the solutions with their peers, who have begun replicating it in their own kitchen gardens.

Through pilot initiatives in, so far, more than 27 countries, UNHCR Innovation generates evidence about how new climate action approaches can work — and how they can be adapted, replicated, or scaled to maximize their impact. “Our work, as Innovation, is really about developing that proof of concept, showing that these solutions not only deliver environmental benefits, but they solve the priority challenges of refugees in a financially sustainable and feasible way,” Tala says.

Navigating challenges

Despite the diverse benefits of community-led climate action, the path toward mainstreaming successful new approaches is far from simple. “The humanitarian funding cycle is not very conducive to innovating in this space,” Tala points out, “because a lot is expected to be delivered in a short space of time. And there are some processes that you simply cannot speed up.” Monitoring and evaluation of climate action projects is complex, with long timescales needed to see certain impacts — for instance, environmental regeneration or viability of start-up businesses.

This has knock-on impacts for the ability of successful ideas to scale — since a given initiative’s value must be measurable before investments can be made in replicating or scaling it. These enduring challenges are compounded by current humanitarian funding and personnel contractions, which have significantly affected the technical expertise within UNHCR required to deliver essential environment and climate action work.

Some of these structural challenges will be partly addressed through UNHCR’s just-launched Innovation Accelerator — a global initiative designed to scale proven solutions. Already, the Accelerator is supporting a solarization project to explore locally tailored, sustainable energy solutions across multiple regions — an exciting opportunity to both reduce environmental degradation and promote self-reliance for the 91% of refugees living in camps who currently lack sustainable energy options.

Charting a new path forward

Even as the humanitarian sector reels from the repercussions of tightened purse-strings, climate action remains an increasingly essential part of UNHCR’s work. Submissions to the latest round of the UNHCR Innovation Incubator continued to put forward a wide range of ideas to tackle climate-related challenges, from using data analytics to better prepare for climate risks, to refugee-led flood risk management.

And the locally led climate action ongoing around the world gives room for hope. In Zimbabwe, the nature-based fencing project engaged 700 community members to help prevent erosion, store carbon, reduce deforestation, and strengthen food security and social cohesion. The fact that the solution was rooted in and run by the community was key to its success: activities continued even after the 2025 humanitarian funding freeze, because the community wanted them to; farmers were persuaded of the idea’s utility and worked to not only complete the planned fenceline, but also to extend it. As Gawaar says, “ensuring equitable access to climate finance for displaced populations is both a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.”

The full impact of this nature-based solution will take time to measure, but early benefits such as fewer animals entering cropland are already visible. The camp’s new refugee-run nursery, staffed by newly trained entrepreneurs, can grow 30,000 trees and seedlings annually — creating 800 square metres of potential for a more climate-resilient future.

Find out more about UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation work here.