Uncovering climate vulnerabilities experienced by refugees in Jordan

Innovating data collection

While working with communities in Azraq and Zaatari camps, UNHCR Jordan learned anecdotally about pressing climate-related challenges people were facing in their daily lives. Limited access to electricity for air conditioning in the sweltering summer months. Water seeping through the roofs of older, untended shelters. “We knew about this being an issue,” says Aimee Kunze Foong, Programme Assessment and Analysis Officer in Jordan, “but we didn’t have a systematic way to look at it from a theoretical, analytical perspective, looking at it from a bird’s eye view.”

To fill this research gap, the team did not need to start from scratch. Since 2014, UNHCR Jordan has conducted the Socio-Economic Survey (also known as the Vulnerability Assessment Framework, or VAF) biennially, tracking changes in refugees’ living conditions over time by collecting data on a range of topics — from health to education to food security — though not climate. Over the past decade, the survey has established shared, reliable data and findings about refugees’ situations in Jordan across camps and host communities, enabling and strengthening the delivery of targeted humanitarian assistance.

Building upon this trusted framework, the team worked with the International Security and Development Center (ISDC) and the UNHCR Innovation Service on a pilot study to incorporate a climate resilience module into the Socio-Economic Survey. Researchers engaged with refugees in camps and host communities throughout Jordan to tailor the CVI to the Jordanian context and meaningfully assess the interplay of ecological, social, and economic factors which shape how populations experience climate impacts. They developed a novel methodology to measure refugees’ climate vulnerability as a function of a household’s exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to climate hazards.

After consulting with communities to help refine the CVI and questionnaire design, researchers surveyed a representative sample of refugees — 1,126 in camps and 4,038 in host communities — on their individual experiences of climate change. This innovative approach, capturing vulnerability at the household level, makes it possible to identify how climate challenges practically impact refugees’ lives on a daily basis. Abdellatif Ghatasheh, Associate Statistics and Data Analysis Officer in Jordan, explains the significance of this development:

“Whenever we hear ‘climate change,’ we always think of an entire city or country flooding … but a slight change might affect more people at the household level. This might not be seen at the country level, because many climate change effects have a slow onset. … [So,] now, we are focusing more on families, how individuals or households can be affected by climate change. I think this is an innovative part of the index itself.”

The climate crisis is a global challenge, but its impacts are felt differently by refugees across different backgrounds, ages, and diversities, who live in a variety of environments and socioeconomic conditions. Capturing small-scale incidents, which would likely be missed in macro data, allows humanitarians to better understand and address the most immediate, as well as long-term, threats to vulnerable communities’ safety and wellbeing.

This approach also has its limitations. As with any methodology reliant on self-reporting, there are chances of respondent bias and inaccuracies. To help ameliorate this, researchers developed several experimental questions and task-based games designed to seek information from refugees in a less formulaic way. Aimee sees exciting potential for these methods, rooted in behavioural science, a focal point of UN 2.0, to discover how and why people react to climate-related shocks as they do and, thereby, inform strategies to develop refugees’ climate resilience.

Analyzing survey findings

Following a thorough data collection process, researchers turned to synthesizing their findings. Survey responses were used to compute a vulnerability index for households based on their relative levels of:

From this data analysis, households were categorized into four states of climate vulnerability: Low Vulnerability, Stress, Crisis, and Emergency. The 2024 CVI results reveal that 40 percent of refugees in Jordan, falling into the latter three categories, exhibit concerning levels of vulnerability — with 10 percent living in a state of emergency. This includes households facing, for example, acute challenges in accessing safe drinking water or heat-related impairment of their daily activities.

As expected, refugees in camps face substantially higher exposure to climate shocks than refugees in host communities and, accordingly, are significantly more vulnerable. Across contexts, the most vulnerable households are also the least likely to adopt mitigative behavioral changes, which suggests a need for humanitarian programmes supporting refugees’ adaptive capacity.

Even more revealing, though — in terms of informing targeted interventions — are the CVI’s findings broken down at the individual camp and city levels. For example, researchers were surprised to find that refugees in Zaatari camp are more likely to experience Emergency level climate vulnerability than refugees in Azraq camp. Azraq residents live in a more desertic and isolated environment and, thus, generally face greater socio-economic vulnerability. Zaatari, meanwhile, has closer proximity, and greater access, to host communities and livelihood opportunities. However, people in Zaatari actually face greater exposure to climate shocks, largely due to deteriorating shelter conditions.

Infrastructure is a challenge across camps but especially in Zaatari. As Abdellatif explains, “Temporary shelters are expected to last for up to six years, but for some people, they have been living in the same shelter for more than 10 years.” Using these shelters — essentially, metal containers — beyond their intended lifespan increases the likelihood of leakages, flooding, and other damage from climate shocks. While UNHCR provides need-based maintenance services, funding constraints make it hard to meet all basic needs — meaning that even small climate events can increase refugees’ vulnerability. One camp resident reports: “Whenever it rains, my floor gets flooded.” Overall, 78 percent of Zaatari residents reported flooding affecting their shelters in the past year, as compared to 47 percent of Azraq residents.

Herein lies the practical value of the CVI’s detailed sub-indices and findings. “The situation on the macro level appears worse [in Azraq] in the abstract,” Abdellatif says, “but if we zoom in at the micro level at Zaatari camp, it is a worse situation.” The CVI’s innovative methodology reveals vulnerable populations and the specific challenges they face, which otherwise might go overlooked. Utilizing these granular findings, humanitarians can address pressing needs by, for instance, improving camp infrastructure and optimizing resource allocation — making them instrumental in the prioritization and planning of activities by UNHCR and other stakeholders as part of the refugee response in Jordan.