by Ray Wilkinson

It is one of the world's most stunning landscapes. Endless savannah grasslands, dotted with the graceful silhouettes of giraffe and ponderous elephants, shade into deep lakes and simmering volcanoes which spike broodingly into the African sky. Hopelessly overcrowded villages and the last great concentration of mountain gorillas cling precariously, side by side, to mountain slopes. Peeling waterside mansions recall the corruption of 19th century colonialism and despotic 20th century post-colonial tyrants.

Hundreds of thousands of terrified people spilled into this region in 1994. Fleeing one of modern history's worst atrocities – the killing fields of Rwanda – they set the stage for another spectacular collision, this time between man and his environment.

On the plains of Tanzania vast cities sprung up virtually overnight as refugees cowered in hastily airlifted tents, flimsy twig huts or simply in hollows scooped into the ground. In the shadows of still rumbling volcanoes, other refugees perched atop and in the fissures of ancient lava flows, the ash so hard even dynamite had no impact on its surface. In neighboring Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) towns such as Goma and Bukavu were overwhelmed by frenzied and then exhausted hordes of frightened exiles.

Armies of men, women and children slashed and felled millions of trees in the previously virgin forests of Zaire's Virunga National Park, Africa's oldest game sanctuary, in a daily search for fuel. In the Kagera region of northwest Tanzania, refugees consumed more than 1,200 tons of wood per day. Local gunmen, poachers and refugees trapped or shot out wildlife, including the gorillas.

A WATERSHED

Such mass flights of civilians always have a major impact on the surrounding countryside in which they seek safety. But unlike earlier exoduses, events in Africa's Great Lakes region in the mid-1990s proved an environmental watershed of sorts.

UNHCR's Japanese High Commissioner Sadako Ogata had set the stage in 1992 with possibly the most comprehensive statement up to that time linking the scourge of environmental degradation and refugees.

She expanded the debate before the special U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, noting that though it was already well known refugee movements could lead to ecological destruction, environmental degradation often set the whole cruel cycle in motion as civilians increasingly were forced to flee in the first place because of this phenomenon.

"This relationship between refugees and the environment has long been overlooked," she said, pledging her agency to a much more comprehensive involvement.

Rwanda highlighted the problem to a global audience. The orgy of death was the most well-documented genocide in history. Huge numbers of terrified people then fled the killing fields into an extremely beautiful but fragile ecosystem where their ongoing plight was covered by an unprecedented media blitz. Those facts, plus a generally heightened awareness of environmental concerns resulted, perhaps for the first time, in a widespread international recognition of the refugee-ecology link.

Billions of dollars worth of regular aid – food, water, shelter, medicines – were trucked and flown into the stricken region even as thousands of persons died from exhaustion, cholera and other disease. And when it became clear the refugees would be staying for months or years rather than weeks, humanitarian organizations also turned their attention to some burgeoning environmental headaches.

To prevent the further destruction of Zaire's forests, UNHCR hired 100 trucks to haul commercial firewood to the camps for cooking and poured $2.5 million into a similar project in Tanzania.

In addition to such 'normal' programs as planting trees, providing fuel-efficient stoves or helping people grow crops, the refugee agency promoted other unusual projects.

It financed the retraining and re-equipping of park rangers to protect invaluable flora and the mountain gorillas and helped to rehabilitate a local volcano observatory, which, among other things, tracked the ominous rumblings of nearby Mount Nyiragongo. The volcano did not explode then, but earlier this year a vast sea of molten lava finally spewed down its sides, virtually burying Goma town and forcing tens of thousands of panicked civilians to flee.

GOING GLOBAL

Even as field workers grappled with the uncertainties of African volcanoes and disappearing rain forests, the refugee agency went 'global' in 1996, issuing its first all-embracing Environmental Guidelines.

These recognized that "While traditional UNHCR activities have succeeded in ... sustaining refugee populations, there has been an increasing realization that the negative environmental impacts associated with refugee situations must be better understood and dealt with."

Mass flight, the guidelines acknowledged, could destroy entire ecosystems and economic infrastructures, seriously harming not only refugees but local populations as well and causing a widening ripple effect of social, economic and political chaos. The guidelines offered general advice on how to prevent or alleviate these problems.

Underlining the increasing importance of the issue, the Japanese government funded the appointment of three successive senior environmental coordinators at the organization's Geneva headquarters.

That program lapsed several years ago, highlighting the dilemma that no matter how worthy the cause, programs do not automatically prosper in an increasingly complex and competitive humanitarian world.

Projects can be expensive at a time when budgets are shrinking. The rehabilitation of refugee camps in Africa alone could cost as much as $150 million annually. Environmental schemes were viewed in the past with suspicion, as 'luxuries' to be implemented only when more urgent projects had been completed – an attitude which is still widespread today within UNHCR and the humanitarian community.

Manpower as well as financial resources remain in short supply. Within the refugee agency there is one full-time environmental expert in Geneva and around 20 part-time experts in the field. An age-old debate continues on just who should be responsible for environmental projects – humanitarian or development organizations – especially when programs such as reforestation may continue for years after the departure of the last refugees.

HOT POTATO

The environment has become a political hot potato with some governments increasingly vocal in their demand that the international community must foot the bill for cleanup and rehabilitation projects even when it is unclear if refugees were the cause of the degradation in the first place.

Such dilemmas come at a particularly critical time in the refugee environmental cycle. In the Horn of Africa, a perennial hothouse of war and exodus, more than 30 camps are scheduled to close as hundreds of thousands of people return home and UNHCR undertakes one of its most ambitious cleanup operations ever.

In Sudan, Africa's largest country, as much as $10 million was earmarked for operations and Bellings Sikanda, head of the agency's operations in Showak in the eastern part of the country said, "We are now at a crossroads here. The refugee program is beginning to wind down and we are leaving. But there is still a price tag to this."

Reflecting the political sensitivity of the debate, Bushra el Amin, the government's leading coordinator told Refugees "Some people say what you are offering is a drop in the sea. We appreciate that drop since we are optimists." But he then added, in apparent contradiction, "We want lots of money and lots of action."

West and central Africa faced the opposite problem to the Horn. As East Africa wrestled with camp rehabilitation and resettling returning refugees into fragile ecosystems, Liberia, Congo and surrounding regions were gripped by ongoing conflict, renewed flights of refugees and all of the environmental headaches produced by war.

Across the globe, hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees also began to go home, presenting massive environmental challenges on several fronts. As many as 200 sites in Pakistan, which hosted millions of Afghans for many years, may need cleaning up.

Afghanistan itself is an economic and environmental nightmare with literally everything ranging from individual village homes and fields to factories and hospitals needing to be rebuilt from scratch. In an indication of how one environmental disaster can cause global ripple effects, Afghanistan is so short of wood millions of dollars worth of timber will be imported from as far away as South Africa and Tanzania to help rebuild the country.

Refugees and their environment may have only a modest impact on the earth's overall physical well-being, but a recently released 450-page report entitled Global Environmental Outlook, painted a very bleak picture for the future unless everyone – governments, big business and organizations – radically changed their ways.

More than 1,000 scientists warned that living species, entire ecosystems, especially forests, could continue to disappear at an alarming rate and more than half the world will be affected by water shortages.

As former High Commissioner Ogata warned in her 1992 speech, millions of refugees are 'born' by such ongoing degradation and may then go on to exacerbate the degradation themselves in their search for safety.

A world summit on sustainable development will discuss these issues later this year in South Africa.

ON THE EDGE

It is early spring in eastern Sudan and temperatures are already in the 50s – so hot it is like walking into a Turkish bath where the steam has turned into solid clouds of heat. Dust tornadoes swirl across the drab, flat grey-brown landscape and just as suddenly disappear into the slate-grey sky. Cattle and goat carcasses dot the horizon. They die where they drop. Nothing can be done to save them.

Around every settlement and town, low-lying spiky scrub trees are draped, like Christmas trees for the terribly poor, with millions of discarded plastic bags – a dreary reminder of the excess of human consumption and its impact on a delicate ecosystem. Rusting farm machines and abandoned silos are monuments to a failed experiment to 'make the desert bloom' and turn the region into the breadbasket for the entire Middle East.

Most of the country's estimated 120,000 Eritrean refugees live in this region. In the 1980s, more than one million uprooted people from some of the nine countries which share borders with Sudan took refuge here. There are an additional five million Sudanese who have been displaced by civil conflict in their own country – the highest figure in the world. War seems to be a 'constant' in this area.

Not all of the 20 million uprooted persons UNHCR currently cares for live in such harsh surroundings, of course. Conditions for refugees are as variable as the climate in different parts of the world and a converted military barracks somewhere in Europe may seem almost deluxe in comparison to the east African savannah.

But the great majority do live on the very edge of survivability. Uprooted peoples often escape from the world's poorest nations and take sanctuary in equally destitute countries. They are sometimes housed in uninhabited parts of a country where there is little or no infrastructure or on land which locals long ago decided was too difficult to tame.

The severity of the landscape in eastern Sudan, northern Kenya or parts of Pakistan is a stark reminder of a fact so glaring that it is often overlooked or ignored – refugees and the environment encompass far more than a project to replant a forest or clean up a deserted camp. Virtually every problem faced by refugees and the organizations trying to help them has an 'environmental' connection.

NARROW FOCUS

"We tend to look at the 'environment' through a very narrowly focused telescope," says Sergio Calle-Noreña, who is not an environmental expert himself but a senior UNHCR protection officer in Kenya. "The environment involves politics, protection, security, food and health – very obvious really when you think about it, but people often don't connect all the dots."

Women refugees in the Dadaab complex of camps in eastern Kenya, for instance, were terrorized for years when they had to scavenge for firewood in the bush. Their protection, security and health were all severely compromised (see story page 8). Polluting scarce water points or using 'green' firewood cause serious health problems. The scarcity of wood and the inability to cook food, even if it is available, lead to malnutrition and other diseases.

The battle for resources can lead to social and political turmoil. Difficulties between refugees and local communities invariably fall into this category. Some governments, especially in Africa, used to welcome refugees, giving them plots of land and sometimes citizenship. But as the numbers increased over the decades and refugees stayed longer, new arrivals were not allowed to 'integrate' with local communities and support themselves on donated farmland, but were confined to overcrowded camps.

Though such moves were designed to take the pressure off natural resources and appease local communities, they often had the opposite effect as the refugees were forced to forage, often against the law, for scarce resources such as firewood and crops.

In a move to counter that trend, Zambia recently announced a pilot project in which some of the nearly 300,000 refugees the country supports will be integrated into local communities and given land to produce crops for both domestic use and export. The move was partially designed to counter prevailing attitudes summed up by one local chief, who said, "We thought the refugees were [only] here to cut down our trees and use our water."

GOOD, BAD, UGLY

The history of both economic and environmental projects in the developing world entered journalistic folklore many years ago – encompassing as they do the extremes of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Projects range from the latest technology wizardry to the most down-to-earth and time-tested of programs. Environmental education is the most basic tool encouraging, explaining and cajoling refugees, especially children, local people and government officials through eco-clubs, classroom lectures, literature and local theatre.

Tree planting and reforestation, especially in semi-desert regions, have become the cornerstones of environmental programs. In one of the most ambitious projects of its kind, the World Bank in conjunction with UNHCR and other organizations spent $80 million in the 1990s to rehabilitate forests in Pakistan

Green belts increasingly surround camps in the arid Horn of Africa and regenerate despoiled areas in the tropical central African regions, improving soil conservation, restoring biological diversity, providing building and cooking resources and shade.

A myriad of other projects have been introduced. High tech satellite imagery and GPS (global positioning systems) can chart refugee movements, camp locations and any environmental destruction.

At the low tech end of the scale, so-called multi-storey gardening may be a partial answer in overcrowded camps, refugees needing only a burlap bag some tin cans and a little soil to produce bumper crops in confined spaces. Rwandan refugees in northern Uganda use ubiquitous termite mounds to help turn their waste into useful fertilizer and others weave discarded plastic bags into mats and shelter materials.

CHEQUERED HISTORY

The energy efficient stove in all of its guises has had perhaps the most chequered career of any project. People in developing nations use inordinate amounts of wood for cooking but their traditional methods – often a simple open fire – are extremely inefficient. When tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of refugees cluster together in a confined space the results are predictable – a savage assault on the surrounding countryside as they scour for wood.

Better stoves appear to be the answer. In some African camps, families are encouraged first to plant several trees and are then 'rewarded' with a new stove (the rationale here being that nothing should ever be given away free). Today's stoves are simple and cheap devices made from local soils and clays, sometimes with tin liners which experts believe are as much as 60 percent more fuel-efficient than traditional methods. Their use should result in enormous savings among large concentrations of refugees.

So far so good for the theory, but it has proved frustratingly difficult to sustain such programs.

Rwandan refugees in Tanzania in the 1990s received new 'improved' cookers, but many abandoned them because they had been built 'in the wrong place' in their huts, traditional stone fires could burn large pieces of wood, thus avoiding the laborious job of chopping timber into smaller pieces for the new stoves which also took longer to cook maize, thus negating their apparent fuel saving.

"We have learned many lessons," Matthew Owen, an environmental consultant, told Refugees at the time. "We do not put so much faith in the improved stove now."

Still the experts keep trying. One Swiss engineer designed a very effective grass-burning stove, but when it was field tested in Tanzania, it was quickly discovered that refugees would have had to plunder virtually all the grass in the area to feed the voracious machines. Some solar cookers are cheap and easy to build, but they take several times as long to cook a meal and many refugees view them skeptically.

There have been other setbacks. Newly arrived civilians at one site in Sudan were given more than 100 tractors, but to use them efficiently they first had to uproot the surrounding tree cover. Being pastoralists, the refugees eventually abandoned the machines anyway after damaging the environment.

Part of this, of course, goes with the territory. Projects may be experimental in nature and some inevitably fail. Others collapse because of bureaucratic bungling; the lack of an institutional memory in organizations or their refusal to become involved in expensive, long-term projects which they consider development rather than humanitarian projects. Refugees, too, are often reluctant to embrace new ideas.

In Kenya's Kakuma camp some were not interested in using new stoves because they did not expect to stay for very long. Others shunned the stoves because they reminded them of the shape of graves. In Sudan they are sometimes used as flowerpots.

Cultural differences hamper other developments. Some women in Kakuma avoided using more modern toilets because they feared they would become infertile. In Sudan, some projects were stalled almost indefinitely among Eritrean refugees because it was not realized that women were not allowed to work outside their homes. That situation has radically altered these days to such an extent that it led to a memorable exchange between one visiting dignitary and a male refugee.

"I see women, women working everywhere. But what are the men doing?" the visitor asked. To which the refugee replied: "The men give the permission for the women to work."

WHAT NOW?

The environmental stakes are enormous – on both the personal and global level. A carefully organized garden on a tiny backplot can sustain a starving family. A replanted forest may regenerate an entire region, supporting refugees and local communities alike.

Nations, often among the world's poorest, which have helped millions of refugees for many years in the past, can be encouraged to keep their doors open to future arrivals if they can be convinced their countryside will not be despoiled. Political and physical barriers will be erected if they believe otherwise, as is already happening in some countries.

Financial and physical resources will never be enough to tackle every outstanding problem, but new technology and ideas, the greater involvement of more players, especially local communities, children and refugees themselves, and a more thorough and sustained application of existing knowledge and guidelines could have a major impact.

World Environment Day 2002 was used as a catalyst not only to launch thousands of projects and exhibits around the world, but also to encourage closer working ties between the refugee agency and its international and local partners.

Though a large body of information covering the majority of refugee-environmental situations already exists – including their initial flight, arrival in a safe country and ultimate repatriation – it is often applied sparingly, if at all.

During the chaos of a refugee exodus environmental concerns generally take a backseat to more 'immediate' problems such as providing food, housing and water and political calculation. In some circumstances this is inevitable.

A camp may not be located in the best environmental position because governments are often preoccupied with security concerns.

Harassed aid officials have little time for 'esoteric' considerations such as the preservation of trees in the race to provide life-saving water supplies.

But the two issues need not be mutually exclusive and misguided emergency decisions often return to haunt aid operations leading to a degraded life style for refugees, clashes with local communities over scarce natural resources, fractured relations with governments and expensive cleanup operations.

Even common-sense guidelines are still ignored. Forests continue to be chopped down and other areas bulldozed clean to establish camp sites causing irreparable damage, according to environmental experts.

There is no clearly defined exit strategy either among humanitarian agencies. Sites which once housed huge concentrations of civilians have been cleaned up – or not – on an ad hoc basis and one expert described the humanitarian modus operandi of earlier years as: "Get out of the country as soon as the last refugee has left."

NOT ACCEPTABLE

In today's environmentally aware world, that is no longer acceptable especially if hosting countries are expected to continue to shoulder the burden of hosting future refugees.

There are other areas where much remains to be done. Refugees often return home to areas which are as fragile as the camps themselves and David Stone, UNHCR's senior environmental expert said, "We have only just begun to scratch the surface" in helping prepare civilians to meet this challenge.

No preparation or the wrong kind of preparation is a recipe for disaster. It was discovered recently, for example, that an area in Eritrea officially earmarked for the return of many of the expected 120,000 returnees would not be able to sustain them. A search was launched for new locations.

Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries on earth and in its dilemma where to house floods of returning refugees the government de-gazetted the majority of the country's 2,500 square kilometer Akagera National Park to help accommodate them. To the horror of environmentalists, it has been virtually destroyed in the intervening years.

The plight of urban refugees has had little attention to date and the problems faced by the world's estimated 20-25 million people internally displaced within their own countries are often more politically sensitive than those of refugees. "It is easier for humanitarian agencies to give these people a quick fix such as shelter and food than even begin to think of tackling long-term problems with nature," one expert said. "That's one for the development boys, but much of the time there is simply a vacuum."

Some tentative steps have now been taken, according to UNHCR's Stone, to develop blueprints for a pilot 'environmentally friendly' refugee camp which would balance site layout, water supplies, arable farming plots and technology in a careful mix. Such a plan could then be applied in situations around the world. "It may sound idealistic, but it is practical," Stone said. "Most everything could be recycled or regenerated within a given camp."

Wider cooperation with local communities, governments and international development agencies and a more flexible and inclusive attitude within humanitarian organizations must also be realized, environmental experts insisted. Some of these efforts, it must be noted, have been underway for years with only limited success.

But as High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said recently: "We cannot ignore the environmental consequences of refugees and refugee operations. This could jeopardize the basic rights and needs of refugees ... the [very] institution of asylum.


Before and after: the effect of a large exodus on the environment. © S.Torre

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 127: "The Environment – A Critical Time" (July 2002). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (830Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here