Challenge: UNHCR’s humanitarian response generates an estimated 750+ kilo-tonnes of waste per year, but limited resources and lack of sustainable approaches means the organization struggles to safely and responsibly reuse, repurpose, and dispose of this waste as per its strategic goals. 

Solution: A scoping exercise to explore waste streams in displacement camps and warehouses, to design and test a more efficient, localised, and community-based waste management system.  
 
Expected results: Initial development of a standardised set of actions and tools to scale globally, enabling UNHCR and other humanitarian actors to reduce their environmental impact and promote sustainable waste management in partnership with communities. 

Challenge: Over time, UNHCR invested in various solar PV systems to enhance clean energy access, but some became dysfunctional due to a lack of standards, enforcement tools, operation and maintenance, or spare parts. Instead of providing clean energy, such systems are at risk of becoming e-waste. 

Solution: Idle or inefficient systems will be identified and an innovative combination of solutions for improved sustainable functioning will be combined in an innovative way – including legal tools to enforce existing technical standards and enable operations and maintenance expertise, technical components for appropriate maintenance, and operational support such as targeted capacity building. 

Expected results: Practical insights and tools that can be applied across operations to restore and manage solar PV systems, reduce e-waste, and enhance UNHCR’s capacity to efficiently generate clean energy now and in the future. 

Challenge: Dzaleka refugee camp’s water supply infrastructure is under pressure, leading to substandard levels of service. Groundwater over-abstraction, due to a high number of boreholes, drives aquifer depletion, spurred on by regional drought conditions and seasonal extreme weather events. 

Solution: Working with refugees, members of the host community, and others to facilitate and measure groundwater recharge, by building low-cost wells and dams that control erosion, capture runoff for crop irrigation, and allow the gradual infiltration of rainwater back into aquifers. Real time monitoring technology and physical measurement of boreholes will monitor groundwater levels. 

Expected results: More sustainable groundwater abstraction by enabling the recharge of aquifers – used by both refugee and host communities – with rainwater runoff. The risk of soil erosion and flooding will be mitigated and livelihoods will be enhanced through irrigation dams for cash crops.  

Challenge: Although shelters are intended to be temporary, displacement seldom is. This creates the challenge of improving shelter designs and technologies that meet immediate needs while also supporting recovery in a way that incorporates local adaptations and materials to ensure autonomy, dignity, and sustainability – especially when considering most refugee settlements and camps are projected to experience twice as many days of dangerous heat by 2050. 

Solution: Designing a sustainable shelter system, with the support of Better Shelter, that promotes community-driven adaptation. The system features a robust, modular, and easily assembled frame that can be clad with local materials or prefabricated panels, ensuring adaptability to diverse climates and contexts. Communities and local markets will be robustly engaged with throughout the process. 

Expected results: Identification of shelter solutions and validation through the construction, testing, and evaluation of prototypes to improve the wellbeing of residents. The results will guide design changes to the shelter system and the development of a localized delivery strategy, ensuring that solutions are practical, sustainable, and tailored to community needs. 

Challenge: Meeting basic household needs is unaffordable for many refugees in Slovakia, while initiatives and infrastructure to enable reuse and repurposing of items in urban areas are lacking or insufficient. Existing circular economy opportunities are not fully inclusive of refugees, limiting avenues to enhance their socioeconomic inclusion.   

Solution: Codeveloping an integrated model of community reuse centres (CRCs) – community hubs where refugees and locals meet for activities including recycling, DIY repair workshops, community gardening, and more. The CRCs will leverage circular and social economies to address environmental challenges and enhance social cohesion.  

Expected results: Ways to support and manage CRCs are developed and tested in selected urban areas across Slovakia to improve refugee inclusion and community environmental sustainability. Evidence and lessons from this pilot support the establishment of centres in additional settings, increasing accessibility.  

Challenge: In Buenaventura’s Lleras neighborhood, forcibly displaced families and host communities face acute protection risks. Children are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and recruitment by non-state armed groups. These dangers are compounded by severe environmental degradation, marked by inadequate waste management and the absence of clean and safe communal spaces.  

Solution: The Creative Environmental and Cultural Laboratory will foster safer environments for children, youth, and the wider community through locally driven, sustainability-focused initiatives. By transforming waste into musical instruments and other cultural assets while building community capacity for waste management and inclusive cultural expression, the project nurtures pride and belonging.  

Results: Greater environmental and cultural awareness. Stronger social cohesion and inclusion through intergenerational engagement. Expanded opportunities and leadership roles for children, contributing to the prevention, mitigation, and response to recruitment by non-state armed groups. 

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.