When Displacement Meets Climate Change, The Crisis Within the Crisis
Picture this: a South Sudanese mother who survived war, crossed the border into Uganda, registered as a refugee, and found a small plot of land to call home in Bidi Bidi settlement. She planted her garden. She began rebuilding. And then the rains came, not the steady, predictable rains of the agricultural calendar she had always known, but violent, unforeseeable floods that swept through the settlement, destroyed her garden, and collapsed her shelter. Three months later, the rains stopped entirely. The land cracked. The crops she had replanted failed again.
She has not moved once. But climate change has moved against her, twice.
This is the reality for hundreds of thousands of people living in Uganda’s refugee settlements, and it is one of the most underreported crises within Uganda’s humanitarian response. Refugees and the host communities who live alongside them are not just dealing with the trauma of displacement. They are also living on the frontlines of a climate emergency they did nothing to cause, in settlements that were often allocated in the most environmentally marginal land available, with the fewest resources to adapt.
At Second Chance Immigration, we believe this is not only a humanitarian issue. It is a justice issue. And advocacy is our response.
Understanding the Scale: Climate Change in Uganda’s Refugee Settlements
Uganda is one of Africa’s most climate-vulnerable countries. As the climate crisis intensifies, Uganda faces rising incidents of extreme weather including floods, droughts, and landslides. Between 2018 and 2020 alone, 334,000 people were displaced due to climate-related disasters. Flooding presents the most significant risk, each year, floods impact nearly 50,000 people and cost over $62 million in losses.
In 2024, floods, landslides, and other climate-related disasters displaced more than 78,000 people and affected over 413,000 across Uganda, 35% of them children, making it the worst year since UNICEF began tracking such data in 2018.
For refugees, the situation is often worse than the national average. Refugees in Uganda are exposed to significantly higher temperatures compared to host country averages, and settlements are simultaneously exposed to lower-than-average rainfall compared to the rest of the country. With current settlement policies, residents of camps face unique spatial and socioeconomic vulnerabilities, fragile infrastructure, aid dependence, and inadequate shelter, all of which interact with climate hazards to produce significant harm.
These are not abstract statistics. They translate into specific, lived experiences: gardens destroyed by flooding in the wet season, wells running dry in the dry season, malaria outbreaks following stagnant floodwater, tensions between refugees and host communities as both groups compete for shrinking land and resources.
In the Nakivale settlement in south-western Uganda, for example, extreme weather conditions affect people’s livelihoods throughout the year. In the dry season, the bare land is starved of trees to counter the heat from the harsh sunshine. Plants die, food becomes expensive, and many go to bed hungry. In the wet season, rivers and swamps overflow into homes and gardens, causing destruction to houses, assets, and crops, and exacerbating diseases such as malaria.
The environmental pressures are compounding. In 2022 alone, over 1,000 family latrines and shelters were destroyed due to floods in two refugee settlements, at a restoration value beyond a million dollars. It is increasingly difficult to draw the line between conflict-induced migration and climate-induced migration.
The Connection Nobody Talks About Enough: Climate Change and Protection
One of the most important things we have learned in our years of working with refugee communities is that climate change is not a separate issue from gender-based violence, food insecurity, or protection. It is deeply intertwined with all of them.
Climate change contributes to water scarcity, extreme heat, and changing rain patterns. Drought contributes to resource scarcities, particularly food and water, that increase sexual and gender-based violence risks, transactional sex, and menstruation insecurity. Heavy rains and flooding contribute to resource scarcities that exacerbate sanitation insecurity and increase GBV risk.
When crops fail, family tensions rise. When water points dry up, women and girls travel further to collect water, exposing themselves to assault. When floods destroy latrines and contaminate water sources, disease spreads. When food rations are cut because the agricultural season has failed, parents pull their children out of school to work. The climate ripples outward through every dimension of refugee life.
This is why our climate advocacy is not a standalone programme in a separate silo, it is woven into our legal, education, and protection work. We cannot protect a woman from GBV without also addressing the climate conditions that increase her vulnerability. We cannot support a child’s education without also advocating for the settlement infrastructure that lets them walk safely to school in the wet season.
What Second Chance Immigration’s Climate Advocacy Does
Community-level climate awareness in settlements. We run workshops and community dialogues in Nakivale, Bidi Bidi, Kiryandongo, and Kyaka II that bring together refugee and host community members to understand climate risks, share local knowledge about environmental change, and plan together. Refugees often carry invaluable traditional agricultural and environmental knowledge from their home countries, knowledge that is frequently ignored by formal response systems. We amplify that knowledge.
Advocacy with Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister and national authorities. Uganda’s settlement planning process does not always take climate risk into account. New settlements are sometimes allocated on flood plains, in areas with already-degraded soil, or in districts where water resources are insufficient for a growing population. We document these risks, compile evidence from community testimonies, and advocate with OPM and relevant government ministries for settlement siting and planning that integrates climate resilience from the outset.
Promoting climate-smart agriculture and natural resource management. A sustainable refugee response anchors on people who invest in climate adaptation — preparing refugees and host communities to conserve the environment and adapt to changing climate contexts, including through renewable energy access and sustainable land use. We support community groups in adopting climate-smart agricultural techniques: soil conservation practices, drought-resistant crop varieties, water harvesting, and agroforestry. We connect refugee farmers with extension workers and partner organisations running environmental restoration programmes.
Linking refugees to climate adaptation funding. There is a growing body of international climate finance — through the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and bilateral donors — that is specifically designed to support vulnerable communities facing climate impacts. However, these funds almost never reach refugees directly. We advocate for refugee and host community inclusion in Uganda’s national climate adaptation plans, and we help community groups understand how to access available funding streams.
Addressing land degradation and promoting peaceful co-existence. When cleared acres of land, destruction of crops and livestock, the searing heat of the dry season, and the unforgiving floods of the rainy season converge, tensions that might lead to conflict between refugees and host communities are easily stoked. We mediate and facilitate dialogue between refugee and host communities on shared natural resource use, because when two communities are fighting over the same shrinking water point, it is not a conflict problem. It is a climate problem that needs a climate-informed solution.
Engaging refugee youth as climate advocates. Young people in Uganda’s settlements are not passive victims of climate change. Many of them are already taking leadership in their communities — planting trees, advocating for solar lighting, developing innovative solutions to water storage and soil erosion. We support and train refugee youth as climate advocates, connecting them with regional and international youth climate platforms so their voices are heard where decisions are made.
Our Commitment to Fairness
Refugees contributed virtually nothing to the global emissions that are driving climate change. Yet they bear a disproportionate share of its consequences, living in the most environmentally marginal settings, with the least resources to adapt, and with limited political voice in the national processes that determine their conditions.
This injustice is not incidental. It is structural. And addressing it requires not just emergency response to floods and droughts, but systemic advocacy, for climate-resilient settlement planning, for inclusion in national climate policy, for access to the adaptation financing that makes long-term resilience possible.
That is what Second Chance Immigration is committed to delivering. Not charity. Justice.