By Fenella Henderson-Howat
There is an increased recognition of the connection between environmental issues and humanitarian crises. The Rohingya refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazar is a tangible example of the long-lasting impacts humanitarian crises and their respective responses can have on ecosystems. Since August 2017, Cox’s Bazar has been home to over 900,000 Rohingya refugees as well as over 2.8 million local Bangladeshis. It is also one of Bangladesh’s poorest districts, with 33% of the population living below the poverty line, and 16% below the extreme poverty line. Deforestation has been on the rise for nearly three decades, with the Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary forest area dropping from 3,304 hectares to 1,794 hectares between 1989 and 2009. The arrival of over 700,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in 2017 put further pressures on an already fragile ecosystem. Forest land was cleared and hill land cut and levelled for the construction of camps across 2,639 hectares, 75% of which was within the protected forest area. The utilisation of forest resources also increased due to the additional demand for cooking fuel by the refugee community, resulting in further forest degradation of over 7,000 hectares within one year. Since 2017, there has also been a huge reliance on bamboo for shelter construction and repair within the camps, which has contributed to the destruction of already established bamboo forests throughout Bangladesh.
The need for humanitarian actors to prioritise climate action and to properly coordinate interventions with environmental issues was central to the formation of the Energy and Environment Technical Working Group (EETWG) in Cox’s Bazar. The group was established in early 2018 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP). This article aims to document the work and achievements of the EETWG up until end-2022 as a case study of an environmental coordination body which has the potential to be replicated in other humanitarian responses.