Attachments
Tens of millions of people worldwide continue to be forced to flee their homes and seek safety from conflict and violence.
By mid-2025, the number of people displaced by war, violence, and persecution stood at over 117 million.1 At the same time, floods, storms and other extreme weather events, along with gradual changes such as sea level rise and desertification, are exacerbating crisis conditions that drive displacement and compound already complex displacement situations.
Climate-related hazards do not occur in isolation. They aggravate multiple causes of forced displacement both within and across borders.
Over the past decade, weather-related disasters have caused some 250 million internal displacements – equivalent to over 67,000 displacements per day.2 This represents a 10 per cent increase compared to the ten-year average through the end of 2023.
These displacements often occur in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
The number of countries reporting both conflict and disaster displacement has tripled since 2009.3 Chad, for example, hosts over 1.4 million refugees and asylum-seekers, and is one of the most fragile and climate-vulnerable countries in the world. In 2024, floods in Chad triggered more than 1.3 million internal displacements, by far the highest disaster-related displacement figure on record for the country and more than in the previous 15 years combined.
Climate change is compounding and multiplying the challenges faced by those who have already been displaced, as well as their hosts, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
By June 2025, over 86 million displaced people were living in countries with high-to-extreme exposure to climate-related hazards.5 Many of the world’s largest refugee settlements are located in areas that experience harsher weather conditions than are generally found in their respective host countries: refugee settlement areas face extreme heat and more variable rainfall in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Rwanda; severe temperatures in Jordan and Pakistan; and intense rainfall in Bangladesh.6 UNHCR country operations are also increasingly called on to prepare for and respond to new or exacerbated emergencies, such as drought in Zambia and floods in Brazil, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and South Sudan. In 2024 alone, one-third of the emergencies declared by UNHCR were due to the impacts of extreme weather events on people who had already been displaced by conflict.7
Such high exposure, combined with heightened vulnerability and low adaptive capacity to climate hazards, undermines efforts to build self-reliance and resilience.8 It deepens marginalization and compounds vulnerability – not only for displaced populations but also for host communities, who are themselves often living in similarly precarious conditions.9