Three in four displaced people live in climate danger zones, UN refugee agency warns
Nearly 90 million refugees and displaced people live in countries highly exposed to drought, flood and extreme heat, a new UNHCR report finds days before COP31; and the money meant to protect them barely reaches the front line.
Published 6 November 2026 · 00:18 GMT
The summary
UNHCR's report, released on 6 November 2026, finds nearly 90 million forcibly displaced people, three in four of the global total, live in countries highly exposed to climate hazards. The COP31 climate summit opens in Antalya, Turkey, days after the report; UNHCR is urging governments to direct more adaptation funding to fragile states.
The three lenses
- WestHow the West reads it In the West, the story has been told as a climate-justice story with a price tag attached.
- EastHow the East reads it In the East, the story lands closest to home.
- Global SouthHow the Global South reads it In the Global South, the report confirms what frontline states have been saying for years: they host the displaced, absorb the climate shocks, and receive about a tenth of the climate finance.
Key facts
- UNHCR's report, released on 6 November 2026, finds nearly 90 million forcibly displaced people, three in four of the global total, live in countries highly exposed to climate hazards. UNHCR
- The COP31 climate summit opens in Antalya, Turkey, days after the report; UNHCR is urging governments to direct more adaptation funding to fragile states. France 24
- More than two-thirds of the refugees who returned home in the first half of 2026 went back to countries highly exposed to climate hazards. Reuters
- In Syria, nearly four million displaced people have recently returned to worsening water scarcity and erratic rainfall; flooding along the Euphrates in May 2026 damaged homes and displaced thousands again. Reuters
- By 2050, one in three refugee settlements across sub-Saharan Africa could face 100 or more days of dangerous heat each year. France 24
- Weather-related disasters have caused more than 255 million internal displacements over the past decade; about 70,000 people every day. France 24
What did the UN refugee agency actually find?
Three in every four people forced from their homes by war, violence and persecution now live in countries where the climate itself has turned hostile. That is the headline of a new report from UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, released on Friday 6 November 2026, days before the COP31 climate summit opens in Antalya, Turkey. Nearly 90 million refugees and other forcibly displaced people live in countries highly exposed to drought, flood and extreme heat, the agency said, and the overlap between conflict and climate hazard is no longer an exception; it is the shape of it.
The report lands as governments gather to argue over adaptation money, and its message is blunt: those who contributed least to the warming planet live closest to its consequences. "Refugees face a double injustice," said Anton Leis Garcia, UNHCR's assistant high commissioner for operations. "Forced to flee conflicts they did not cause, they are now on the frontlines of a climate crisis they have contributed least to."
What do the numbers say about where displaced people live?
Nearly 90 million people, three in four of all those forcibly displaced, live in countries the agency classes as highly exposed to climate hazards, with Afghanistan and Bangladesh named among the most severely exposed. Weather-related disasters have already caused more than 255 million internal displacements over the past decade, about 70,000 people every single day, and they keep arriving where wars have already destroyed the roads, clinics, water systems and savings that might have cushioned them.
The report also follows the people who try to go home. More than two-thirds of the refugees who returned during the first half of 2026 went back to countries highly exposed to climate hazards, so return is no guarantee of safety. In Syria, where nearly four million displaced people have recently returned, declining groundwater and erratic rainfall threaten recovery, and flooding along the Euphrates in May damaged homes and displaced thousands all over again. And the heat is still coming: by 2050, one in three refugee settlements in sub-Saharan Africa could face 100 or more days of dangerous heat a year.
What is still missing from the picture?
The report counts exposure country by country, which leaves the hardest question open: how many of the 90 million are exposed not just on paper, in a national average, but in the settlement where they actually sleep. A camp on high ground and a camp on a floodplain sit inside the same national statistic, and the difference between them is a bad season or a second flight. The report does not settle that, and no government count published alongside it does either.
Nor can anyone yet say how the forecast El Niño will redistribute the risk, or how many of the returns now under way will survive the next drought or flood season. The agency warns that severe flooding in East Africa could displace up to three million people in Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda by the end of this year, but a forecast is not a casualty count. What COP31 will deliver in money, and what share of it will reach the settlements named in the report, is likewise undecided, and will only be known when the pledges are counted.
Why does a climate report about refugees matter now?
It matters because it strikes at the idea the whole refugee system rests on: that there is somewhere safe to go back to. For decades, return has been treated as the durable solution. If the places of return are themselves becoming unliveable, too dry to farm, too hot to sleep in, too flood-prone to rebuild in, then return stops being a solution and becomes a transfer from one danger to another, and the system has no ready answer for what replaces it.
It matters, too, because of the money. Only about 10 percent of climate finance reaches fragile or conflict-affected countries, the report says, so the places carrying the heaviest burden receive the smallest share of the help. A separate UN report published on Wednesday found rich countries well short of the 305 billion dollars a year needed to help developing nations adapt. The gap is not an abstraction; it is the distance between a settlement with water and one without it, and the report puts that distance on the table days before the negotiators sit down.
How did flight from war become exposure to climate disaster?
The mechanism is not mysterious, and that is what makes it so difficult to break. War destroys the things that let a community absorb a shock, the stored harvest, the clinic, the well, the road to market, and then the shock arrives on schedule, as a drought or a flood that would have been survivable a decade earlier. The displaced person does not face two separate crises, one human and one natural; the two share the same ground, and each makes the other worse. UNHCR counted 117 million people displaced by mid-2025, and its earlier No Escape reporting warned that the countries facing extreme climate hazards could rise from three to 65 by 2040.
Geography concentrates the harm: exposure is heaviest where the wars are longest and the states are weakest, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are named in this report, and Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sahel run through the agency's earlier work, while host countries next door absorb the spillover without the budgets to manage it. The Sudanese refugee the report follows, who fled fighting in al-Fashir in June 2023 for the Farchana settlement in eastern Chad, is the pattern in a single life: flight from one danger into the path of another, the second arriving slowly enough to be called bad luck and fast enough to destroy a harvest.
What happens when the places of refuge become unliveable?
The second-order effects arrive quickly and do not stay inside the camps. When a settlement's water runs out or its fields flood, people move again, into cities that cannot house them, across borders that are closing, or back toward the conflict they fled, and each move strips away another layer of resilience while creating a new claim on a host community that is often itself under strain. Sudan's neighbours are already shutting consulates and trading accusations over drone launches, as our reporting on the Sudan–Ethiopia rupture shows, and fresh climate-driven movement would land on relationships already fraying.
The climate itself is about to test the system. A forecast supersized El Niño could worsen the risks in many refugee-hosting countries, the report warns, and the same phenomenon is already threatening harvests far from any camp, as our reporting on El Niño and South Africa's crops describes. Meanwhile the politics of the host countries is shifting under the same pressure: South African voters have just been to the polls in municipal elections that could end the ANC's long dominance, as our coverage of the vote records, and the question of who bears the cost of hosting is never far from a ballot box. The climate will not wait for the politics to settle.
What should COP31 deliver for the people on the front line?
The test in Antalya is simple to state and hard to pass: adaptation money must reach the places the report names, in amounts that match the risk, through channels fragile states can actually use. UNHCR is asking governments and climate-finance institutions to increase funding for adaptation in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and its operations chief has put the stakes in a single sentence: "Climate adaptation in fragile and displacement-affected areas is a matter of survival." Watch, after the summit, not for the headline pledge figure but for the share earmarked for displacement settings.
Watch the weather, too. If the forecast El Niño brings severe flooding to East Africa, the three million people the report says could be displaced in Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda will become the first test of whether the system learned anything, and the rains will not wait for a communique. And watch Syria through the winter, where returns continue into falling groundwater and erratic rain. The report's numbers describe a crisis already under way; what happens next depends on whether the money and the attention arrive faster than the water.
The three lenses
West Lens:
How the West reads it In the West, the story has been told as a climate-justice story with a price tag attached. The coverage leads with the 90 million figure and the COP31 ask, and it pairs the report with the separate UN finding that rich countries are falling well short of the 305 billion dollars a year needed for adaptation; a framing that turns the report into evidence in an argument the West is already having with itself about who pays. The risk in that reading is that the displaced themselves become a number in a finance debate, while the report's human detail keeps the argument honest.
East Lens:
How the East reads it In the East, the story lands closest to home. Bangladesh and Afghanistan are named among the most severely exposed countries, and the region's floodplains and deltas hold millions of displaced people, so the report reads less as a warning about a distant crisis than as a description of the neighbourhood. The Korean press has carried the Geneva dispatch, and for readers across Asia the exposure is concrete: the monsoon belt, the floodplains, the deltas where millions already live on the edge of the water.
South Lens:
How the Global South reads it In the Global South, the report confirms what frontline states have been saying for years: they host the displaced, absorb the climate shocks, and receive about a tenth of the climate finance. Al Jazeera's discussion of why wealthy countries are failing developing nations frames the same gap the report quantifies, and the African dimension is the sharpest; one settlement in three facing 100 days of dangerous heat by 2050, three million people at risk of flood displacement in East Africa, and host countries like Chad and Ethiopia carrying burdens their budgets cannot match. The Southern reading is not a plea for sympathy; it is a demand that adaptation money reach the front line before the next disaster does.
The consensus
- What we agree on
- What we agree on: nearly 90 million forcibly displaced people, three in four, live in countries highly exposed to drought, flood and extreme heat, according to a UNHCR report released on 6 November 2026 ahead of COP31 in Antalya; the overlap between conflict, displacement and climate hazard is now the central fact of the displacement crisis.
- What we don't agree on
- What we disagree on: whether the answer is mainly more adaptation money channelled to fragile states, or a deeper change in how refugee protection itself is organised; and whether COP31 will treat displaced people as a climate constituency in their own right or as a footnote to national adaptation plans.
- What we know
- What we know: more than two-thirds of refugee returns in the first half of 2026 went back to climate-vulnerable countries; only about 10% of climate finance reaches fragile or conflict-affected states; and weather-related disasters drove more than 255 million internal displacements over the past decade.
- What we don't know yet
- What we do not know yet: how many of the returns now under way will survive the next drought or flood season; how the forecast El Niño will redistribute risk across East Africa; and what share of the adaptation money promised at COP31 will actually reach the settlements and host communities named in the report.
- What we expect
- What we expect: COP31 negotiators to face direct pressure to earmark adaptation finance for displacement settings; further displacement in East Africa if the forecast flooding arrives; and a harder debate about whether 'durable solutions' can still mean return when the place of return is itself becoming unliveable.
Questions, answered
How many displaced people live in climate danger zones?
Nearly 90 million, according to the UNHCR report released on 6 November 2026. That is three in every four forcibly displaced people worldwide, living in countries highly exposed to drought, flood and extreme heat. The report was published days before the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, where the agency is pressing governments to direct more adaptation funding to fragile states.
Why are refugees especially exposed to climate hazards?
Refugees and displaced people are concentrated in the countries least equipped to cope: Afghanistan and Bangladesh are among those the report names as severely exposed, while across sub-Saharan Africa one settlement in three could face 100 days of dangerous heat a year by 2050. Conflict strips away the roads, clinics, water systems and savings that would otherwise cushion a flood or a drought.
What does the report say about refugees returning home?
More than two-thirds of the refugees who went home in the first half of 2026 returned to countries highly exposed to climate hazards, so return is no guarantee of safety. In Syria, where nearly four million displaced people have recently returned, declining groundwater and erratic rainfall are threatening recovery, and flooding along the Euphrates in May damaged homes and displaced thousands once again.
What is UNHCR asking COP31 to do?
The agency wants governments and climate-finance institutions meeting in Antalya to increase funding for climate adaptation in fragile and conflict-affected countries, where only about 10% of climate finance currently arrives. Adaptation there, its operations chief said, is 'a matter of survival'; not a development extra, but the difference between a settlement that endures and one that empties again.
Sources
- UNHCR
- France 24
- Reuters