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In the last decade, the global count of forcibly displaced persons has 鈥� from 59 million people in 2014 to over 122 million people in 2024. While most of the world鈥檚 displaced people live with family members or in urban areas, one fifth of all refugees and asylum-seekers live in traditional . Refugee camps are often overcrowded and offer substandard living . Most refugees live without electricity or running water, let alone decent sanitation infrastructure or access to medical services. Living in a refugee camp, as opposed to non-camp settings, leads to higher levels of poverty and worse outcomes. Furthermore, the shelters themselves are often , whether those are large congregate spaces where people sleep packed in together on dirt floors or small homes made of tarpaulins that provide little privacy or protection. Refugee camps and the shelters within them are also highly to natural disasters.

Building disaster-resilient shelters for refugees is important not only for those originally displaced by natural hazards, but rather an effective and necessary approach for refugees displaced by conflict. A resilient shelter is a cost-effective strategy that can offer a dignified living space, maintain the intersectional benefits of adequate shelter for inhabitants, and protect refugees from re-displacement. As natural hazards continue to increase in magnitude and threaten communities, constructing and rehabilitating refugee shelters to be resilient to disasters will become even more essential.

Risks of Re-Displacement 

Refugees are always at risk of re-displacement. hosts 4.6 million refugees. Fighting between government forces and militias in the northern part of the country has put Sudanese refugees at risk, forcing them to to safer areas. hosts over 1.5 million refugees. Israeli airstrikes in Beirut and neighboring areas has over 80,000 refugees.

Refugees originally displaced by conflict are also at risk of re-displacement from natural disasters. UNHCR reports that displaced people are more at risk of secondary displacement by disasters than those who have never been  before. The nature of refugee camps factors into this heightened risk. Camps are often located high-risk hazard areas, such as low-lying lands near rivers that are likely to be flooded during rainy season. Typical camp layouts, with closely packed shelters and structures, increase the likelihood and . The use of impermanent infrastructure in camps, despite the protracted nature of crises, increases the vulnerability of camps to destruction, and in turn, heightens the risk of re-displacing camp residents.

This cycle of re-displacement can increase the protection needs for refugees and insecurity on a regional scale. Repetitive migration movements can be burdensome on refugee hosting countries. The resulting strains on resources can stoke localized and cross-border conflicts. For example, the area of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Burundi has a history of significant displaced populations. Currently, over 700,000 refugees are across the three countries. The resource strains and ongoing tensions have instigated violence by the Rwandan M23 rebel group on displaced persons camps in eastern DRC and the security of the entire region.

Value of Dignified Shelter

Shelter is a human right, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is one of the core basic needs of forcibly displaced people. Adequate shelter should aim to provide a safe, culturally acceptable, habitable, and dignified space for a displaced person. Sheltering is an intersectional effort with intersectional benefits. It offers direct protection from environmental impacts, provides safety and privacy, and facilitates household access to additional humanitarian services.

Indirect benefits of shelter include improvements to livelihoods, social cohesion, and environment. An evaluating research on shelter benefits found that the positive impacts of shelter on health had the strongest evidence base. Adequate shelter can promote by providing living space with good air quality, minimizing crowding and risk of infectious , and limiting the spread of air- and water-borne vectors. A in Al-Ama鈥檙i refugee camp in the West Bank found that incidences of pharyngitis, asthma, bronchitis, and other diseases are directly correlated to the quality of shelter conditions. In addition to physical health, safe shelter also has mental health benefits by reducing psychological and social stresses. 

The provision of shelter is often not dignified enough in the humanitarian settings. In an emergency situation, the dignified of shelter design 鈥� such as privacy, safety, and minimum space requirements 鈥� may be cast aside to focus on quantity of housing, regardless of the quality. But as forced displacement situations have increasingly become protracted, the displaced people now live in undignified, impermanent shelters for years. On average, refugees in protracted displacement situations remain for 18 and 26 years. Whereas dignity is a core tenant of the 鈥溾�� for refugees promoted by UNHCR, it is so often lost by viewing shelter through a short-term, transitional lens. 

Building Disaster-Resilient Shelters 

Shelters in camps are often not constructed to natural hazards. To protect the integrity of shelters and the benefits provided to their inhabitants, shelter interventions need to incorporate disaster resilient strategies. A project to improve a shelter鈥檚 鈥渄isaster resilience鈥� is one that lessens the occurrence or impacts of disasters on the structure. When communities face disaster risk, three groups of strategies may improve collective resilience of shelters and households: relocating shelters, mitigating risks to the settlement, or mitigating risks to the shelter.

Relocation of households to new areas outside of risk zones is the most effective , as the hazard threat is either lessened or effectively removed. The nature of many disaster risks are regional, so nearby relocations do not change the risk factor. For example, the IDP camps located in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo are subject to repetitive . The relocation of IDP camps to other areas within the province will still face flood risk. Some disaster risks are also driven by the layout of the camps that will not necessarily be addressed by establishing a camp in a new location. Additionally, moving entire communities to a new area is a politically complex, logistically burdensome, and costly strategy. Displacement camps are mostly established and operated on land directly allocated by the host government. In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the continual  of the rule of law, limited national government capacity, and aggressive policies towards displaced persons lessen the likelihood that new land for camps will be allocated. Land availability and use is also often the primary issue that  social tensions between IDPs and the host community.

Practices to  construction and management of shelters and settlements are often the most politically and logistically viable options. The calculated  and benefit of disaster mitigation strategies is well documented in non-humanitarian contexts. The National Institute of Building Sciences  shows that every $1 spent on disaster mitigation strategies saves at least $6 in disaster damages and recovery activities. The exact cost-benefit ratio of disaster mitigation strategies is not regularly available for emergency contexts, but a  of shelter resilient strategies in emergencies found many low-cost and high-impact design features that promote disaster resilience for shelters. Many international organizations and institutions like the Global Shelter Cluster and International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies document best practices for efficient and effective disaster mitigation strategies for shelters.

Examples of techniques to mitigate disaster risks to shelters and settlements include the following:

• Establish strong connections between load-bearing beams and other structural components. After earthquakes in 2018 and 2020, the shelter cluster and local Community Post for Disaster Response group in promoted a framing constructed of light steel and diagonal bracings. This strategy reduces the potential impacts of earthquakes, cyclones, tornadoes, and other high-wind events on shelters.
• Install plinths and deeper posts to frame the shelter. After extensive floods in 2022 and an earthquake in 2023, the shelter cluster in  promoted the installation of adequate plinths at the base of walls. After Tropical Cyclones Batsirai and Emnati in 2022, the shelter cluster in promoted shelter framing with posts installed at least 75 centimeters deep. This strategy reduces the potential impacts of floods, cyclones, and other events with high winds or heavy rainfall on shelters.

• Establish defensible spaces around shelters. After a series of fires in camps in 2018, the shelter cluster in  promoted the clearing of dry vegetation, waste, and debris from shelter areas. This reduces the potential impacts of fire events on shelters.

   

Other  include increasing spacing of tents to allow for firebreaks, excavating appropriate drainage channels for water flow, and planting retaining foliage to reduce erosion risks. This list of techniques is not exhaustive of the ways that shelters can be made more disaster-resilient, but it offers insight into the types of strategies that practitioners may select given the specific context.

Implementation Process and Barriers

Mobilization of disaster-resilient shelter strategies faces major hurdles. Host states may place significant policy restrictions on activities perceived as 鈥減ermanent鈥� for displaced persons, as they would like to believe that displacement is temporary. Many disaster mitigation strategies, such as strengthening walls and framing or installing drainage systems, may be easily perceived as permanent and effectively banned in camp settings. Employing disaster resilient strategies for shelter and settlements requires creative approaches and language to address such issues. For example, Catholic Relief Services and Caritas International are implementing a program to fortify shelters against disasters for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi government bans any form of 鈥減ermanent construction鈥� for refugees, even though many of the refugees may have lived in Bangladesh for at least 20 years. Catholic Relief Services and Caritas International creatively their programs as 鈥渕id-term shelters,鈥� even though the activities are really for permanent construction, to gain political approval.

Additionally, to shelter construction may require specific technical skills and materials, which can affect the timeliness and cost of shelter . Determining which strategies are 鈥済ood enough鈥� is an inherently subjective and decision for implementing agencies to make. Monitoring is an important component of shelter interventions but is often underfunded by donors and deprioritized by implementers. Identifying funding and skilled staff for effective monitoring and evaluation is another barrier to retaining and tracking implementation of such .

Way Forward

The integrity of refugee shelters is threatened by the disasters that destroy them over and over again. Disaster damages suspend the health, economic, and other benefits of adequate shelter. Building a disaster-resilient shelter is a cost-effective and sustainable approach to preserving the safety and dignity for refugees. But more attention to, mainstreaming of, and research on resilient strategies are necessary next steps for refugee sheltering approaches. Extensive guidelines exist for intersectional shelter priorities. Considerations for co-locating near potable water sources and designs that protect from gender-based violence are often mainstreamed into refugee sheltering programs. Disaster resilient considerations need to also be mainstreamed in this way.

Prioritization of resilient and dignified shelter will require additional evidence-based research to prove how strategies work in humanitarian settings. Disaster strategies are highly contextual to the local culture, nature of displacement, and hazard being mitigated. Whereas strategies like to keep a structure in place can be effective to mitigate the impacts of high-wind events, other strategies like the use of rot-resistant resistant and fa莽ade can mitigate the impacts of heavy rainfall events. Additional research into these approaches in humanitarian contexts, building upon the existing work of the Global Shelter Cluster and other institutions, is needed to further demonstrate the benefits and appropriate use of disaster resilient shelters for refugees.