The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an agency tasked with protecting refugees, warned of an imminent threat to vulnerable populations via UN News.

What's happening?

The UNHCR was established in 1950 to address massive displacements caused by World War II, two years after the U.N. adopted a human rights stance: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."

According to the UN, a refugee is someone who is unable to return to their home due to war, disaster, or other grave threats, including persons without a nationality.

As of June 2024, the organization counted over 122 million displaced people worldwide, bringing them within the scope of the UN's refugee aid efforts. Among those efforts are camps, temporary settlements constructed to shelter refugees in an emergency. 

In the last decade, the U.N. attributed 250 million "internal displacements" worldwide to extreme weather, affecting a staggering 70,000 people each day.

Average temperature fluctuations and their side effects, like extreme weather, are not just driving global citizens into refugee camps; they're also increasingly posing a threat to the security of these temporary shelters. 

Three-quarters of refugees have been displaced to regions with a "high-to-extreme" risk of impacts from an overheating planet, the U.N. said, and the agency feared refugee camps themselves would be "uninhabitable by 2050" due to extreme weather.

"Many of these locations are likely to become uninhabitable due to the deadly combination of extreme heat and high humidity," the agency said.

Italian diplomat Filippo Grandi, the current commissioner of the UNHCR, lamented the recursive trauma caused by extreme weather "destroying homes and livelihoods and forcing families — many who have already fled violence — to flee once more."

"These are people who have already endured immense loss, and now they face the same hardships and devastation again. They are among the hardest hit by severe droughts, deadly floods, and record-breaking heatwaves, yet they have the fewest resources to recover," Grandi said.

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Why is this important?

Grandi's remarks about droughts, floods, and heatwaves were incredibly jarring in the context of global weather news in 2025.

Wildfires, droughts, floods, and extreme heat dominated the headlines all year long. 

The year commenced with deadly wildfires in California, heatwaves broke records globally, and droughts and floods had horrifically fatal consequences.

None of that weather is new, but extreme weather isn't the same as "typical yet severe" weather, and awareness of the difference is critical.

As temperatures rise and seas warm, those factors affect weather like gasoline does a fire. This effect was pronounced when Hurricane Melissa struck the Caribbean as a Category 5 storm in late October.

Melissa hit hard, supercharged by several strengthening cycles over unseasonably warm water, devastating Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

What's being done about it?

"Nothing" is not an option, as Grandi emphasized, adding that funding was necessary to address the extreme weather crisis.

"To prevent further displacement, climate financing needs to reach the communities already living on the edge. They cannot be left alone," Grandi explained, calling for action at the ongoing COP30 summit in Brazil.

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