A person who flees conflict and then faces repeated flooding in a camp has two protection problems, not one.
Nearly 90 million forcibly displaced people, or three-quarters of the global total, live in countries highly exposed to climate hazards, according to the UN refugee agency. France 24 reports that the agency issued the warning on Friday, urging action ahead of the COP31 climate summit in Turkey. The figure is striking for what it says about overlap: the places where displacement is most concentrated are also among the places most exposed to drought, flood and extreme heat.
The agency's argument, as reported, is practical rather than abstract. Droughts, floods and extreme heat are making lasting solutions harder to find. That matters because durable solutions for displaced populations — return, local integration or resettlement — depend on stable land, habitable shelter and functioning livelihoods. Where climate hazards repeatedly erode those foundations, displacement that might otherwise be temporary risks becoming protracted. The agency's warning links humanitarian protection directly to climate adaptation, a connection that is often acknowledged in principle but rarely funded at scale.
The timing is deliberate. COP31 in Turkey will bring governments together on adaptation finance and loss and damage, and the agency is positioning displaced people as a constituency that should be counted in those negotiations. Whether that translates into commitments is a separate question. The summary does not say what specific measures the agency is seeking, nor which countries are most affected, nor how the three-quarters figure was calculated. It also does not indicate whether the agency is asking for new money or for existing funds to be reoriented.
What is clear is the scale of the overlap between displacement and climate exposure, and the difficulty of separating the two in policy terms. A person who flees conflict and then faces repeated flooding in a camp has two protection problems, not one. The agency's intervention, as reported, is a bid to make that reality legible to governments before they meet in Turkey. The details of the appeal, and any response from member states, are not yet confirmed.
