Permanent Temporariness and Climate Outsiders: Refugee Camps as Ecological Sacrifice Zones in the MENA Region
Nazifa Rafa, PhD Student at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
Introduction
The refugee camp in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is more than a site of emergency shelter—it is an institution of abandonment. From Jordan’s Za’atari and Azraq to Lebanon’s informal tented settlements, camps represent the entrenchment of what is euphemistically termed “temporary protection,” but what in practice constitutes a state of “permanent temporariness” (Ramadan 2013; Birger 2024). Though originally conceived as provisional humanitarian interventions, these camps often evolve into long-term infrastructures of containment, where the fiction of temporariness justifies infrastructural neglect, policy exclusion, and environmental externalization. Increasingly, they function as ecological sacrifice zones (Ipsen and Lequieu 2024; Juskus 2023)—geographies where environmental risk is disproportionately offloaded onto already marginalized populations in service of larger political, economic, and ecological orders.
This article interrogates the intersection of refugee governance and climate precarity in the MENA region, revealing how the humanitarian insistence on temporariness actively reproduces vulnerability in the face of accelerating environmental crises. While the climate-migration nexus has garnered growing attention in academic and policy circles, most analyses remain focused on displacement caused by climate change. Far less scrutiny has been directed toward how displaced populations themselves experience climate risk within the architectures of humanitarianism. This piece addresses the critical gap by examining the climate consequences of prolonged encampment and systemic exclusion in the MENA region.
It advances two interrelated arguments: first, that refugee camps are often deliberately located in ecologically marginal zones and deprived of adaptive infrastructure; and second, that refugees are structurally excluded from national and global climate governance frameworks. In doing so, the article calls for a fundamental reorientation of climate governance in displacement settings—one that centers rights over risk management and recognizes refugees not as passive recipients of aid, but as political and ecological subjects.
The Climate-Geography of Displacement: Camps as Zones of Engineered Exposure
Refugee camps in the MENA region are overwhelmingly sited in environments of acute ecological precarity: deserts, floodplains, arid hinterlands, and degraded peri-urban peripheries, where ecosystems are already stressed and state investment is minimal. Recent estimates suggest that 40 percent of the refugees live in countries that are themselves among the most climate-vulnerable and least prepared to adapt, such as Jordan and Lebanon (UNHCR 2024). In a study of 17 refugee camps in East Africa, seven camps hosting around 600,000 people were found to be highly susceptible to extreme weather conditions, including surface temperature increases and pluvial flooding (Owen et al. 2023). These findings mirror the risks observed in the MENA region, where environmental fragility is intensified by political fragility.
Jordan’s Za’atari and Azraq camps, which together host nearly 110,000 Syrian refugees, are located in water-scarce, heat-exposed zones of the eastern desert, where summer temperatures frequently exceed 40°C and winter nights drop below freezing (Fransen et al. 2024; Bose 2024; Ashour et al. 2023). In Lebanon, informal tented settlements—many unrecognized by the state—are frequently established on flood-prone lands or steep, erosion-prone terrains. These areas are especially vulnerable to landslides and torrential rainfall (Fransen et al. 2024; Pollock et al. 2019). In both countries, refugee presence is confined to peripheral zones that are environmentally fragile and strategically neglected, reinforcing spatial and social exclusion.
This geography of exposure, far from being accidental, is politically engineered. Host governments, often in coordination with humanitarian agencies, deliberately situate refugee camps in ecologically marginal zones to contain populations while signaling to domestic publics and international donors that displacement is temporary, exceptional, and undeserving of long-term investment. As Bulley (2014) argues, the camp is not merely a humanitarian space of care—it is a site of governance and control. Camps function as biopolitical frontiers where abandonment is systematized and normalized.
This logic reproduces a colonial mode of settlement in which those deemed “outside” the nation—non-citizens, racialized groups, and displaced populations—are relegated to geographies unfit for the general population. It echoes nineteenth-century frontier practices of reserving prime land for citizens while relegating “undesirables” to ecological wastelands (Malkki 1995; Piguet 2013). In this context, the camp becomes an ecological sacrifice zone: a space where environmental hazard is strategically weaponized to justify neglect and containment. Refugees are cast as human buffers—absorbing the environmental shocks that states and societies are unwilling to bear.
Infrastructural Minimalism as a Doctrine of Temporariness
At the heart of humanitarian governance in the MENA region lies a persistent fiction: that displacement is temporary. This fiction underpins the design and management of refugee camps, where infrastructure is deliberately kept minimal (Agier 2011)—plastic tents instead of storm-resistant shelters, gravel floors instead of concrete, and chemical toilets instead of permanent sewage systems. These are deliberate design choices, rather than logistical oversights, justified as preserving the “emergency” nature of displacement and deterring protracted settlement (Brun 2016).
This doctrine of “infrastructural minimalism” is reinforced by donor funding models and host state anxieties. Major humanitarian donors frequently cap funding at 12-month intervals, incentivizing short-termism in project design and discouraging investments in durable infrastructure (Castillo 2024). NGOs, bound by these short funding cycles, must prioritize cost-efficiency and impermanence—even as the reality of exile stretches into decades. Refugee camps become locked in a loop of underdevelopment, where temporariness is both assumed and produced.
Yet this refusal to build for permanence is not only fiscal—it is political. Host governments fear that durable infrastructure could imply permanence, legitimizing refugee claims to land, water, or public services. Humanitarian agencies, often complicit in this logic, replicate these deterrent policies. As a result, camps across the region become stuck in a paradox: built to be temporary, yet condemned to last. Za’atari camp in Jordan, now over a decade old, still relies on shelters designed for short-term use. The plastic sheeting cracks under desert heat; inadequate sewage infrastructure collapses during flood events (Alshawawreh et al. 2017). In Lebanon, prefabricated caravans installed by NGOs routinely tilt or flood when winter storms hit unreinforced foundations (Tiwari et al. 2023).
This institutionalized austerity exacerbates vulnerability during climate shocks. In 2019, extreme winter floods in Lebanon killed several Syrian refugees whose makeshift shelters offered no protection from the elements. Similarly, in 2015, winter storms devastated parts of Za’atari, where inadequate shelter planning and poor weather forecasting left residents exposed. Humanitarian responses focused on awareness campaigns but avoided infrastructural investment out of fear it might appear “too permanent”.
This commitment to impermanence reveals a deeper truth: that refugee lives are managed through a logic of containment rather than care. Infrastructure, therefore, becomes more than just a technical matter—it becomes a moral one. By refusing to invest in sustainable, climate-resilient infrastructure, the humanitarian sector tacitly accepts the precarity and expendability of displaced lives. Camps are thus not only zones of logistical neglect but sites of structural abandonment, where engineering choices mirror political calculations that treat refugees as temporary objects of relief rather than rights-bearing residents deserving of durable infrastructure (Harrell-Bond 2008; Trautmann 2024).
Refugees as Climate Outsiders
Despite living in some of the most climate-vulnerable conditions in the world, refugees in the MENA region remain systematically excluded from national and global climate governance. In National Adaptation Plans across the region, refugees appear—if at all—only as potential burdens on water supplies, infrastructure, or biodiversity, rather than as rights-bearing residents or participants in climate resilience (Biermann & Boas 2010). Refugees are, thus, positioned outside the policy imagination of the nation-state and the financial eligibility of most climate adaptation programs.
Multilateral financing mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund rarely earmark funds for refugee-hosting areas, particularly informal settlements or camps, which are often excluded from state-defined territories of concern. In practice, this means that refugee communities are left out of early warning systems, flood defense projects, renewable energy transitions, and climate-proof infrastructure investments that increasingly benefit host populations living nearby.
When “green” humanitarian initiatives do appear in camps—solar-powered streetlights, water filtration, or waste-recycling programs—they often serve to reinforce containment rather than integration. Such technologies are implemented within the camp perimeter, separated from national grids and municipal services. For example, while solar panels in Za’atari camp have helped reduce diesel dependency, they have not translated into energy sovereignty or connection to Jordan’s broader infrastructure. Instead, these selective interventions offer techno-managerial fixes that legitimize camp isolation, without addressing the deeper structural vulnerabilities (Minca 2015; Abdelnour 2015; Janmyr 2016).
Worse still, these environmental projects can reinforce harmful narratives. Refugees are increasingly blamed for environmental degradation—overdrawing groundwater, creating waste, or contributing to deforestation—despite clear evidence that structural drivers of ecological collapse in the region stem from elite land use, unsustainable urban expansion, and extractive resource governance (Hussein et al. 2020; Dutta 2023). “Eco-containment” shifts responsibility for environmental risk onto the displaced, framing refugees as problems to be managed rather than communities entitled to environmental justice.
As a result, refugees are rendered invisible twice over: first by the humanitarian sector, which treats them as passive aid recipients, and second by the climate governance apparatus, which excludes them from adaptation and resilience frameworks. Even as climate finance accelerates in MENA, displaced populations remain unrecognized and unreached. They are left to endure the environmental consequences of decisions in which they had no part—non-citizens in both legal and ecological terms.
Dismantling the Fiction of Temporariness: Toward Inclusive, Rights-Based Climate Governance
The persistence of “permanent temporariness” in refugee camps across the MENA region reflects a deeper moral and political failure. It rests on the enduring fictions that displacement is short-term, that camps are exceptional spaces, and that refugees are transient guests rather than enduring political and ecological subjects. These assumptions have allowed states, donors, and humanitarian actors to justify decades of underinvestment in durable infrastructure, inclusive planning, and climate adaptation. The result is a regime that normalizes vulnerability while denying refugees both recognition and remedy.
As displacement stretches into its second and third decades for many refugee settlements, maintaining the pretense of temporariness has become a mechanism of policy paralysis. Refugees are consistently left without storm-proof housing, flood protection, adequate water access, or energy resilience—not due to logistical impossibility, but due to a systemic refusal to acknowledge their continued presence. Exposure to extreme heat, floods, and cold is a predictable and repeated outcome of a governance system that treats climate vulnerability as a management problem rather than a justice issue.
If climate justice is to have meaning in the region, it must begin with the recognition of refugees as rights-holders and political actors. Addressing environmental vulnerability in displacement requires more than greening camps or improving humanitarian efficiency. It demands a structural reimagining of refugee governance, based on inclusion, accountability, and long-term investment. Three interlinked reforms are essential to that shift.
First, refugees must be explicitly integrated into National Adaptation Plans—not merely as vulnerable populations, but as stakeholders in climate governance. Adaptation plans must include refugee-specific measures such as cooling centers, flood defenses, water-harvesting systems, and off-grid energy solutions. These must be backed by designated budget lines and implementation pathways.
Second, climate finance must be redirected to include displacement settings. Multilateral and bilateral donors must establish dedicated funding windows for refugee-hosting areas, especially informal settlements and camps. Funding processes must be participatory, allowing displaced populations to co-design, implement, and evaluate adaptation programs based on local priorities and knowledge.
Third, investments in infrastructure—water, shelter, energy, and mobility—must move beyond the humanitarian fixation on minimalism and temporariness. Humanitarian actors should partner with refugee communities to scale grassroots innovations that connect to national systems rather than remain isolated prototypes. Durable infrastructure must be treated as a moral and ecological imperative.
These reforms represent a necessary paradigm shift: affirming that refugees, like all communities, are entitled to environmental security and infrastructural dignity. Without dismantling the architecture of containment and the illusion of ephemerality, refugee camps will remain sacrifice zones—peripheral sites where the consequences of global environmental injustice are most deeply felt and most structurally ignored.
This article is part of a series of articles commissioned under the ‘Resilience and Inclusive Politics in the Arab Region’, generously funded by the Carnegie Corporation.