As diplomats pack for COP31 in Antalya, UNHCR has issued a blunt warning: climate extremes now hang over most people who already fled conflict or persecution. Close to ninety million such residents — roughly three out of every four on the planet — are based in countries rated high or extreme for drought, flood and heat risk. The agency says recovery after displacement increasingly fails when the weather keeps striking the same fragile districts.
Homecomings are part of the problem. Well over half of those who repatriated in early 2026 walked back into climate-fragile states. Syria’s almost four million recent returnees face shrinking aquifers; river floods along the Euphrates in May wrecked patched houses and forced another round of flight. By 2050, planners expect many African camps to bake through a hundred hazardous heat days a year, and a few Ethiopian sites could see that figure double.
Storms and floods also keep shuffling people inside their own borders. Weather disasters have triggered more than 255 million internal moves in ten years — about seventy thousand every day. A strong El Niño raises the chance of huge new floods in East Africa before December, with scenarios running from under a million to as high as three million people uprooted in Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda. Despite that exposure, fragile war-hit economies still collect only about ten percent of global climate cash.
Antón Leis García, UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner for operations, frames the gap as a double injustice: communities least responsible for warming stand deepest in its path. In Türkiye, a major host nation, the agency will push for displaced families to be named in national climate plans, for adaptation budgets to reach areas of exile and return, and for scale-up of fixes refugees already pilot — Sahel solar pumps, Ugandan resilient crops, Colombian mangrove repair. Without those shifts, COP31 could applaud targets while the people least able to relocate again keep losing ground to heat and water.
