The Impact of Refugee Camp Settlement on Host Community Environmental Sustainability: Case of Bambasi Refugee Camp Benishangul Gumuz Regional State.
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Date
2020-06
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Abstract
Ethiopia has a long-standing history of hosting refugees. The camp settlement was mostly settled
in an area with high environmental sensitivity, poor pre-existing developmental infrastructure,
and a high level of poverty. The objective of this study was to assess the impacts of refugee camp
settlement on the host community environment sustainability in the Bambasi refugee camp. The
challenge and constraints for environmental sustainability in the refugee camps were identified
in the reviewed literature. The study has used both qualitative and quantitative research
approach with mixed explanatory methods to understand the impact and relationships between
dependent and independent variables through research. Particularly, the research design
combines the household survey of socio-economic data analysis from target populations with the
observation of satellite imagery data for the classification of land use land cover change
detection from the year 2005 to 2020 in the study environment. The study found out that the
humanitarian response and its performance was very poor and not satisfied the basic demand of
refugee, the refugee camp infrastructure was very low such as poor shelter condition and poor
supply of alternative energy source, poor economy condition pushes refugees to highly depend
on the surrounding environment. The establishment of the Bambasi refugee camp has increased
the population in the study area and became a burden on the natural environmental resource
around the host community. Furthermore, the satellite imager of the LULC result indicated that
the agricultural land class use increases by 21% from 1594.6 hectares (48%) in 2005 to 2307.8
hectares (69%) in 2020. Conversely, the LULC change detection finding confirmed that the
forest land class has decreased from 1110.4 hectares (33%) in 2005 to 171.6 hectares (5%) in
2020 due to an increase in the population of the refugee camp area. It was concluded that in the
long -run the establishment of refugee camp settlement has put the host community's
environmental sustainability in danger. Finally, the intervention needs to be recommended for
the humanitarian agency to develop alternative energy source, infrastructure, and active
environmental planning and management project that should include the indigenous knowledge
of the community and minimizing dependency of both refugee and host community on the
surrounding environmental resource.
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Keywords
Environmental sustainability, Impact, Economy condition, Infrastructure, Refugee camp, LULC Change detection.