The Impact of Refugee Camp Settlement on Host Community Environmental Sustainability: Case of Bambasi Refugee Camp Benishangul Gumuz Regional State.

No Thumbnail Available

Date

2020-06

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

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.

Description

Keywords

Environmental sustainability, Impact, Economy condition, Infrastructure, Refugee camp, LULC Change detection.

Citation