In Plain Sight: The World’s Refugee Crisis As Seen From Space
The movement of the world’s 21 million refugees can increasingly be seen from space. While the emergence of camps around Syria, most notably Zaatari in Jordan, could be seen on Google Earth for years, other places go largely unnoticed.
Case in point is the dramatic increase of refugees in northern Uganda, stemming from the escalation of violence in South Sudan since June of this year. With 477,200 refugees, Uganda is in the world’s top 10 host countries. Between early July and the end of August, almost 100,000 refugees fled South Sudan. For many, the most direct route out of the country was towards Uganda where refugee camps had already been established in 2014 to accommodate the steady stream of civilians fleeing conflict.
This sudden surge, though, led to the emergency construction of two new camps to deal with the overwhelming number of new refugees. One camp, Pangirinya (also known as Pagrinya) can easily be seen in 2 to 4 meter resolution imagery from Planet , while the other camp, Bidibidi, is so large, it is readily visible in the Sentinel 2-A, 10 meter resolution imagery.
Pangirinya settlement camp
Bidibidi settlement camp
But this is not the only quickly forgotten crisis. In Burundi, over 300,000 refugees have fled the country since April 2015, when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would run for a third term, which the opposition declared as unconstitutional. Since then, high resolution satellite imagery has been used to corroborate video and witness accounts of mass graves. But imagery also shows the scale of the political crisis with the expansion of one refugee camp in Tanzania and the reopening of two other historic camps that were closed in 2005 when refugees repatriated after fleeing the 1996 post-coup violence.
Refugee camps in Uganda have been established and hosting refugees since 2014, as rampant violence against civilians seems to continue unfettered in South Sudan. Closed camps in Tanzania have had to reopen only a decade later to host refugees fleeing political violence in Burundi. With today’s access to satellite imagery it is difficult to ignore their existence anymore.
