Collaborative solutions to protect the environment and refugees

UNHCR Bangladesh is taking action with imaginative and pragmatic programs to protect the environment, wildlife, and people in alignment with UNHCR’s mandate.

By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist

As the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) launches the Innovation, Environment and Resilience Fund, we’re exploring — and listening to — environmental innovators at UNHCR and its partners. The goal is to learn about their responses to global climate and environmental crises, and demonstrate how stewardship of the environment is crucial for the advancement of human rights. This is the second in a two-part series about work being undertaken in Bangladesh. The first part is available here.

Bangladesh is a sobering example of how climate change is impacting the entire world. Without action, people, wildlife, and the environment itself will suffer, perhaps to a point of no return.

The country’s climate has never been an easy one to live in, and it’s not getting any better. The weather is warm and humid, and the country experiences monsoons, heavy rains, and tropical cyclones — all of which can lead to flooding, landslides, and the destruction of the lives of plants, animals, and people.

The arrival in Cox’s Bazar of one million Rohingya refugees forced to flee persecution in Myanmar in 2017 has put further pressure on the challenging climate and ongoing degradation of the environment in this region of the country.

The wood required to create the settlement and provide fuel for cooking exacerbated deforestation in the area. Not only did this disrupt the natural habitat and migration patterns of animals, it also created greater vulnerability to natural disasters.

UNHCR immediately acted to fulfill its mandate and support the Bangladeshi authorities in protecting displaced people, which also included Bangladeshi people forced out of their homes by natural disasters. UNHCR’s actions were necessary to provide shelter and resources to displaced people, but contributed to an already precarious environment. Recognizing the need for collaboration, UNHCR Bangladesh joined forces with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Bangladesh Forest Department, among others.

Alongside its partners, UNHCR Bangladesh has already made significant progress in restoring and improving the habitat. It has planted over 400 acres of mixed vegetation: trees, herbs, and grass, including vetiver grass that spreads its root system quickly and deeply into the soil, binding and strengthening it. Stabilizing the soil prevents landslides and reduces land erosion. What’s more, the trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and use carbon to build more plant matter. Certain tree species also provide food to wildlife, with the tree cover creating habitats for wildlife in the canopies and undergrowth.

But landslides aren’t the only natural disaster people in Bangladesh face. Cox’s Bazar is also in a major path for cyclones, which can bring highly destructive winds. With Rohingya refugees living in shelters made of bamboo and plastic tarps, it’s extremely difficult to stay safe in the midst of a cyclone — or a monsoon. Once again, UNHCR turned to planting, creating wind-breakers to protect the settlement.

“We call it planting with purpose,” says Ehsanul Hoque, Assistant Environment Officer in the Energy and Environment Unit at UNHCR Bangladesh. “It helps protect lives and assets and reduce the risk of disasters.”

This is the kind of innovative approach UNHCR is urging every operation to explore, and UNHCR Bangladesh is one excellent model of how to evaluate issues and create solutions to address both immediate and longer-term needs. After all, Hoque explains, the Cox’s Bazar district is considered a “climate hotspot.” He says the World Bank studied the impact of climate change on hotspots in South Asia and predicts that if trends continue, the living standards in Cox’s Bazar will drop 20% by 2050.

“The impact of climate change will be felt very much,” he says. “And those of a lower socioeconomic status are disproportionately impacted.”

Nature-based solutions to protect and restore the environment

According to Hoque, planting with purpose underscores the importance of aligning all of the operation’s activities with UNHCR’s protection mandate. Although the trend of deforestation didn’t begin in 2017, UNHCR Bangladesh recognized the responsibility it had to restore the natural environment as much as possible.

“We’re not only stabilizing the soil, we’re improving it,” Hoque explains. “We are also helping improve biodiversity and the habitat for a number of wildlife species.”

Another reason reforestation is important is because the forest feeds the streams that run through the settlement and provide water for drinking, fishing, and subsistence agriculture — especially during the dry season, when there isn’t enough rain to fill the streams. UNHCR, along with their partner the Center for Natural Resource Studies (CNRS), studied the movement and patterns of the area’s water by consulting with local colleagues and local communities.

“They shared with us that it looks like there used to be one wetland that people from many villages were relying on for fishing, and it was converted to agriculture,” Hoque explains. “We immediately engaged with many other local people who have the institutional memory — including refugees and government agencies — to conduct a watershed assessment to determine how the water resources could be better managed.”

In addition to the watershed assessment, which was conducted in collaboration with CNRS, to understand the status quo, IUCN, with the support of UNHCR, conducted a study that resulted in a modeling application that factors in various future scenarios that might occur due to climate change. Predictive modeling can help UNHCR Bangladesh better predict risks that could be managed proactively.

“We want to build our capacity and the capacity of the refugees as well,” Hoque says. “We will always have room to improve. Although 1,400 acres have been planted by UNHCR and all partners so far under the coordination of the Energy and Environment Technical Working Group (EnETWG), there are still many areas where plantation is required.”

An important aspect of the work Hoque, his team, and UNHCR’s partners are doing is the involvement of refugees and members of the host community.

“Refugees are at the center of all the planning, because if the community is not engaged then nothing can be sustained,” he says. “That’s why we provide educational information so they will consider the environment in their activities, too. The sustainability is further ensured by collaborating with the Forest Department, embedding the practices in local institutions.”

Community-based solutions and creativity to promote harmony with nature

Humans and wildlife have always had to learn to coexist. But as the world becomes more developed, many species have been forced out of their natural habitats or even driven into extinction.

A prime example is the critically endangered Asian elephants that migrate between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Even before UNHCR erected the settlement in Cox’s Bazar, the elephants’ habitat, and the only migratory corridor between Bangladesh and Myanmar, had been dwindling, but the settlement cut it off, resulting in some dangerous and even deadly encounters.

The conflicts between elephants and the people in Cox’s Bazar, including the host community, have been managed and substantially reduced thanks to an intervention by IUCN. UNHCR Bangladesh reached out to IUCN in early 2018, after a total of 12 Rohingya lives were lost when elephants found their way into the settlement once it had been erected.

IUCN has been leading an Elephant Conservation Program in Bangladesh since 2000, so it could provide expertise UNHCR didn’t have. Thanks to a series of novel solutions, since spring 2018 there has not been one death caused by an elephant intrusion — despite continued attempts by elephants to enter the settlement.

“Elephant intrusion attempts towards camps indicate their movement pattern and long-distance traveling behavior in search of food, water, shelters, and potential mates,” says Anika Tasneem, Program Assistant for IUCN’s Bangladesh Country Office. “They’re still moving along their migratory routes, but we’ve been able to stop human-elephant conflicts before they escalate.”

IUCN and UNHCR Bangladesh have established a number of solutions. First, after conducting a study of elephant presence around the settlement and entry routes they might use, IUCN erected 50 watchtowers around the perimeter of the settlement where most elephant sightings occurred, a figure that has increased to 99. Each watchtower is staffed by six members of IUCN’s Elephant Response Teams (ERTs), which are made up of Rohingya volunteers. Every night, two members of the ERT staff the towers from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., when elephants are most likely to migrate.

The volunteers are equipped with handheld microphones, search lights, and torch lights, which they use to watch for elephants. Although shining a bright light into an elephant’s eyes will only anger the animal, the volunteers have been trained to use the lights to urge the elephants back into the forest. The microphones are used to warn people in the settlement of an approaching elephant, and the loud noise of the microphone is another way to deter the elephants back into the forest — away from the settlement.

“There are many evidence-based techniques to drive elephants into the forest, and now the volunteers all know how to do it,” Tasneem says. “Elephants have attempted to enter the camps but they’ve been stopped successfully at the entry points and deterred back into the forest. The volunteers are protecting their community.”

The initiative benefits the host community, too, because some of the watchtowers are located very close to villages in Cox’s Bazar. IUCN also trained host communities and formed elephant response teams in strategic locations. There was a morning when one elephant entered the village close to Camp 13, and with special permission from settlement authorities the Rohingya volunteers were brought into the host community to deter the elephants back into the forest.

“It was such a great working relationship we witnessed between the host community, the refugees, and local officials,” Tasneem says. “We currently have 26 Elephant Response Teams (ERTs), consisting of 260 ERT members in the host communities of Cox’s Bazar South Forest Division.”

IUCN is also keeping a database, tracking the 379 attempted elephant intrusions (and counting) since the watchtowers were erected, as well as surveying elephants’ movements around the settlement. Using that information, IUCN hopes to develop an early warning system for elephant intrusions.

In addition, IUCN is piloting programs to deter elephant intrusions. Rows of thorny plants along the peripheries acting as a barricade is one pilot, and the other is beehives.

“For such a humongous mammal, elephants are scared of bees,” Tasneem explains. We’ve placed beehives at a particular distance along the peripheries and when the elephants feel the presence of the bees, they move in the opposite direction. It’s too early for results yet, but these programs have been adopted in other countries before.”

While the primary objective for the beehive fence is to deter elephants from entering host community areas, this also creates opportunities for alternative livelihoods for the community. People collect the honey produced in the hives and sell it in the local markets. It also supports an increase in the bee population. As the bees are an essential pollinator, they also help in the pollination of wild plant species, which ultimately helps to restore the adjacent degraded forest areas.

There’s even more, including a Youth Environmental Program that engages young Rohingya volunteers in educating their community about environmental protection (see story one in this series).

IUCN is involved in a variety of other projects in partnership with UNHCR Bangladesh, something Tasneem considers vitally important.

“Partnerships are the most critical thing if you want to work in such a huge humanitarian context, because all our efforts have to be holistic,” she says. “If one sector works in one direction and the other sector is planning something else, then none of it will have a fruitful impact.”

Implementing solutions to conserve energy and the environment

IUCN’s partnership with UNHCR was helpful in another significant environmental protection initiative in Bangladesh. When the settlement was first established in Cox’s Bazar, families used firewood for cooking — causing massive deforestation and pollution, because wood isn’t a clean-burning source of fuel.

UNHCR Bangladesh conducted a study and discovered that liquified petroleum gas (LPG) is a cleaner, less expensive, and rapidly scalable fuel source available in Bangladesh. The initiative began with a pilot of 600 households, which each received canisters of LPG — liquid under pressure in the canister that turns into gas when it’s released and ignited.

Both UNHCR and IUCN studied the impact of LPG on the environment and, according to Tasneem, they found the distribution of LPG reduces dependency on the forest for fuel by 80%.

Within one year of the settlement’s establishment, every household had an LPG canister and a cooking set designed for its use that provides 50% more thermal efficiency, says Dewan Mowdudur Rahman, an Energy Associate in the Energy and Environment Unit at UNHCR Bangladesh.

“Every family received mandatory training on using LPG efficiently and safely, as the settlement is very congested and fire safety is very important,” he says.

Although he admits LPG isn’t the cleanest fuel, it is to date one of the most pragmatic solutions and is readily available in Bangladesh. Plus, it creates 87% less CO2 emissions compared to firewood when cooking, which reduces the chance of families getting sick from the emissions.

But UNHCR didn’t stop there. Because LPG is relatively expensive — up to US$18 per canister, with every family needing a little over nine canisters per year — UNHCR wanted to reduce costs while improving efficiency.

After a visit to Nepal, where Bhutanese refugees are using LPG gas with pressure cookers, UNHCR Bangladesh’s findings prompted a pilot to introduce pressure cookers that use 50% less fuel in Nepal. Even though the pressure cookers cost an estimated US$25 each, the fuel savings would cover that cost in just six months.

“The results are very encouraging,” Mowdudur Rahman says. “Now we are considering collecting even more data about how much fuel we might save before making a decision to scale up to provide pressure cookers to everyone.”

The environmental impact of using LPG is multi-fold. First, because it’s a residual product of oil extraction, if LPG isn’t captured for other uses it simply goes into the air unnecessarily. LPG emits significantly less carbon dioxide than other forms of fuel, and reduces the pollution — and deforestation — caused by the use of wood cookstoves.

“LPG is energy-efficient, controllable, and reservable,” Mowdudur Rahman says. “You just turn it off when you are finished cooking. With wood, it just keeps burning until the fire goes out.” Further benefits include reducing conflict with the host community, as well as the risk of Gender-Based Violence (GBV).

In another effort to conserve energy, UNHCR Bangladesh is installing solar-based power. Some of this is in response to Bangladesh forbidding full electrification of the settlement, but as Mowdudur Rahman says, the operation sees it as an opportunity to “go green” and turn to renewable energy sources. UNHCR Bangladesh is working on preliminary designs to determine the most efficient way to use solar energy.

In addition, IUCN facilitated Youth Club members to pilot the use of Moser lamps, which can keep solar energy working even during the rainy season in Bangladesh when there isn’t enough sun to power other solar products. The lights are essentially a clear plastic bottle filled with clean water installed in a hole on the rooftop, with half the bottle inside the household. Sunlight goes into the water bottle and the water reflects the sunlight inside the house.

As with every endeavor — including a pilot program to eliminate electronic waste, from solar appliances to electronics — UNHCR Bangladesh is evaluating and testing its solutions before implementing them on a large scale.

“We gather data to learn how well a solution might work, and we do a lot of interaction between colleagues, who are learning from our projects as well,” Mowdudur Rahman says. “Through the process of working with partners and colleagues, we are trying to bring the best practices to the people living in Cox’s Bazar.”

The only thing that can slow the destruction of the environment by climate change is action. Through collaboration, evidence-based approaches, experimentation, and listening to the voices of the community, UNHCR Bangladesh is taking decisive steps to stem the tide of further environmental degradation. And the operation’s ongoing efforts prove that a combination of both innovative and sensible solutions can help protect the environment and the people who live in it.

For more information on the Innovation, Environment and Resilience Fund visit the Fund website.