Recycling solar, pulling plastic: Innovating across diverse environments
UNHCR Innovation project teams are working with communities to nurture new ideas that respond to climate and environment challenges in diverse contexts.
In 2023, communities across the globe are dealing with interrelated but locally specific environmental and climate challenges. Humans are key players in our diverse and balanced ecosystems. Just as we have created and exacerbated many of these challenges so, too, can we take actions to mitigate their impacts, address their root causes, and promote the wellbeing of our environments and the life they support.
This year, World Environment Day is focusing on strategies to beat plastic pollution and establish circular economies. Projects supported by UNHCR’s Innovation Service are piloting methods to do just that in contexts where people are experiencing forced displacement — but they’re also doing so much more.
Here are five ways we’re working — in very different environments around the world — to promote ecosystem and human health, champion circular economies, and care for people and the planet.
1. Making solar sustainable in Bangladesh
With nearly 930,000 Rohingya refugees living in flood- and landslide-prone settlements around the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, energy needs are high. Many of those needs are met by solar-powered appliances provided by humanitarian organizations — yet a number of factors mean those items often don’t last long, turning a supposedly sustainable solution into an electronic waste (e-waste) problem.
So, UNHCR Bangladesh came together with partners to create a system for e-waste collection, value-chain analysis, recycling, and repurposing that would also develop the skills of community members with training on appliance repair. Supported by our Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund, this initiative aims to ultimately benefit 40,000 community members — with a cleaner environment, longer-lasting appliances, and boosted livelihood opportunities.
Community members living in Kutupalong Refugee Camp are set to receive training on electrical safety and solar waste throughout the second half of 2023, and a dedicated space for training and the repair and recycling of e-waste is being constructed in the camp. Households will be incentivized to redirect their e-waste to this Green Innovation Hub, with further training on solar equipment maintenance and repair paving the way for community-based management and responsible recycling of e-waste.
2. Empowering communities through innovative gardening in Colombia
On the hilly outskirts of Medellin, poorer neighborhoods composed of various refugee communities, internally displaced people, returnees, and hosts face integration challenges as well as environmental degradation and limited job opportunities. UNHCR Colombia’s answer to these interwoven challenges? Peri-urban hydroponic gardens for community use, interweaving traditional cultivation techniques with innovative gardening technologies to grow organic vegetables.
Workshops run through the Bello Oriente Environmental School have been a great hit with community members of all ages and origins, helping to build bridges among neighbors. In these initial workshops, a diverse array of participants — Colombian and Venezuelan, women and men, elderly and young people — prepared the land, planted seeds, and learned from each other about vermicomposting and food security for themselves and their families.
“I like to do these agricultural workshops, because I come from the countryside,” said Luz Amparo, a participant displaced years ago from Frontino, Antioquia (northwest of Medellin). “Now that I signed up, I am very happy.” Another participant, Ana, proudly brought along vermicompost she had made at home. Through cooperation and learning, these community members are restoring environmental health, exchanging knowledge, and building social cohesion across generations.
3. Exploring nature-based solutions to malaria in Uganda
Malaria has an enormous impact on vulnerable individuals, families, and communities around the world. For Palorinya refugee settlement in Uganda, as for other poor communities across the tropics and subtropics, the rainy season brings elevated risks with spikes in infections. The rural settlement’s location amid seasonal floodplains makes it a mosquito magnet — a situation only aggravated by deforestation and climate change.
Since other malaria-prevention efforts have struggled, UNHCR colleagues in Moyo, Uganda, are exploring a nature-based solution that could restore the environment while improving human health and creating livelihoods. The pilot is testing the use of products derived from locally available resources — like lemongrass and neem trees — to formulate natural mosquito repellents that could help reduce malaria rates in Palorinya.
The revegetation of these indigenous plants will ensure the sustainability of this potentially commercially viable product while also cushioning the impact on the settlement of rains, soil erosion and flooding. Nearly 300 community members have already been trained as trainers on tree cultivation and management who are cascading it to their neighbors, reaching thousands more. This spread of knowledge on environmental restoration and natural properties will boost local capacity and provide opportunities for small businesses producing natural repellents.
4. Turning plastic into art and paving stones in Mali
Timbuktu, a historic settlement on the edge of the Sahara, has long been an Anglophone byword for the most far-flung regions imaginable. Yet this Malian city is increasingly receiving forcibly displaced communities, and the population increase has increased waste-management issues and heightened sanitation concerns.
Refugee-led organization Association Gouna-Thieré, with the support of the UNHCR Refugee-led Innovation Fund, is working to clean up the living environment of the displaced through an innovative cash-for-work programme that will see plastic waste collected and recycled into artwork and paving stones. The project, which is community led and supports women’s inclusion, will ultimately benefit 250 people — while converting 250 tonnes of plastic waste into beautiful and useful materials.
5. Pulling plastic from our supply chain in Chile
Humanitarian aid is essential to ensure the wellbeing and safety of displaced people around the world — but it also generates a lot of waste. And it doesn’t have to! To respond to this environmental challenge, UNHCR Chile is working to integrate sustainability and circular-economy criteria across their supply chain to green their procurement of essential supplies.
This pilot project — supported by UNHCR’s Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund — is working on recycling refugee housing units used in the north of Chile to avoid them going into illegal landfills, or littering the desert. It also aims to eliminate single-use plastics, reduce packaging, and support local sourcing.
On World Environment Day, we’re taking a moment to appreciate these initiatives, which—despite working in hugely diverse settings—all aim to address challenges and deliver opportunities for forcibly displaced people by working in collaboration with nature and supporting healthy ecosystems.
There’s plenty more to be done but these projects, and other innovative approaches around the world, show that we have everything we need to take action on plastic pollution, champion circular economies, restore environments, and nurture the wellbeing of people and the planet.
Read more about our Environment and Climate Action Innovation Fund here and explore another initiative supported through the Fund—one that is strengthening community-based environmental management in Ecuador—here.
