Millions of people in the Great Lakes region have spent decades displaced by conflict, but climate change is adding a new layer to the crisis. Floods, landslides and rising lake waters are uprooting communities and sometimes displacing people who have already fled violence, exposing the limits of regional approaches that treat conflict and climate displacement separately.
In May, participants at the 61st meeting of the United Nations (UN) Standing Advisory Committee on security in Central Africa reiterated their commitment to preventing internal displacement and protecting displaced people. Similar declarations have been made before, as civil wars and armed conflicts scattered millions within their own countries and beyond. Three decades on, internal displacement still lacks durable solutions.
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DRC, Burundi and Rwanda in the Great Lakes region
By the end of 2025, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) hosted 4.93 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) – Africa’s second largest IDP population after Sudan. Burundi counted roughly 88,800 IDPs, in addition to around 100,000 displaced since the 1993 civil war, who preferred not to return home, and have not been reported in official statistics since the 2010s.
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Conflict remains the main driver of regional internal displacement, with the DRC alone registering over a million new IDPs in Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC)/M23-held territories during 2025’s first quarter.
However, climate-related events are now layering onto conflict as a second, growing cause. They accounted for around 13 per cent of IDPs (630,000) in the DRC and 92.3 per cent (82,800) in Burundi by the end of 2025. Recurring floods and landslides, and the rise of Lake Tanganyika’s waters, have displaced tens of thousands in Burundi and DRC in recent years, many of whom had settled along the lake in violation of riparian buffer zones.
Rwanda offers a contrasting case: conflict-induced displacement has been low for years, with internal displacement today almost entirely climate-driven and concentrated in the Western and Northern provinces along Lake Kivu.
Conflict and climate drivers do not simply coexist; they reinforce each other. The degraded conditions of IDP camps expose displaced populations to climate hazards. In 2025, the shelters of around 50,000 who had fled violence in South Kivu, settling in households, churches and schools in Tanganyika Province, were destroyed by flooding after torrential rains, displacing many for a second time.
In a region marked by protracted conflict-induced displacement, climate IDPs add further pressure on already scarce resources, including land. This is compounded by Burundi and Rwanda’s high population density, which is conducive to land-related conflict.
In Burundi, conflict over land allocated by the government for humanitarian purposes has long caused tensions between IDPs and host communities, escalating into violence. This shows how decades of unresolved displacement have themselves become a driver of conflict, calling for solutions that go beyond humanitarian aid.
The UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement have been translated into two binding instruments namely the African Union’s (AU) Kampala Convention and International Conference on the Great Lakes Region’s (ICGLR) Protocol on the Protection and Assistance to IDPs. However, no country in the region has adopted a national IDP law giving it practical effect.
Although these instruments provide for a range of measures, in practice, protection and assistance get more attention than prevention and durable solutions. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Global Assessment Report 2025 says only 3.3 per cent of humanitarian aid went to prevention and preparedness between 2019 and 2023.
Regionwide, apparent progress on internal displacement has often been misleading. In Burundi, implementation of the 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement failed to return all those displaced by the 1993 civil war. Instead of resolving underlying obstacles to return, the government simply renamed the camps ‘peace villages’.
In the DRC, recurring armed conflict has made any voluntary return impossible. The drop in displacement figures since 2025 was not because of durable solutions, but because of the AFC/M23’s early 2025 forced dismantling of IDP camps near Goma.
Unlike Burundi and the DRC, Rwanda’s government has invested in large-scale relocation programmes for families in disaster-prone areas as a preventive measure. But this, too, raises concerns about voluntariness: moves not freely chosen risk being perceived as another form of displacement.
The Great Lakes region also lags in building resilience to climate hazards and preventing them. Like other parts of Africa, it lacks functional weather stations that can provide meteorological data, making early, informed responses to climate hazards nearly impossible. Besides, coordination between the two tracks remains weak. No regional mechanism monitors – let alone responds to – displacement profiles shaped by both drivers.
The result is a region where durable solutions for IDPs are undermined by the persistence of drivers that caused displacement. As climate change intensifies and conflicts remain unresolved, that gap will widen.
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An integrated approach is becoming more urgent as donors cut aid budgets, leaving IDPs even more vulnerable. The first step in a coherent response is providing better evidence. National bodies are needed to document field-based data on climate-induced displacement and its interactions with conflict.
Second, existing regional early warning mechanisms should be adapted to track conflict and climate drivers in order to generate integrated preventive measures. This ambition was included in the 2004 Dar Es Salaam Declaration but remains unrealised two decades later.
Third, with international aid shrinking, countries need robust national IDP laws that domesticate existing UN, AU and ICGLR legal instruments. Legislation that addresses both drivers of displacement should be backed by the political will to implement them.
Last, IDPs and host communities need a seat at the table, in peace processes and climate policy consultations, rather than being treated as subjects of decisions made on their behalf.
Tatien Nkeshimana is a Research Officer, and Veronica Chepseba is a Research Intern at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS).
This article was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union, under the contract entitled ‘Strengthening the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region’s (ICGLR) Capacities for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution and Peacebuilding.’
(This article was first published by ISS Today, a Premium Times syndication partner. We have their permission to republish).
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