Climate change and related disasters are driving millions from their homes. Now, a new UN initiative aims to put these very refugees to work offsetting the emissions of the world’s biggest producers.
Facing a US$7 billion (£5 billion) funding shortfall, the UN’s refugees agency has launched its Refugee Environmental Protection (REP) fund. The plan? To plant trees and install sustainable cooking stoves in camps, generating carbon credits to sell on the global market.
It sounds like a win for everyone: money for camps, jobs for refugees, and trees for the planet. But our research, carried out with our colleague David Harvie, suggests a darker reality. This is a system that generates questionable climate benefits, while locking refugees into low-wage labour to service the same economies that displaced them.
How the fund works
The fund aims to plant tens of millions of trees to offset carbon emissions elsewhere, while simultaneously providing employment for refugees and funding for UN refugee camps.
It uses donor funding to invest in tree-planting and clean cooking-stove programmes in and around refugee camps. (These cookstoves use electricity or burn liquefied petroleum gas rather than firewood – the cleanness refers to the fact that they’re considered safer for users because there’s less indoor air pollution, not because they are fossil-free).
Friedrich Stark / Alamy
The claimed carbon savings from these projects are then verified and registered as carbon credits to be sold to people or organisations who want to “offset” their own emissions. Revenues are used to replenish the fund, to improve the camp and finance new projects. Advocates also claim that clean cooking stoves will better protect women against gender-based violence, as they will have a reduced need to collect firewood.
The fund remains at a relatively early stage of development. Following pilots in Uganda and Rwanda, the UN plans to expand it to Brazil, Bangladesh, Kenya, Mozambique, Cameroon and Chad.
The impact on emissions
While the claims sound good, there are significant issues that mean the fund may well fail to reduce carbon emissions – and could possibly even increase them.
Many of the problems with schemes like these are now well known. The carbon credits industry’s self-regulation, combined with its lack of shared methodologies, undermines the credibility of its claims to reduce emissions. Key actors such as the multinationals that buy the credits or the landowners who generate them are also incentivised to overstate the climate benefits.
In addition, carbon credits rely on counterfactual estimates of what would have happened without the project. This is riddled with uncertainty, especially as climate change or reforestation can themselves alter how much carbon is saved.
These issues affect all carbon credits, even including the most rigorously verified – so-called gold standard-certified projects – which is the certification the UN’s fund will use.
The problem with planting trees
Most tree-planting schemes have very high failure rates, often seeing almost half the trees die in the first five years, while some can have mortality rates as high as 90%.
Poorly designed projects can also degrade soils, harm biodiversity and exacerbate water shortages. And as climate change increases the risk of wildfires, stored carbon could be released back into the atmosphere.
These problems have led many researchers to declare carbon offsets as false climate solutions that allow major emitters to continue polluting without any meaningful reductions. Indeed, much research has established that lots of carbon credits are effectively worthless.
The UN’s refugees agency has stated the fund “manages project risks according to high climate standards” and prioritises “measurable improvements in fuel efficiency and emission reductions.” It maintains that revenue is “transparently reinvested in community-driven projects”.
Who gets the carbon credit?
Refugees are paid to plant trees and assemble cookstoves, but the wages are extremely low. Comparable projects in Rwanda and Uganda suggest official wages range from around US$1.30 to US$5 per day, and are often less in practice.
By contrast, gold standard-certified reforestation credits typically sell for US$20–27 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent, 2025 prices. Using conservative estimates, the fund’s planned 20,000 hectares of reforestation could generate around US$3.2 million per year, or US$64 million over 20 years.
The UN frames the fund as a way to secure finance for refugee camps, but our analysis of the pilot projects shows a huge disparity between the value of the carbon credits and the money reaching the camps. For the 388,000 people across the three pilot sites, we estimate the US$3.2 million generated annually would contribute roughly 14% of current (insufficient) funding – and less than 5% what is required to provide adequate services.
While the money raised is a fraction of what’s needed to run the camps, the “value” created by refugees doing low- or unwaged labour goes beyond the direct dollar amounts. These credits have enormous strategic value for the buyers. By purchasing gold standard offsets generated by displaced people, major polluters gain a powerful social and environmental license to continue business as usual. That’s why much of the value appears to go not to the refugee workers, but to the companies buying the credits, and to the intermediaries who manage the transactions.
Sopa / Alamy
Much of the work involved in generating credits also comes from the use of clean cooking stoves. This labour is entirely unwaged, and is done primarily by women. Where gas is involved as a fuel for these stoves, the companies who provide it also benefit by securing a small but important market for their fuel. That’s one reason why exporting countries such as the US support clean cooking initiatives, even while opposing other climate measures.
The UN’s refugee agency rejects the characterisation of the fund as exploitative, framing it instead as a necessary “innovative financing” mechanism to plug a funding gap.
Ultimately, we worry the fund risks creating a form of climate maladaptation, where something seeks to respond to climate impacts but unintentionally increases vulnerability.
Similar to many aspects of the emerging green economy, the UN’s Refugee Environmental Protection fund risks making climate change worse while exploiting refugee labour. This perversely locks refugees into a green Sisyphean task: producing carbon credits that enable continued emissions, thereby worsening the very conditions that helped displace them in the first place.
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