Sudan's Newest Refugee Camps Are Eating Its Land the Fastest

Picture a camp where the trees have been cut for cooking fire, the soil has been stripped, and the wells are running dry. Now picture the same thing happening in a ring around that camp, out to 50 kilometres. Across Kassala, El Gedaref and White Nile states, that picture is no longer hypothetical. It is written in satellite data covering nearly half a century.

Sudan has long carried some of Africa's largest and most enduring refugee populations. It has done so in drylands that were already fragile, where rain is unreliable, soil is thin, and every year's harvest is a gamble. Refugees fled war and persecution and found shelter here. That generosity should be honoured. But generosity without planning becomes a slow-motion disaster for the people who must live beside the camps for decades after the aid convoys leave.

Consider what the satellite record shows. Researchers at the International Water Management Institute tracked 19 camps from 1978 to 2025, measuring changes in land use, vegetation, soil and overall land condition across four distance bands out to 50 kilometres. The pattern is consistent. Farmland and built-up areas grew steadily, and they grew by replacing shrublands, grasslands, forests and wetlands. The land that sustains rain, holds water and feeds livestock was converted, year after year, into something that could not do those things.

Here is the detail that should stop every policymaker in their tracks. The oldest camps, the long-established ones in Kassala dating to before 1990, show the greatest total loss. The newest camps, those opened from 2020 onward in El Gedaref, are changing fastest each year. We are not watching a problem that is fading. We are watching a problem that is accelerating as Sudan's newest settlements take shape.

The degradation also moves outward. It begins in the inner zones, closest to the camps, and then spreads toward the edges. By the time it reaches 30 to 50 kilometres, the land that remains is less healthy than it was. A village that never hosted a single refugee can end up downwind of the damage, drinking from a shrinking aquifer and harvesting thinner crops.

Let us be precise, because precision is what separates a serious case from a slogan. The study found a strong and consistent association between settlements and environmental change. It did not include a comparison landscape without camps, so it cannot prove that camps alone caused every hectare of loss. Drought, expanding farmland and wider economic pressure are part of the picture too. But the absence of that control group is itself an indictment. For years, decisions about where to site camps and how to manage the land around them have been made without the baseline data that would tell us what those decisions cost. We are asking for proof after decades of failing to collect it.

Why does this matter beyond the camp fences? Because land degradation is never only an environmental story. When topsoil disappears and wetlands are drained, the consequences arrive as drought, as flood where water has nowhere to go, as failed harvests, and as fights over the last grazing land and the last working well. Resource conflict is what happens when a government fails to plan. Sudan has already paid a catastrophic price for institutional collapse, with its army and rival militias turning the country into a battlefield since April 2023. In that vacuum, nobody is measuring the land, enforcing the rules on tree-cutting or water use, or asking whether a camp's firewood demand is turning a forest into ash. The people who bleed are the poorest: refugees who did not choose the arrangement, and host communities who did not get a say in it.

Africa has better examples to learn from, and Sudan's leaders should study them. Kenya's Kalobeyei settlement, planned alongside the older Kakuma camp, was designed to integrate refugees with the host community through shared services, markets and land use planning rather than isolating them in a permanent aid bubble. The core idea is one that every serious reformer should embrace: a camp is part of a landscape, and it must be governed as one. Botswana, for its part, has shown what disciplined institutions can do with scarce water and land, building a stable economy on the foundation of clear rules, transparent management and a government that answers for its choices. None of this is magic. It is the unglamorous work of planning, measuring and enforcing.

So what must happen? First, every new camp must be sited with environmental checks written into the process from day one. That means soil and water assessments before the first tent goes up, clear limits on tree-cutting and groundwater extraction, and a mandatory plan for how the land will be managed when the camp is still there in 2045. Second, clean energy must replace firewood. Donors who fund shelter and food should fund liquefied petroleum gas, solar cooking and efficient stoves on a scale that matches the demand. A refugee family that cooks with wood is not an enemy of the environment; it is a family that was never offered a better option. Third, the government and its partners should zone land use around each camp, protecting wetlands and grazing corridors from conversion, and restore degraded land through nature-based methods such as reforestation and water harvesting. Restoration in the oldest camps is not optional. Prevention in the newest ones is the cheapest decision anyone will ever make.

Finally, transparency. Monitoring data must be shared publicly, updated regularly, and linked to early warning systems that alert communities before drought or flood arrives. Secret or fragmented data is how bad decisions survive. Property rights and clear land tenure matter here too, because people who know they have a stake in the land are far more likely to protect it.

And now to you. If you are a Sudanese citizen, demand that your government publish the land data for every camp and every host community, and demand a seat at the table when siting decisions are made. If you work for an aid agency or donor, refuse to fund a camp without an environmental plan you can see. If you are a regional leader in the African Union or IGAD, put camp degradation on the agenda and insist that environmental monitoring be a condition of humanitarian support. Refugees deserve safety. Host communities deserve a future that is not being quietly sold off, hectare by hectare, to the dust.

We have been told, for decades, that hosting refugees is a burden to be endured. The satellite record says the burden is not the people. It is the absence of planning, measurement and accountability. Fix that, and Sudan can be both a generous host and a steward of its own land. Keep ignoring it, and the trees, the soil and the water will be gone long before anyone thinks to ask who was responsible.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB