Conflict and climate change create a double displacement threat in Africa’s Great Lakes

For people displaced by war in Africa’s Great Lakes region, fleeing once no longer guarantees safety. Floods, landslides and rising lake waters are uprooting communities and, in some cases, forcing people who escaped violence to move again.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo hosted 4.93 million internally displaced people by the end of 2025, Africa’s second-largest internally displaced population after Sudan. Burundi counted about 88,800 internally displaced people, in addition to roughly 100,000 people displaced since the 1993 civil war who had not returned home and were no longer included in official statistics.

Conflict still drives most displacement. The DRC recorded more than one million new internally displaced people in territories held by the Alliance Fleuve Congo and M23 during the first quarter of 2025. But climate-related events accounted for about 630,000 people, or 13% of the DRC’s internally displaced population, and 82,800 people, or 92.3%, in Burundi by the end of the year.

Recurring floods and landslides, along with rising waters in Lake Tanganyika, have displaced tens of thousands in Burundi and the DRC. Many had settled near the lake despite riparian buffer zones. Rwanda presents a different pattern: internal displacement there is now almost entirely climate-driven and concentrated in the Western and Northern provinces along Lake Kivu.

The pressures overlap in camps and host communities. In 2025, flooding after torrential rains destroyed shelters used by about 50,000 people who had fled violence in South Kivu and were living in households, churches and schools in Tanganyika Province. The resulting competition for land and other scarce resources is especially sharp in densely populated Burundi and Rwanda, where land disputes between displaced people and host communities have sometimes escalated into violence.