Refugee nexus eco-capacity: examining refugee-environment dynamics and sustainable integration pathways in Djibouti

Understanding the environmental impact of refugees and the burden they place on nature is critical for building long-term climate resilience for disadvantaged populations, but it is often overlooked in domestic refugee climate action plans. In this paper, we look into the interaction patterns between the environment and refugees in Djibouti from 1990 to 2022 and how a set of sustainability indicators nexus refugees can be evaluated at an adaptive system level through long-term and short-term observation, based on an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, a causality test, as well as both variance decomposition (VD) and impulse response function (IRF) analyses. According to the ARDL results, we confirm the progressive, positive impact of biocapacity, arable land, and trade on refugee resiliency. This discovery suggests that incentives aimed at biocapacity restoration are closer to offset refugee footprints and can propel ecological services necessary to support refugee populations. Whereas a thriving trade is fundamentally linked to preserving the environment and ecosystems, through green technologies interchanges. However, there are significant caveats that need to be concerned, mostly on the question of how long the domestic biocapacity reserves will withstand the unprecedented advancing of ecological footprints, which increase in junction with the rising number of refugees. IRF and VD forecasts indicate that over a 10-year period, carbon emissions and ecological footprints will exert growing negative effects, surpassing available biocapacity. The findings also point out that the camp-based renewable energy, refugee capacity-building initiatives, and financial aid gravitate toward a low level of a minimum ground that lags behind in energy security targets and funding channels. This failure to protect and provide repercussions efforts for refugee against the pernicious of climate change, and the overrising ecological footprint, not only increases the risk of vulnerability exposure but demonstrates the far-reaching limits of domestic climate policies and the insufficient insulated efforts toward refugee inclusivity.