South Sudan is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable contexts.  Recurrent flooding, environmental degradation, and displacement increasingly overlap, particularly in refugee-hosting areas where services, land, and livelihoods are shared between displaced and host communities. Compounding these issues are a lack of regular data on key areas such as infrastructure, making it difficult for donors and organisations to tackle these key 

In collaboration with partners, Samuel Hall recently completed a multi-layered assessment of climate vulnerabilities in three refugee-hosting location, Aweil West, Maban, and Jamjang,to support climate-resilient planning and investment. The findings point to a simple but critical lesson: understanding climate risk in low-information environments requires combining local knowledge, field-level data, and advanced spatial analysis.

Local knowledge as the foundation for climate action

Climate risk does not look the same everywhere. Even within flood-prone regions, patterns of exposure, coping strategies, and priorities vary sharply from one location to another. That is why participatory methods were central to this assessment.

Community workshops and focus group discussions enabled residents to map flood pathways, identify vulnerable infrastructure, and describe how climate shocks affect livelihoods, safety, and access to services. These exercises were not add-ons, they shaped how risks were interpreted and helped design interventions grounded in local realities rather than generic assumptions. In a context where formal data systems are limited, local knowledge remains one of the most reliable sources of insight.

Why field-level data still matters

Satellite data alone cannot capture whether a borehole is functional, whether a school floods every rainy season, or how far households must travel when markets are cut off. For this reason, the assessment included in-depth infrastructure surveys, directly assessing nearly 300 water points, health facilities, schools, and markets across refugee settlements and host communities.

This field-level evidence revealed how climate shocks repeatedly damage essential services, often in predictable ways, and how infrastructure placement, maintenance gaps, and drainage failures compound vulnerability. In low-information environments like South Sudan, on-the-ground data collection remains indispensable for identifying what is actually at risk, and why. Play around with the dashboard to see the infrastructure data in action.

Pairing field evidence with advanced geospatial analysis

At the same time, local data gains power when matched with advanced analytical tools. Using Google Earth Engine and Sentinel satellite imagery, the assessment applied machine-learning land-cover classification to track environmental change over time, revealing deforestation, wetland loss, cropland shifts, and changing flood dynamics that are not always visible during short field visits.
This integration made it possible to link community-reported flooding with longer-term trends in land degradation and settlement expansion. It also highlighted how repeated shocks are eroding natural buffers that once reduced flood risk.

Mapping institutions, not just hazards

Climate resilience is not only about exposure it is also about capacity. Alongside the climate risk analysis, Samuel Hall conducted a detailed stakeholder and capacity mapping of government bodies, humanitarian actors, and community structures operating in refugee-hosting areas.

This work highlighted persistent coordination gaps between institutions working inside refugee settlements and those operating in host communities, as well as severe constraints in mobility, data systems, and early warning mechanisms at local government level. Understanding these institutional realities is essential for designing interventions that are not only technically sound, but implementable and sustainable.

One picture, many data streams

These workstreams underline a key message: no single data source is sufficient in complex, low-information environments. Participatory knowledge, field surveys, spatial analysis, and institutional mapping each capture different dimensions of risk. Only by bringing these strands together can policymakers and practitioners identify where climate impacts are most acute, where capacity gaps lie, and where targeted investments can have the greatest impact, for both forcibly displaced people and the communities that host them.

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