Some ambassadors arrive at their first big assignment and keep the message safe. Theo James went to the Sahel and tried to tie two of the hardest problems in the world together: forced displacement and a warming climate. In October 2024, shortly after being named a UNHCR Global Goodwill Ambassador, the actor traveled to Mauritania to meet Malian refugees living at the edge of the desert.
According to reporting carried by The African Mirror, James spent time at the Mbera Refugee Camp, a sprawling settlement that hosts well over 250,000 refugees, most of them women and children who have fled violence in neighboring Mali. He also met members of the surrounding host communities, who are navigating the same environmental pressures with far fewer resources.
The purpose of the trip, UNHCR has said, was to show how climate change compounds the hardship of people already uprooted by conflict. The account of the visit described droughts in the region now stretching eight to nine months, up from three to four months in the past, along with worsening water shortages that hit people, livestock and crops alike, and bushfires that threaten both refugee settlements and local villages.
James let the people he met carry the story. The report quoted an 84-year-old community leader named Momo, who offered a line that stuck — 'The forest speaks a lot even if it is mute' — and a Malian refugee, Mariama Walet Almahdi, whose message was starker still: 'Tell them we are thirsty.' Those voices, rather than statistics, framed what the visit was trying to communicate.
James connected what he saw to a question of fairness. 'While we're all affected by climate change, it's the people least responsible who are bearing the heaviest burden,' he said in remarks reported from the trip. He added that the visit was a prelude to advocacy on a bigger stage: 'That's why I'm heading to COP29 — to stand alongside them and push for real, urgent change.'
UNHCR's representative in Mauritania, Elizabeth Eyster, underscored the stakes in the same reporting, saying, 'Now is the time to act, before the situation worsens and lives are put further at risk.' The agency framed the Mbera visit as the opening of a sustained push to keep refugee-hosting regions in the climate conversation rather than at its margins.
The trip also reflected James's own longer history with the agency; UNHCR notes he had supported its work for years, visiting people seeking refuge in places such as Greece, France and Jordan before his formal appointment in 2024. The Mauritania journey, and his stated plan to carry the message to the COP29 summit in Baku, marked his first major outing in the ambassador role.
For readers of this magazine, the value of the visit is in the link it draws: the climate crisis and the displacement crisis are increasingly the same story, and the people on the front line of both are often the least equipped to cope. Anyone citing the specific figures, camp population and quotes here should verify them against UNHCR's official materials before reproducing them.
Source date: October 8, 2024. Contextual photograph; it does not depict the people or the specific event described in this article. Photo: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Dylan McCord, Public domain ↗.
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