Kafr Yahmul, Syria – As winter begins, residents of an informal camp north of Idlib city are preparing for the coming months.

Fateem al-Yousef anxiously watched the sky as clouds gathered, thinking about what would lie ahead for her and her family when the rains began. “I’m afraid that water will get into the tent and my children will get sick,” she told Al Jazeera.

Fateem, 40, has been displaced since the early years of the war in Syria, which began in 2011. She left her village south of Idlib and moved from one village to another. Four years ago, she finally settled with her husband Khaled al-Hassan and their nine children in the Kafr Yahmul camp, where 70 families live on rented land.

Fateem said the memory of her first day in the camp was still fresh in her mind because it was accompanied by rain. She had recently given birth and water was entering the family’s tent. “The situation was very difficult because we were not adapted to it,” said Fateem. “We felt like there was water everywhere and we had no heat for our young children.”

Today, displaced people in northwestern Syria are burning pistachio shells, hazelnuts, olives, stray pieces of firewood and charcoal, and leftover plastic, nylon and cardboard to keep warm because the price of diesel has skyrocketed, but even these options are expensive for camp residents.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), about 2.7 million people in Syria need urgent assistance this winter.

Syrians face high costs of living, unemployment, inflation – prices have doubled since the start of 2023 – ongoing displacement and the lingering effects of February earthquake.

A severe lack of funding for humanitarian projects in Syria will also worsen the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in 2024, OCHA warned.

Burning waste, harmful to health

Fateem said she and her family can barely make ends meet even though most of them work. Her eldest daughter, 15, and 14-year-old son work as farm laborers, while the younger children collect scrap metal from roadsides. Her husband, 47, is unable to move a hand but works whenever he has the chance. Still, the family can’t afford everything they need to survive the winter. Most adults earn less than $1 a day – barely enough to support a family.

Wadha al-Yousef, 36, lives nearby and is not directly related to Fateem but comes from the same village. She, her husband Ahmed al-Sattouf, 42, and their five children aged one to seven have been living in Kafr Yahmul for five years. She told Al Jazeera that her family relies on collecting cardboard, plastic and nylon scraps from roadsides in the summer to keep warm in the winter, but burning them comes at a cost.

“The terrible smell and smoke spread throughout the camp, but people tolerate each other because they all have no other choice to heat,” Wadha said.

Burning plastic and nylon is harmful to the family’s health. Wadha said that her children constantly suffer from illnesses caused by the smoke and therefore they have to visit health centers and clinics throughout the winter.

Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) warned this month about the dangers of incinerating such waste, as it emits harmful fumes that can cause respiratory illnesses and infections, particularly in children and the elderly.

Autumn rain clouds arrived a little later than usual this year, but the cold and flooding are forecast to be as bad as ever, if not worse. Last year, 306 refugee camps in northwest Syria were flooded in the winter. United Nations agencies report that 874 of 1,525 camps in the region have been classified as “at risk” of winter flooding. Seventeen of them are at “catastrophic” risk, 240 are at “extreme” risk and the rest are at “severe” risk.

About two million people live in the camps and at least 15,000 new tents are needed every winter. However, most of the existing tents have not been replaced in years and do not have the necessary insulation to protect against rain and cold. Neither Fateem nor Wadha have anything more than a thin nylon cover sewn into the tents to insulate and keep them dry. But that wasn’t enough to withstand even the first light rain of the year that came a few days ago.

“I spent the night standing and holding up the shade so the water wouldn’t fall on my young children while they were sleeping,” Wadha said. She said her family couldn’t afford more appropriate insulation, which would cost about $70.

“You can’t do more with less”

David Carden, UN deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syrian crisis, told Al Jazeera that the most effective solution to help the displaced people is to move them from tents to dignified shelters that offer greater durability, privacy and protection from flooding and harsh weather.

If a family’s tent is replaced every six months, a shelter can last five years, Carden said, adding that replacing tents frequently is “one of the most cost-effective investments.” However, only a third of it financing The funds pledged by donor countries for 2023 have actually been received, he added. In comparison, just over half of the required funds will be made available in 2022.

Due to the lack of funding for OCHA’s humanitarian assistance plan in Syria, only 26,000 families were provided with caravans or housing units. According to the United Nations, around 800,000 people still live in tents.

“We just can’t do more with less,” Carden said. “But we fear the worst is yet to come next year.”