Findings

Changing nature of crises and response

Our study shows that the climate emergency is part of the new reality of humanitarian operations.

Many aid workers gave noticeable examples of how the frequency, severity, location and impact of disasters were changing in the places that they had worked, with dramatic impacts on the well-being of communities. For aid workers, the climate emergency is increasingly part of the day-to-day work. They are witnessing an overall change in the patterns of natural hazard occurrence leading to disaster, and identified the following trends:

This sentiment of a changing hazard landscape was the most pronounced in humanitarian professionals with 15 to 20 years work experience. They spoke about various disasters as ‘wake up calls’ on the effect of the climate emergency. Cyclone Idai was given as a clear example by striking a region unused to preparing for tropical cyclones.

Respondents specialising in providing protection and assistance to victims of conflict spoke about shifts in the nature of conflicts. In the past 30 years, conflicts have changed, characterised by an increase in intra-state violence, a multiplicity of actors, new types of warfare, and in some cases, an erosion of respect for international norms and International Humanitarian Law. Fast and slow onset disasters exacerbate ongoing community and regional tensions, heightening existing and introducing new conflicts.

The climate emergency is a ‘threat multiplier’, exacerbating existing societal inequalities, harming economies and traditional livelihoods and eroding living conditions and coping capacities in particularly vulnerable contexts. Many people are living in ‘multi-hazard environments,’ experiencing continual peaks of crises including conflict, disasters and pandemics.

Changing needs

This shifting context influences humanitarian needs and operations including:

Aid workers at all levels and across all roles are strongly aware of the climate emergency. They see the impacts of it daily. Having received some training and research on the topic, they want to know more about how to adapt. Although a lot of general information on the climate emergency exists, aid workers are unsure about how to use general information, for example on regional climate risk factors, to guide operations and responses across health, water and sanitation, shelter, food or security.

The use of technical experts in the aid sector could help “translate” technical information, such as climatic forecasts to guide operational responses. Technical experts could also help the sector understand how risk is assessed.

There are good examples of improving knowledge for the climate emergency including the International Organization for Migration’s online course Sustainability in Humanitarian Action, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s work on Shelter, and cross UN collaboration (such as regional OCHA with the World Meteorological Organization, and UNEP and OCHA on environmental emergencies).

It is also important to identify and address specific knowledge gaps, which could include investigating early action programmes for forgotten hazards or places that are usually not covered.

Many aid organisations work reactively rather than planning and preparing for long-term humanitarian crises. Our study showed that the aid system was structured for short-term action. Funding uncertainty for the next financial year prevented long-term planning.

Organisations have not calculated how budgets for different response areas would need to be increased; how recruitment strategies should be tailored for changes in staff profiles in terms of language skills or field expertise; where to locate new regional offices; or how procurement chains, stockpiles of goods for humanitarian relief, or logistical assets would need to be scaled-up to meet increased demand.

There is also a lack of data that can easily be translated to policy and action that supports long-term planning, and few studies on the future number of people who will need additional humanitarian support due to crises associated with the climate emergency.

Early action saves lives, is cost-effective and reduces suffering. Intervening earlier will also increase people’s resilience and mitigate participation in risky coping strategies.

Anticipatory action is an approach which links early warnings to actions designed to protect communities and their assets ahead of a hazard.This approach is now encouraged in the aid sector and should be supported by donors particularly because there is still an element of disasters which are cyclical or at least somewhat predictable. Our study also revealed that early action appears to work best in countries that have experienced a prior disaster.

Good examples of early intervention include: early action by the World Food Programme in the Republic of Congo in 2020 which provided residents with cash assistance before the riverine floods were widespread. In drought-struck regions of Somalia and Ethiopia, the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund earmarked US$40 million in April 2021 to ensure people get help before the situation turned into a devastating food security crisis.

Acting in anticipation comes with its own unique challenges. It requires significant upfront investment to set up monitoring systems and to work with government, donors and other local and established NGOs, to plan activities and build relationships over time.

A change in mindset is also needed: donors need to be comfortable with funding preventative interventions and measure progress and success differently. Governments must also be willing to receive help before a disaster has reached crisis levels.

Resourcing is one of the main challenges to adequate preparation and flexibility in responding to the climate emergency. Funding from governments is often slow to arrive. It’s difficult for organisations to recruit specialist staff at short notice, and there are rarely adequate stockpiles of goods already in the country for humanitarian relief – meaning that organisations have to rely on international procurement processes that are often slow, bureaucratic and carbon/pollution intensive.

These issues are magnified for local NGOs who have crucial contextual knowledge, proximity to victims and the ability to support long term programmes in their countries, but rarely have access to the funds accessible to larger international NGOs and UN organisations. This means that these critical local organisations can’t respond quickly, scale up operations for growing needs and plan long term – even though they are best placed to respond. Local NGOs typically do not have access to the stockpiles of goods for humanitarian relief, such as medicines, shelter kits, food and non-food Items that international NGOs can access.

In our study, resourcing was consistently seen as one of the main barriers to adaptation to climate change in the aid system. New ways of working, new early action funding streams, investments in disaster preparedness and multi-year funding opportunities are limited, different eligibility requirements between donors made them difficult to access and they are rarely afforded to local NGOs.

Grants available for development and climate adaptation are difficult for humanitarian agencies to access without setting up new partnerships. For example, it took four years for Save the Children to be accredited with the Green Climate Fund, a fund established within the framework of the UNFCCC to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change.

The unprecedented challenge posed by COVID-19 put these issues in the spotlight. UN OCHA’s consolidated appeals in 2020 only received approximately 50% of total funding requirements. Other organisations outside the UN also struggled to obtain enough funding. Donor country aid budgets are at further risk as governments focus on domestic recovery.

Evaluating and improving partnerships is vital if humanitarian organisations are to cope with increased demand and pressures. Partnership working has a great impact on how and when aid is delivered, co-ordinated and funded, as well as impacting post-crisis recovery, reconstruction and addressing root causes.

Many different collaboration and reform initiatives have been developed over the years to improve the overall functioning of the system, but these cases are limited and not part of a common approach.

Respondents to our study called for governments to have a greater role in preparedness activities, which requires significant upfront investment and resourcing to collect risk-monitoring data. It also requires governments to take greater ownership, including identifying possible gaps in response capacity so that humanitarian actors can be engaged early. This can be politically sensitive, so a collaborative approach between humanitarian partners and their governmental counterparts is needed.

There was also a sense that development organisations could play a greater role in reducing vulnerabilities and inequalities that make communities less resilient to the climate emergency.

The private sector’s role in adapting to and mitigating the effects of the climate crisis is critical. The sector has a crucial role to play in supporting the co-creation of solutions to some of the challenges we face, and in funding the gap between required and received funds. This could also change the flow of funds from a typical ‘North-South’ direction to locally funded projects, which would have greater local ownership and result in more long-term gains.

Examples of private sector collaboration include:

The OCHA and UNDP Connecting Business Initiative which engages the private sector in disaster preparedness, response and recovery, including during COVID-19.

The Vanuatu Business Resilience Council responded to Cyclone Harold in April 2020 – supplying over 1,000 remote coastal households with 35 tonnes of food and non-food items over an eight-week period.

In Haiti, the ‘Alliance pour la Gestion des Risques et la Continuité des Activités’ network carried out information sharing campaigns and sent more than two million text messages and provided phone credit to the National Emergency Center to facilitate communications when Tropical Storm Laura passed through the Caribbean in August 2020.

Country Director, 30 years of experience

Although the humanitarian sector’s primary priority is to save lives, reducing negative environmental impacts is an important part of good practice. Like all other industries, humanitarian organisations have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. We work in vulnerable contexts, where environmental protections and regulations are often lacking and the environment may have been severely damaged by conflict or instability.

Respondents to our study demonstrated high motivation to see more positive and preventative actions implemented in their organisations, and wanted adequate time and resourcing allowed to form partnerships with local agencies to put plans for reducing impact into place.

The Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organisations is an important initiative, where signatories must translate the commitments of the charter into time-bound targets and action plans within a year. This additionally creates means by which mitigation and adaptation activities can be assessed and funded.

Good examples of work in this area include climate change mitigation and environmental protection strategies and plans from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Other organisations without formalised plans incorporated mitigation and protection activities in their operations for example: conducting environmental assessments and monitoring environmental impacts in field offices; the use of solar-powered water pumps in schools, hospitals and displacement camps, and biogas systems in prisons; partnerships with academia and the private sector to investigate the impact of products distributed in logistics chains; and finding new ways to manage hazardous waste from vehicles.

The UN Environment Programme and OCHA (UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs) jointly designed a Nexus Environmental Assessment Tool, to allow humanitarian actors to quickly identify issues of environmental concern before designing longer-term emergency interventions.

Preparing the aid system for the climate emergency is an advocacy and communications challenge.

Many participants who informed our research felt that the urgency of the situation was not being communicated effectively enough. To safeguard human survival, aid organisations need to have a more active participation in political processes that influence the climate emergency.