The global humanitarian system needs to adapt to the worsening climate crisis

Humanitarian needs have been growing at an alarming rate over the past half-century, with crises increasing not only in regularity, but in scale, severity and complexity. As the climate crisis worsens alongside conflicts, the global humanitarian system requires a forward-thinking strategy to address a concerning new reality.

There were record levels of humanitarian need in 2023, with 339 million people needing assistance. Household Multi-Sector Needs Assessments indicated a pervasive deterioration in humanitarian conditions, particularly in relation to food security, livelihoods and health.

In the past year, there has been major conflict in Sudan, the occupied Palestinian territory, and Nagorno-Karabakh, with devastating impacts on people and already fragile infrastructure. Displacement is projected to increase by at least 6.2 million people by the end of 2024, doubling since 2015. In some of the worst situations, people are unable to move to escape danger, remaining without access to services. Eighteen ‘hunger hotspots in 22 countries’ will likely face catastrophic food insecurity. Conflict, displacement and lack of basic services are driving health emergencies globally, including resurgences of cholera and dengue.

Against the backdrop of the worsening climate crisis, El Niño has hit its peak, with climate emergencies projected to increase at pace. Simultaneously, the international system responded to natural hazards including major earthquakes in Syria, Türkiye, Morocco and Afghanistan, and to major flooding across parts of Asia, North Africa and East Africa, amidst other disasters. As seen with the Türkiye–Syria Earthquake, Libya’s Storm Daniel, and Myanmar’s Cyclone Mocha, natural disasters are increasingly occurring in environments where political crises threaten humanitarian access.

This worsening complexity is challenging current approaches to emergency preparedness and response as a result. This has led to increasing calls for anticipatory action, and cuts to the heart of who, where and how global humanitarian systems prioritise, and why.

A system past its limits?

Against this backdrop, the nature of crises is evolving. Where global humanitarianism has been geared predominantly towards conflicts since the 1980s, climate-driven emergencies are likely to increasingly take centre stage. These emergencies, however, may look different from ‘traditional’ disasters that the humanitarian system is used to. Trends suggest that we will see more climate emergencies: occurring concurrently; more occurring recurrently; with longer-lasting impacts in permanently changed environments; and increasingly occurring within existing conflict environments – fuelling new or prolonging conflict dynamics as communities feel resource constraints. Ultimately, it is likely the climate crisis will influence every aspect of humanitarian action, and not be a discrete issue as sometimes perceived. Humanitarian actors must fundamentally shift their mindset away from being geared towards protracted conflict crises and one-off disaster events, and towards approaches that consider cascading risks and a state of global ‘polycrisis’.

At the same time, the scope of global humanitarianism has expanded significantly in past decades. Humanitarians are covering more situations where no alternative – or no will to seek an alternative – exists. Protracted crises are the norm; humanitarians are providing safety nets where governments can’t or won’t; and humanitarians have arguably provided short-term fixes for a lack of diplomatic ability, or will, to address root causes of need and conflict. Coupled with relative cuts in financing compared to needs, this strain raises the risk of an international system – one already at its limits – being forced to respond to even more issues with even fewer resources.

Analysis, prioritisation and anticipatory action

There is increasing acknowledgement that these competing demands may lead to a risk of system failure from a perspective of the ability to mobilise and deliver assistance. Less well acknowledged, however, is that the demands will also create significant and worsening challenges in effective analysis, with humanitarian analysis and information agencies struggling to evaluate and prioritise quickly evolving crises to identify people and places facing the most acute needs at speed. This will become particularly critical for response to new emergencies outside of normal annual planning cycles.

Therefore, investment – and hope – in anticipatory action approaches is growing, but while many initiatives show promise locally, they have yet to be proven at scale. Anticipatory action systems typically draw on lessons from development contexts where they have borne fruit, notably where data is more readily available than in most humanitarian contexts, particularly hard-to-reach areas where there may be a breakdown in governance and significant barriers to operate.

Where these systems do exist, many are fragmented, single-sector, and lack tangible links to other analysis, decision-makers and responders, meaning there is no guarantee of an actual response taking place. Without robust data, models are also prone to misfire or oversight, particularly if they do not incorporate local expertise and community early-warning systems. Whilst recent anticipatory action pilots have demonstrated utility on prediction for climatic events and disease outbreaks, there remains a significant gap where conflict – a primary driver of need – is concerned, as conflict prediction models alone cannot be relied upon for anticipatory action.

Global and country-level systems are also not set up to allow joint analysis to effectively inform Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) structures across the world, and few countries have a clear or transparent process for decisions on prioritisation or resource allocation, particularly outside of the Humanitarian Programme Cycle. In 2023, there has been heightened demand for analysis coordination, with an increasing number of Assessment and Analysis Working Groups, whose functions include assessment coordination, conducting joint analysis, and supporting inter-cluster groups with prioritisation and emergency response. Without collective real-time analysis through such groups, coordination mechanisms are often struggling to quickly reprioritise resources or launch responses. Proper global, country- and area-level preparedness plans linked to such analysis are also required if both emergency and anticipatory responses are to stand a chance of responding to the increasing prevalence of crises in the future.

The future of response

A tightening focus

It is likely that the humanitarian system will therefore have to evolve significantly – and rapidly – to address the changing nature of crises. Whilst not new, global conversations on prioritisation accelerated in 2023, driven both by a desire to improve and by impending funding cuts. Whether forced or intentional, a recentring of international humanitarian assistance on acute emergency response and anticipatory action may be necessary given the future scale of crises, and it is critical that humanitarian leaders have the courage to collectively, and more clearly, define what ‘humanitarian’ need and response encompass in this new reality.

This may also present opportunities for strengthening aid effectiveness and be a catalyst for reform, if it can be harnessed. It would require a smaller role for international assistance deployed for years on end, and a more intentional focus on targeted support to emergencies. Protracted crises will not disappear, so this will necessarily require investment in enabling local institutions to prepare for, respond to, and recover from crises, with affected populations and local institutions taking a more central role more rapidly, post-emergencies.

This focusing should not mean that recovery, development and peacebuilding are cast aside; rather, it could enable better complementary action. As humanitarian resources become more stretched, it is critical that international emergency assistance is not used to cover ongoing governance gaps and that efforts to support fit-for-purpose development (and adaptation) assistance mechanisms – ones outside of the humanitarian architecture, but working in coordination – are accelerated.

A tighter global humanitarian focus may also present opportunities, and a need, to regain lost ground on humanitarian principles. A smaller operational role for the international system in-country would have to be complemented by a modified, more facilitative global role and reclamation of humanitarian space, rights and laws. This will be critical in a world where emergencies are more frequent, and questions around climate rights, justice and untested elements of international humanitarian law emerge.

A systems approach: real-time monitoring and emergency response

For a prioritised global system like this to work, it has never been more critical for evidence and analysis to drive needs-based prioritisation of resources. An integrated approach is required, bringing together real-time monitoring and analysis that identifies areas of current or impending concern and which explicitly informs decision-makers: donors, who can trigger (re)allocations of funding; non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that can mobilise emergency teams; and affected communities, who can trigger community-led early-warning and response systems.

Figure 1 provides an example of how such a system could be established, capitalising on data that already exists within many humanitarian crises, but that is often not properly analysed against a clear framework. If acute humanitarian assistance can be tightened to focus on averting the worst outcomes (excess morbidity and mortality), then humanitarian research can be designed with a clear purpose in mind: identifying people and places that face the highest risk of loss of life now or in the future, with clear triggers and thresholds established in partnership with emergency responders and anticipatory actors to determine appropriate response modalities to reduce or avert the loss of life.

While a conceptual framework can be standardised globally, these systems must be appropriately contextualised to the crisis at hand, to understand underlying drivers of risk, identify appropriate response, and to ensure affected people are at the centre of critical decisions. As the climate crisis drives new and unexpected challenges, these systems therefore must be flexible and contextualised (to be sensitive enough to pick up changes); light-touch (to be cost-effective while delivered at scale); and designed to collect (remote) data from hard-to-reach populations. While these systems are not easy to design or deliver, the scale and complexity of crises today mean that we have to invest in joined-up, real-time monitoring, analysis and response systems, to help maintain a principled, no-regrets approach to humanitarian action.

Local actors at the centre of response

To support better humanitarian assistance under such a future scenario, NGOs – and particularly local actors – must become more central to anticipatory action and response, given that they are often best placed to mobilise standby capacity and to access populations. Such a shift may force progress in areas where the localisation agenda has been slow to yield transformative results to date.

To work, this would require more responders and coordinators to be local actors, financing coming from and going to a wider range of actors, and a proactive shift towards more diverse humanitarian leadership. At the global level, this would require sustaining United Nations (UN) humanitarian leadership, but with more meaningful inclusion of international NGOs and national NGOs throughout the IASC structures, and a rebalancing of global systems to have less of a focus on UN operations and a more holistic view of response, including in situations where international actors play a limited in-country role.

This will be even more true with crises increasingly occurring in politicised environments where international institutions face worsening access challenges. If current trends continue, alternative response models may need to become more frequent – national NGOs and local institutions taking the lead on emergency response, and the international system playing a supportive role. Whilst entrenched power structures in the humanitarian architecture may create resistance to this, potential is already being seen with discussions on NGO-led and locally led coordination and response mechanisms to complement traditional IASC modality structures in contexts such as Myanmar, Sudan and Syria.

A fit-for-purpose global system

Given the emergence of a new climate crisis reality, the global humanitarian architecture is at a critical juncture: it must evolve or risk abandoning the principles that guided its formation. Despite some progress, the global system remains centred on an internationalised (and often UN-centric) approach. However, as the international system becomes more stretched to the point of potential collapse, there could be an opportunity for reforming in a way that meaningfully puts people once again at the centre of response, forcing accelerating progress on reform efforts.

The positive news is that humanitarians, and those they serve, are inherently adaptable. Concerns of the demise of humanitarian principles, erosion of access, and debates on a narrower vs a more expanded humanitarianism have reared their head for the past 40 years and humanitarian aid has continually weathered predictions of its demise. The unprecedented scale of the climate crisis and the political, conflict and rights implications, however, mean that a bold, collective and strategic vision for the global system under this new reality is critical – and global institutions will need to coalesce around that vision, including in ways that limit their current power.

Nanki Chawla is Global Emergencies Manager at IMPACT Initiatives.

Garth Smith is an independent humanitarian consultant and former NGO forum director.