Humanitarians still haven’t agreed what they should do about climate change

Scenes of catastrophic floods and wildfires in many parts of the world last summer hammered home the reality that climate change is now a present danger to humanity and no longer a future threat. It is clear that the climate crisis is a humanitarian crisis. In 2023, the hottest year on record, there were over 200 climate-related disasters affecting over 77 million people and causing an estimated 14,000 deaths. The landmark Climate, Relief, Recovery and Peace declaration adopted at COP28 provided international recognition of the link between climate change and humanitarian needs.

And yet, after years of policy reflection, there is still a distinct lack of clarity about what the precise role of humanitarian aid should be to address climate change. Divergent views exist about how far climate change is altering humanitarian action.

For some, the climate emergency requires a complete reconceptualisation of the humanitarian system, which will see a paradigm shift from war aid to climate aid. Climate change could soon eclipse conflict as the main driver of humanitarian needs. Oxfam claims that there has been an 800% increase in United Nations appeal needs for extreme weather-related emergencies over the last 20 years. The humanitarian sector is at a turning point and ill-prepared to address the new challenges of climate change. A complete rethink is required about how humanitarian aid is funded, targeted and delivered.

Another, more measured, view is that while global warming exacerbates existing humanitarian challenges such as conflict, displacement and food insecurity, it does not present a new problem per se. Humanitarian agencies have been dealing with natural disasters, such as cyclones, floods and droughts, for years. It is just that they are now called climate-related disasters, and are occurring more frequently. For a system that is already overstretched, less could be more in terms of humanitarians carving out a more niche role with regards to climate action. A recalibration of humanitarian action is certainly required, but not a radical new direction.

An uncertain comparative advantage

The reality is probably somewhere between these two views. Regardless, there are certain features of the climate crisis that make it a less-than-straightforward issue for humanitarians to address. The enormity of the challenge is daunting. Agencies are clear that there are no humanitarian solutions to the climate crisis. In terms of prevention, the most that they can do is advocate for the far-reaching measures required to avert the current inexorable rise of global temperatures, such as ending the use of fossil fuels.

Humanitarian organisations are on more familiar ground dealing with the mitigation of the worst consequences of climate change for vulnerable communities. The cost of loss and damage from climate disasters, though, is staggering – averaging $143 billion between 2000 to 2019, according to recent studies, and set to rise massively in the future. There are ethical considerations about how far humanitarian aid should be used to address the climate injustice of loss and damage given that crisis-affected countries are contributing least to the emissions that are causing global temperature rises. On a practical level, though, humanitarian assistance is only ever likely to cover a fraction of what is required for a comprehensive approach to loss and damage.

Humanitarian organisations are eyeing the new Loss and Damage Fund – the modalities of which were agreed at COP28 – and climate finance more generally as a potential way to fill the ever-increasing funding gap in global humanitarian appeals. The Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) has opened a Climate Action Account. However, humanitarians want it both ways: they don’t want donors to use their existing humanitarian funding for these new climate finance mechanisms, but they do want access to them to fund their underfunded appeals. It is unclear whether this is a worthwhile strategy to solve the humanitarian funding gap and will lead to a net increase in donor funding for humanitarian operations. Climate action represents another potential strain of mission creep for a humanitarian system already lacking focus and needing to prioritise.

Climate change is clearly prompting humanitarian organisations to work in new (and welcome) ways to respond better to climate disasters. This includes acting before predictable disasters occur, thereby limiting the worst effects on communities before they unfold. There is increased attention to anticipatory action, although, like its forerunners emergency preparedness and early action, it is extremely hard to raise funds for pre-crisis activities when humanitarian funding is already insufficient to respond to disasters when they occur. According to the Centre for Disaster Protection, pre-arranged financing accounts for only ‘2.7% of total crisis financing’.

Resilience programming is another area that humanitarian organisations can contribute to climate adaptation to make communities less vulnerable to climate events. These approaches require long-term perspective, and are therefore not easy to achieve with short-term humanitarian project cycles. This provides further justification for adding climate change to the humanitarian–development–peace nexus, although such an addition is still considered a step too far for some and has not yet happened.

Time for a system-wide policy on climate change and humanitarian action

Despite these challenges, humanitarian organisations clearly have a vital role to play to address the climate crisis – they just need to clarify further what that role is. A failure to do so will lead the humanitarian system to continue to drift on this issue and not clearly communicate its added value.

It is not the first time the humanitarian system has faced such self-reflection about the nature of humanitarian action. In the 1990s, there was an intense debate about how far humanitarian assistance should be used to prevent armed conflicts. It was quickly acknowledged that aid alone cannot resolve conflicts (the same can been said for climate change), but many agencies have subsequently adopted approaches to conflict sensitivity to ensure that, at a minimum, their interventions positively contribute to peace. The Darfur crisis in the 2000s similarly made protection a system-wide priority (for the first time) and not just restricted to mandated agencies. Humanitarians realised that it was not their role to provide physical protection, but they have since endeavoured to make protection central to the humanitarian response.

There are important lessons to be drawn from these examples of when the humanitarian system has faced overarching challenges that prompted a debate about the scope of humanitarian action for how it should now address the climate change crisis.

First, there needs to be conceptual clarity about the relationship between climate change and humanitarian action, just as there was with conflict prevention in the 1990s. As with conflict sensitivity, there needs to be a clear articulation of how humanitarian aid should be used to address climate change, focusing exclusively on its humanitarian consequences.

Second, humanitarians need to decide what they can realistically do, and more importantly not do, to address the effects of climate change. The menu of options of the different activities that they should engage in needs to be outlined from the level of global advocacy right down to field operations, with the issue embedded in the humanitarian programme cycle and individual project design.

Third, a practical way needs to be developed to roll out new approaches to climate change across all humanitarian operations, which leads to a genuine difference in the way assistance is provided. The aid system does not have a good track record for addressing cross-cutting issues such as climate change. The traditional playbook usually involves deploying technical advisors, developing strategies, establishing working groups, and producing lots of guidance, which tends to lead to fragmented processes and limited systemic change. The humanitarian system would do well to avoid the mistakes of other cross-cutting issues when developing approaches for climate change, taking lessons from other transformations in the humanitarian system, such as the use of cash assistance.

Fourth, the issue of financing needs to be settled. While the allure of climate finance is tempting to solve the perennial humanitarian funding gap, it would be better to see the scarcity of funds as reason to double down on clarifying the added value of humanitarian aid to address climate change rather than risk expanding its scope further. This will require some tough strategic choices given that there clearly is not the capacity in the humanitarian system to be involved in all aspects of climate action.

So far, 374 humanitarian organisations have signed up to the Climate and Environment Charter, and there has been a series of key messages and guidelines on the topic developed. What is needed now, though, is a system-wide policy on the issue to not only ensure a collective commitment to scale up the humanitarian response to climate change, but most importantly to spell out the precise role of agencies to address this global challenge. Given the questions raised here, such a policy is perhaps long overdue.

Damian Lilly is an independent consultant.