Climate change adaptations in humanitarian programming
Over the last few years, humanitarian actors have increasingly engaged with the challenge of climate change. In a world already facing extreme humanitarian need, climate change increases the frequency and violence of disasters, contributes to increases in conflict and displacement, and exacerbates the underlying vulnerability of people affected by disasters and conflict. Climate change is a major driver of humanitarian need, and it changes the context within which humanitarians attempt to respond to this need.
As a result, there has been growing humanitarian interest in climate at the policy level, evidenced in statements by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Principals, Humanitarian Aid Donors, and many humanitarian organisations. But – with the notable exception of a small number of agencies who have worked in this area for some time – there seems to have been less activity at the operational level. Or if there is activity, it is not being recorded; there has been very little written about what agencies are doing ‘on the ground’. As a result, it is common for agencies to say to us: ‘We know that climate change is an important issue. But what does it actually mean for programming? What should we actually do?’
This edition of the Humanitarian Exchange, ‘Climate change adaptations in humanitarian programming’, aims to help answer this question, by providing some examples of the work that humanitarian organisations are doing in response to the threat of climate change. Co-editors Paul Knox Clarke (Principal at the ADAPT Initiative and an expert on humanitarian system reform) and Mihir R. Bhatt (Director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute, or AIDMI) present here a range of articles that encapsulate relevant interventions and learning. The choice of activities, organisations and locations is by no means representative, but the articles here do provide a broad overview of some of the ways that humanitarians are adapting their programming to take climate change considerations into account – and, taken together, they point to a number of emerging trends.
The first article by Jean Mukenga and Jean Pierre Diowo Okitakoy outlines the work undertaken by International Medical Corps in Mali, describing the process of moving from a recognition that climate change is having real impacts on health, to the implementation of programmes to strengthen the resilience of the health system to climate threats, and to prepare the health system to respond during and after floods and heatwaves.
These two themes – preparedness and resilience – run through this issue. One of the first climate trends that emerges is that – in the face of the climate crisis, and at the behest of communities affected by climate change – humanitarian organisations are extending their activities beyond ‘response’ to consider other elements of disaster risk management. Of course, as the articles demonstrate, this does not mean that humanitarian agencies are moving away from response: if anything, the need for response is increasing. Nor are preparedness or resilience new areas for many of the organisations involved. Many are building on previous work, and on the fact that they have been providing services to vulnerable people in the same places for many years. The reality of climate change, at a time when budgets are already insufficient to meet needs, forces humanitarians to consider how these long-term engagements can better decrease people’s vulnerability, rather than just keep people alive. As an example, Rajeev Jha writes about the work of Humanitarian Aid International (HAI) in the Sundarbans in India, where HAI is combining preparedness and resilience in a programme that brings together preparedness planning, capacity-building and resilience activities around the maintenance of mangrove forests. These activities combine local knowledge and new technologies to address a number of climate-related threats, including increased lightning strikes and sea-level rise – a reminder of the variety of hazards enhanced by climate change.
One particularly interesting evolution of previous work on early warning and preparedness is the anticipatory action approach. Anticipatory action typically combines an early-warning system, a preparedness plan, and pre-agreed financing: the early-warning system ‘triggers’ the release of financing that pays for the actions in the preparedness plan. As many climate hazards can be fairly accurately predicted in advance, the approach has been an important element of humanitarian thinking about climate change.
This edition of Humanitarian Exchange includes two examples of anticipatory action programmes: one – for flooding in Bangladesh – from Md. Shahjahan in the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, and one – for heatwaves in Pakistan – from the Initiative for Development & Empowerment Axis (IDEA), as explained by Muhammad Amad and Haris Bin Riaz. Both cases show how the approach led to practical actions in advance of the event and – importantly for an area that is developing rapidly – outline key lessons for future programmes.
In the article from Practical Action in Nepal, Achyut Luitel outlines a related approach using index-based insurance. Here again, financing is agreed in advance and linked to a meteorological monitoring system, but in this case the financing is in the form of commercial insurance rather than a fund provided by a donor. When the monitoring system shows that agreed triggers (such as levels of flooding or the rainfall level in a certain period) have been met, the insurance pays out an agreed level of compensation to cover disaster-related losses. The aim here is to transfer some of the financial risk of climate change from humanitarian donors to commercial markets, allowing for a more sustainable funding base.
Improved preparedness and earlier, more effective responses to disasters are important. But the climate crisis is not just about rapid-onset disasters. It is also about slower, crushing immiseration and increases in vulnerability: ever-decreasing crop yields, increased levels of disease, and access to clean water becoming more difficult. These slower-acting impacts of climate change can be as deadly as disasters, and leave people more vulnerable to disasters when they do occur. Addressing these challenges is the job of climate change adaptation, but very little adaptation funding is currently available to the fragile and conflict-affected states where most humanitarian action occurs, and in the absence of this funding, humanitarian agencies are trying to decrease vulnerability through programmes that support the resilience of communities in the face of climate change.
In Niger, the International Committee of the Red Cross has been working with local communities on activities that reinforce people’s coping strategies to drought and floods. Catherine-Lune Grayson explains that, as well as decreasing vulnerability to climate shocks, these programmes are also designed to ease tensions within and between communities by reducing competition for land and water. Kevin Kairu, Ferguson Olemarampa, Dan Ekal and Patrick Kibuku turn our attention to Turkana county, Kenya, where SAPCONE and DanChurchAid have also recognised the link between climate change and increases in intercommunal violence, and have trained local government officials, community leaders and security agents on conflict analysis, early warning and alternative dispute resolution, as part of a programme to improve the climate resilience of agriculture and fishing. Both programmes demonstrate the importance of understanding, and working on, the linkages between climate change, disasters and social conflict, particularly in areas where conflict is endemic.
Also in Kenya, Lynn Chestit and Carol Rotich write on how Woman Kind Kenya (WOKIKE) supports activities to improve the climate resilience of rainfed agriculture and animal husbandry. Here, too, we see a humanitarian agency going beyond a narrow view of humanitarian response and resilience programming to address the ways in which climate change exacerbates existing social and political causes of vulnerability. WOKIKE’s resilience programming places a strong emphasis on addressing political marginalisation: working to ensure that the voices and demands of people at the sharpest edge of climate change are heard by governments and policymakers.
A distinct thread runs through the articles in this edition, of very strong community engagement, design and ownership of many of the climate-related programmes. The collection includes several examples of humanitarian agencies working to bring together local knowledge of environmental change and adaptation options with a more scientific understanding of climate change. A particularly interesting approach is that of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI). Mihir R. Bhatt and Vishal Pathak explain AIDMI’s appreciative enquiry method to help communities (in this case, groups of women farmers) identify and augment ways of making agriculture more resilient to climate change. The AIDMI article also highlights some of the organisation’s work in urban areas to increase resilience to heatwaves – a reminder that climate change is as much an urban as a rural phenomenon.
While many of the programmes discussed in this issue relate to food security and livelihoods – perhaps a reflection of where much of the humanitarian climate programming has focused to date –the article by Dabal Kaji Rokaha and Mohammad Ali Mamun of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) considers the impact of climate change on another sector: shelter. The lime-stabilised soil construction that the article describes is important both in itself, and as an example of the sort of changes and technical innovations that are required across a wide range of humanitarian activities, including shelter, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), and health.
Adapting to the reality of climate change may push humanitarians out of their comfort zone – of ‘tried and tested’ response approaches that aim to preserve life, livelihoods and dignity until normal life can be resumed. One new area in which humanitarians may find themselves is that of displacement as a coping strategy: the idea that, in certain circumstances, humanitarians may help people relocate away from areas where climate change has made life too difficult or dangerous. In the penultimate article, Alexandra Cohen from GiveDirectly describes how large cash grants are helping communities do just this – relocate away from their flood-prone villages to higher ground. At the same time, Fatima Yamin reminds us that climate change is also an intensely political issue and that we should be careful not to focus exclusively on consequences on the ground, when we need also to engage with the causes of the crisis.
Taken together, the articles show that many agencies are working on the ground to address the current realities and future threats of climate change. They are doing so not because climate change is a hypothetical future issue, but because it is a priority, now, for many of the communities that humanitarian actors serve. The programmes address a wide range of risks, from lightning strikes to malnutrition, because while climate change is a global phenomenon, its effects are intensely local. Many of the programmes focus on food production and livelihoods, but humanitarians are also considering the impacts of climate change on other sectors, such as health and shelter. And in doing so, their own analyses, and the expertise of the communities with whom they work, are pushing them to move ‘upstream’ of disasters, and to strengthen their work on early action, preparedness and resilience.
Where possible, agencies are working with a wide variety of actors – government ministries, technology companies and insurance providers – to support this work. But the reality in many places where humanitarian action occurs is that there are few external actors, and limited external resources, beyond those that come from the humanitarian sector. This brings the argument back to the issue of comfort zones. The world is hotter than it has been for 125,000 years, and it is getting hotter. It is no exaggeration to call the climate threat unprecedented and epochal. The impact is being felt first, and worst, in so-called Least-Developed Countries (to use the United Nations categorisation), and particularly those that are fragile and conflict-affected. In the face of these realities, can the humanitarian system, as well as international humanitarian, development and climate financing mechanisms, meet the scale and speed of change that is required? For now, these programmes, while innovative and apparently effective, are scattered and (in most cases) reliant on very limited humanitarian funding. While they might provide proof of concept, the scale of activity is still tiny compared to the needs for climate adaptation. Hopefully, the work being undertaken by the organisations represented in this issue answers the question, ‘What do we actually do about climate change?’. The next question – an increasingly urgent one – is how to pay for it.
Paul Knox Clarke
Principal, ADAPT Initiative
Issue 86 articles
1. Building weather resilience in Mali
7. Community resilience, livelihoods diversification and recovery, and mitigating climate change shocks in Turkana County
12. Adaptation and resilience: a Sisyphean task?
