Deputy relief chief: "Imperative" to support resilience, climate adaptation alongside humanitarian aid
Ms. Joyce Msuya, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Chief
Remarks at the launch of the Global Humanitarian Overview 2024 - Geneva launch
People at the Centre of Humanitarian Action in the Context of the Climate Crisis
As delivered
Excellencies, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
The world is in the midst of one of the largest humanitarian crises of the modern era, with the devastation wrought by conflict, climate change and economic hardship fuelling unprecedented levels of suffering.
Nearly one out of every five children is either living in conflict or fleeing from it. The number of people suffering acute food shortages caused mainly by climate-related disasters has doubled in the space of a year. The displacement crisis is now worse than any we have seen this century.
And today’s conflicts are more intense than ever. In just two months, 17,000 civilians have reportedly been killed in Gaza, the majority of them women and children.
In the face of all of this, humanitarians around the world have continued to display astonishing levels of sacrifice, resolve and courage as they strive to reach people in their darkest hour.
This year, thanks to the generous contributions of donors, the humanitarian community helped 128 million people with some form of assistance. This is a sign that efforts to strengthen humanitarian action are working.
We are now more efficient, effective and accountable. We have devolved more power to frontline responders. And we’re getting better at anticipating threats so that people can prepare for disaster before it strikes. Yet despite these herculean efforts, millions were not reached.
Donor funding this year fell far short of needs. Indeed, 2023 will be the first year since the global recession that finance for humanitarian emergencies is lower than the previous year.
As a result, humanitarian agencies have had to make increasingly painful decisions, cutting life-saving food, water and health programming, with devastating results for so many.
• In Afghanistan, a country in the grips of famine, we have had to cut food deliveries to 10 million people.
• In places like Myanmar and Haiti, we have had to stop the construction of emergency shelters, which left almost a million people without a place to live, exposed to extreme weather and natural disasters.
• In Nigeria, we could only reach 2 per cent of women in urgent need of sexual and reproductive health services and gender-based violence prevention.
We cannot allow this trend to continue into next year. That’s why today – on behalf of more than 1,900 humanitarian partners, the majority of them local and national NGOs – we are urging donors to fully fund our appeal for US$46.4 billion.
This money will provide a lifeline to 181 million people in 72 countries – men, women and children whose lives have been shattered by war, climate change, economic hardship and other disasters.
Although the amount we’re asking for is less than last year, this does not mean the global humanitarian situation has improved. It means we have had to focus our efforts on the people who face the greatest threat to their lives.
Faced with cuts, we have had to get creative, working tirelessly to prepare robust, evidence-based appeals, anchored in in-depth analyses. Thanks to this work, we know exactly what needs to be done.
First, more support than ever will need to be channelled through local and national partners to ensure that humanitarian action is truly grounded in people’s priorities. In Mozambique, I met women going door to door to speak with survivors of the world’s most powerful cyclone. These women understood the needs on the ground and were able to respond with speed and flexibility to ever shifting priorities. We must do even more to empower groups like this.
Second, we need to step up efforts to prepare communities for disaster. Anticipatory action not only protects lives; it reduces the financial cost of humanitarian action, allowing us to do more with less.
At COP 28 in Dubai, we announced the creation of the CERF climate action account that will channel rapid, flexible funding to climate-related emergencies. We will also use the pooled funds to increase the amount of pre-arranged finance that can be mobilized the moment disaster strikes.
Third, we must prioritize humanitarian diplomacy if we want to get life-saving aid into countries where armed groups and bureaucratic barriers have cut off tens of millions of people. Afghanistan and Syria are examples of what patient, consistent trust-building and negotiation can achieve. These efforts must be doubled.
Ladies and gentlemen, having just returned from COP28, and before that from some of the countries worst hit by climate shocks in East and Southern Africa, I want to end with a word about the climate crisis.
As humanitarians working on the frontlines of the world’s disaster zones, we know the future that scientists warned us about has arrived. Our planet is now hotter than it has been for at least 12,000 years. Human activity has pushed the planet into a new age – an age of fire, heat, flood and drought unlike any humanity has faced.
This year we saw record-breaking heat supercharge natural disasters and extreme weather planet wide.
• In Libya, flash floods killed at least 4,000 people, with thousands still missing, and displaced more than 40,000 people.
• In Canada, wildfires burned an area of forest roughly the size of Syria.
• So far this year climate and weather-related disasters affected more than 44 million people, causing more than 18,000 deaths.
The climate crisis is also turbocharging the world’s existing humanitarian crises, plunging people already reeling from disaster into even greater depths of misery.
The humanitarian community is doing everything it can to respond. We are providing immediate, on-the-ground support to the world’s most marginalized and affected. We’re finding ways to support longer term resilience even as we provide life-saving assistance. And we’re delivering fast, effective assistance through our pooled funds to local organizations operating in the most fragile places.
But the pace and scale of change is rapidly outstripping our ability to respond, stretching an overburdened system to breaking point.
Our message is clear: there is no humanitarian solution to the climate crisis. Unless we address the root causes of this crisis by taking aggressive steps to mitigate climate change and build resilience, the humanitarian system will be overwhelmed.
We have been warned about what awaits us should we fail to act:
• Within a little more than 20 years, more than 1.6 billion people could be exposed to severe and extreme drought. That’s four times today’s number.
• And the number of people living in ‘very high’ crisis risk countries will roughly triple.
Given this nightmare scenario, it is imperative that donors support resilience and climate adaptation alongside humanitarian relief.
The money for the transition is clearly there. Last year G20 governments spent a record $1.4 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies. This is 30 times more than what we need to fund this year’s humanitarian appeal. That fact alone should give us pause.
This year’s global humanitarian overview paints a picture of a world plagued by multiple, escalating, and interconnected crises. Among them a spiralling climate emergency that is adding more fuel to the fire.
Yet it also paints a picture of a humanitarian community that has grown more skilled, more efficient and faster at reaching people in their time of greatest need.
And so I would ask you for a moment to imagine what might be possible if this community received the funds it needed. Imagine how many more millions of people we could reach, how many more we could help to rebuild and repair lives upended by the world’s disasters.
This is the world I want to see us build together. And I know you do too.
Thank you.