Remarks by Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Joyce Msuya at the 2022 Hilton Humanitarian Symposium and Prize Ceremony

I am honoured to be able to speak to you today.

Since its inception, the Hilton Foundation has been at the forefront of humanity’s efforts to improve the human condition and to alleviate human suffering.

Never has this work been more important. The world today faces a series of interconnected, global crises that threaten to unravel decades of progress.

As we chart a course through these turbulent times, we would do well to recall the world that Conrad and Barron Hilton envisioned, a world that this foundation, the NRC and so many in the audience today are working so hard to bring about.

In his will, Conrad wrote that the world’s people “deserve to be loved and encouraged—never to be abandoned to wander alone in poverty and darkness.”

“To wander alone in poverty and darkness.”

These words give me pause because I have been asked to talk to you today about the climate emergency and forced displacement. About migration, about journeys, about wandering.

It is a story we are all familiar with – for the story of our species is a story of migration, of a voyage that has seen us fan out to almost every corner of the Earth.

And yet what is happening on our planet today is horrifyingly different from those early beginnings.

The stable climate that humankind has enjoyed for around 10,000 years – an era of climactic calm that has birthed civilizations and allowed our species to flourish – is rapidly coming to an end.

If emissions accelerate, then one in every three people on Earth may soon live outside the ecological niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years.

These changes will turbocharge a movement of people unlike any the world has ever seen, redrawing the map of our species.

This movement has already begun.

Last week I visited camps for the displaced in Yemen, where the impacts of the climate crisis on the world’s most vulnerable were brought home in grim detail.

I met with Azrak, a woman displaced four times in eight years. She lost her husband and brother to war, and now her country is being hammered by the climate crisis, causing water shortages, droughts, heat waves, dust storms and floods.

Extreme weather now forces more people from their homes than war. But the slow burning impacts of the crisis are just as bad:

• The millions in Southeast Asia who have left their homes because they can no longer produce enough food to feed their families.
• The millions in the Sahel who have streamed towards coasts and cities as drought turns land to dust, forcing them into cities and slums already straining to provide for their people.
• The children in the Horn of Africa forced to walk for days to find water as the rains fail and the region tips towards full blown famine.

More intense and more frequent hurricanes are destroying more homes and upending more lives. Floods are washing away schools and futures. Rising seas are slowly swallowing up island nations.

As the climate emergency intensifies, the number of people forcibly displaced will rocket. And, as it does, millions more will be forced to wander the earth alone, in darkness and poverty.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our fate isn’t yet written in stone. There is still time to act.

First, we must do everything we can to minimize forced migration. The faster and deeper we cut emissions, the more we keep climate change in check and the fewer people will be forced from their homes.

We’re heading in the wrong direction. Emissions are set to rise 14% this decade when they need to be cut in half to avoid the worst.

Change is possible but governments must make polluters pay. That means ending harmful fossil fuel subsidies and heavily taxing the windfall profits of energy firms that are making hay while people suffer.

This extra finance can then be used to help people adapt to the climate crisis, and to offer a lifeline for those who’ve already lost so much in the fires, floods and droughts of our changing planet.

At COP27 in Egypt next month there is a real chance for civil society and others to push rich nations to fulfil their promise to help those most vulnerable to a crisis they did little to cause.

Second, we must make sure that the humanitarian community is ready to assist and protect people.

Part of that is about better predicting when disaster will strike so we can plan for the day after. The Norwegian Refugee Council, the recipient of today’s prestigious award, is a shining example of this. Its work embodies the values laid out by the Hilton Foundation, those of integrity, humility, stewardship, and compassion.

Its work on disaster risk reduction has helped countries like South Africa put in place plans that will save countless lives, reduce suffering, preserve people’s dignity and reduce the financial cost of humanitarian action.

Like OCHA, the NRC understands that, for our work to have the biggest impact, we must give local NGOs, local leaders, local business people and aid agencies a bigger role. They are the ones on the frontlines. They understand the local intricacies, the local impacts, the local solutions.

So let us redouble our efforts to grow the next generation of humanitarian agencies, a generation that can lead the world’s response to today’s interconnected crises.

Lastly, and more broadly, we must do more to ensure that migration caused by the climate crisis isn’t always forced.

Migration is often the only option people have in the face of a hotter, climate-disrupted world. Migration is survival, it is adaptation, it is a way out of crisis. Once we understand this, we can work to make sure migration happens safely and orderly, that people are empowered to make decisions about where they live freely and with dignity. 

We know that most of those displaced by the climate crisis will move within their own countries rather than across borders. They will abandon farms in the countryside and start new lives in overcrowded cities.

Badly managed, this influx will cause a massive expansion of mega-slums, a sprawl that, in a devastating irony, will make people more vulnerable to the very climate disasters they flee.

Deteriorating health, rising extremism, and growing poverty. Cities that are less inclusive, less productive and less sustainable.

And so humanitarian and development organizations, working hand in hand with the private sector and government, must immediately set about preparing the cities of today for the inhabitants of tomorrow.

This means finding solutions that are durable, that increase people’s resilience to climate change. It means green infrastructure, clean energy, decent jobs, and nature-based solutions that buffer people from heatwaves, floods and wildfires. Schools, health clinics, sewage systems, public transport, affordable housing. Retraining people whose lives have been upended so they can find new opportunities.

There are promising signs that this is starting to happen. Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable countries on earth, is teaching people how to adapt – how to grow salt-tolerant rice, how to farm shrimp instead of vegetables. This is adaptation in the usual sense. But the country is also helping people to move before disaster strikes, to towns and cities with greater protection, where employment and education is available to newcomers.

To all those gathered here and online,

What we’re seeing today is an unprecedented flow of people that threatens to generate hunger, poverty and danger on a scale the world has never seen before.

To avoid this future, we will need to see mobility as a form of resilience, migration as a form of adaptation and preparation as our salvation.

And we will need to summon the very best of our collective humanity by embodying the values of organizations like the Hilton Foundation. For, ultimately, how humanely we choose to treat each other will determine whether we can build a resilient, sustainable, global society able to withstand this century of profound upheaval.

When I met Azrak in the camp in Yemen she told me, like others I have met, that what she wants is to be given the power to take care of her family. Jobs, basic services, education. This is what the humanitarian and development sector must deliver for her and millions like her who are forced to flee from war, persecution and the impacts of our hotter world.

This is the mission that lies before us. Let us undertake it with a perseverance that honors the right of every single person to a home, to a life of dignity, to a life where they no longer have to wander this earth alone, in darkness and poverty.

Thank you.