Dialogue at the 2019 Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium: on Climate and Conflict: How global leaders are adapting to troubling trends, October 18, 2019, Des Moines, Iowa

Questions by Kimberly Flowers (KB), Director, Humanitarian Agenda & Global Food Security Project, CSIS. Answers by Mark Lowcock (ML), Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and Emergency Relief Coordinator, OCHA

KB: Mark, talk to us about the trends that you’ve been seeing in terms of climate change and conflict. How does that relate to some of the crises that are most prevalent in what you have to prioritize in your work?

ML: Kimberly, thank you. So as you say, my job is to have an overview of all the world's humanitarian crises and try to coordinate responses to them. You know, the world in its wisdom created all these wonderful agencies—WFP that Ertharin [Cousin, fellow panelist] used to run and the wonderful NGOs and the Red Cross family. And one of the things about the crises we’re dealing with is that no one agency can solve the problem. So when you think about a famine, actually what kills people in famines isn’t just the starvation. It’s mostly the measles or a respiratory infection—those things that a healthy person fights off and a starving one can’t. And that’s why there needs to be a coordinator.

So what we’re trying to do in my office is identify the needs. On the 5th of December we will publish our Global Humanitarian Overview for next year, which is I mean the world's most authoritative, sophisticated assessment of future needs. We’re trying then to coordinate response plans. This year we are trying to raise $25 billion to reach 150 million people, save their lives through these crises. We’re trying then to raise the money to support all these guys in doing their work. And then we’re trying to support implementation, especially in conflicts where the biggest problem is the way the men, and it is the men, with the guns and the bombs get in the way of the lifesaving agencies trying to protect people.

On climate change I'm basically seeing two things. Firstly, more really big bad storms. A month ago I was in the Bahamas. This week we’ve seen the typhoon in Japan. Two years ago we would have been talking about Irma and Maria. Paradoxically, in a way I'm also seeing more droughts, so more wet problems but also more dry problems. Six weeks ago I was in Somalia, a very drought-prone country, exacerbated by conflict. And in the past, droughts have led to famines in Somalia, as in ’92, the first time I was there—a quarter of a million people lost their lives and then again in 2011 a quarter of a million lost their lives. But we’re getting better at staving that off. 2017—the worst drought the country had seen for a long time, we staved off famine.

But what we need to do, as well as staving off the immediate problem, is help countries diversify and evolve to reduce the risk they face. I had a very instructive experience in Malawi about six months ago where there in the middle of a really bad drought I went down to Salima, the shore of Lake Malawi and spent a few hours just listening to the stories of people from that part of the world. And what they said to me, especially the older people, is that they could see the climate has changed. People in that part of the world are entirely reliant on subsistence maize farming and there to make a living farming maize from rainfed agriculture, what you need is 90 days decent rain per season. The number of years where that’s happening is declining. So what they are talking about is how to build different livelihoods, so that the humanitarian system both needs to do a fantastic job in saving lives, but it also needs to help contribute to the solutions.

KF: But thinking about the connections that I'm sure you see between forced migration, displaced persons, conflicts and climate change - how all of those are connected and how that has changed in terms of political will, in terms of your programming. What is it you’re thinking about when you have to confront those issues?

ML: I think one of the starting points is for us all to recognize and understand that conflicts have causes, and what we’re seeing as a result of climate change is that we’re seeing more powerful drivers that are creating displacement and conflict and so on. On Tuesday I'm going again to West Africa to the Lake Chad Basin, the Sahelian region. If you look at that region, what you see is very rapid growth in populations—it’s doubled so far this century. It’s going to double again in the next 25 years, and then it’s going to double after that. You see people whose historical lifestyles have been nomadic, have been on the move so their pastoralists. And you see that the environmental resources are increasingly stressed so that the traditional lifestyles are not working for people, and so you see increasing competition over resources, witnessed in places like the Lake Chad Region. The water in Lake Chad has declined by 90%. The population is much bigger, more people fighting over fewer resources and that creates a space for insurgents and terrorists and so on.

So the only long-term solution to deal with that problem is to find different livelihoods for people. Unfortunately, what we see at the moment mostly is a response to the symptoms. So we see a response in the form of military efforts to deal with insurgents, which I'm in favor of, you know, if that needs to be part of the response. But we also see a response in terms of humanitarian action, which I'm obviously in favor of, including for displaced people. But what we’re not seeing enough of is a response dealing with the underlying drivers of the situation.

Now, there are some ways the humanitarian system can act better to create more space for the solution and kind of agenda. One of the things we need to do is anticipate much better the next problem. It’s much cheaper, more humane to deal with a problem earlier than to wait until it’s on our TV screens and we’re confronted with huge numbers of starving children who can be only saved, as they must be saved, by expensive therapeutic feeding programs. And I am seeing more examples of earlier action. You guys who were in Bangladesh recently and in July just before you were there, when we could see a big storm coming, the World Food Programme provided to 25,000 people -US $53 per person, three days before the storm, to get out of the way and to solve their own problem. And that kind of anticipatory action is what we need to see on a much bigger scale in order to avoid things simply overwhelmed by the strain of dealing with growing caseloads.

KF: But right now are there any changes you’re making within your organization, within your own strategic planning to shift how you're addressing climate change at the moment?

ML: So for us and our support for all the humanitarian agencies—the U.N. agencies, the NGOs and the Red Cross—we’re basically trying to do three things. The first thing we’re trying to do is improve the timeliness and quality of data so that we know the next problem we’re going to be dealing with in time to have an efficient, effective response, not to be very reactive.

The second thing we are trying to do is put in place in advance finance so that when the problem arrives, it’s available instantly. One of the characteristics of humanitarian action around the world is that a problem emerges and we all see it on our TV screens, and people like me pick up the phone to leaders in rich countries and say, “Have you seen what’s going on, on the TV?” And can you help us do something about it? And they think about it, and then they generate some money and eventually gets to the agencies, and then there is a response. That is a long process. What we need is the pre-agreed finance—and insurance can help with this and contingency finance can help with it.

The third thing we’re trying to do is make sure that, once you’ve got the data and you’ve got the money, you also have a plan with agencies and organizations behind it who can execute it quickly. And that requires more agility and repetitive response than we’ve had sometimes in the past. There's a really good example of how to do this well in Mozambique in March when that huge cyclone hit Beira. Within a month of the cyclone hitting, a million people had not just been promised but had received food, had had their kids vaccinated, had shelter provided, and had some start to help them recover. And the faster you act, because you’ve got a plan and you’ve thought about it in advance, the cheaper the response, and the quicker you get on to the recovery.

KF: I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in terms of the importance of governance and political will. When you adhere to your humanitarian principles of being neutral and independence, it ultimately comes back to political will. And how do you look at that?

ML: You know, the world's humanitarian system is an entirely voluntary system. No individual or family or government has to contribute to the work of these wonderful agencies. And we need to keep explaining to everybody why it’s in everyone's interest to save lives and build for the future.
And one of the things that happens when the humanitarian leaders like us get together is we’re sort of outfaced by the problems, so that we leave everyone feeling sort of depressed and miserable. So there’s two things I just want to say to everybody.

The first is—the world has a very effective humanitarian system. Every year, the appeals I coordinate reach more than a hundred million people and certainly save millions of lives. And when I was first doing this work, two million people a year were losing their lives in these disasters, and now it’s an order of magnitude less than that.

The second thing, though, is that the proportion of the world's population who are still vulnerable to these problems is much lower than it used to be. When I was born, most people on the planet were hungry all the time and vulnerable to these disasters. And now because a hundred countries have progressed, the proportion of people left in that vulnerable position is not more than 50%—it’s fewer than 10%. And there’s no reason why we can’t help the remaining 8% along the same journey.