Mr. Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator - Global Humanitarian Overview 2024 – Doha Launch “Putting People First: Humanitarian Diplomacy in a Challenging World” 11 December 2023

As delivered

Allow me to start with an unscripted part of my remarks, and that is to say thank you, honorable Prime Minister [H.E. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani of Qatar], to what you and your Government do daily to seek for peace, provide for humanitarian assistance, to understand the relationship between the two, as I have direct experience of in the case of Gaza. It is not a coincidence that this is the first ever Global Humanitarian Overview presented outside Geneva by one of my successors than to be here in [Doha]. We are hugely in your debt due to your creative diplomacy, your humanitarian diplomacy, your political diplomacy, the generosity that goes with it. So thank you very much indeed. And thank you for being here with us today. It’s a great honor for us. Thank you.

I was also going to start with remarks on Gaza […] – that the situation is bad and getting worse, that the efforts of Gaza, to bring moments of peace, which were successfully achieved last week were of the greatest importance and will be still of the greatest importance. And the very fact of the destruction [and] the intensification of the military operation that we have been hearing about in the south of Gaza and the threats to neighboring countries only makes the prospects and the priorities and the importance and the creativity, your efforts, all the more important. We are relying on you, and we know that you can be relied upon. Thank you very much.

But Gaza is an example, we’ve heard from the Secretary-General, why 2023 has been yet another incredibly challenging year. And as we approach 2024, almost 300 million people around the world are in need of humanitarian assistance and protection – 300 million people, I think that’s equivalent to the third largest, third most populous country in the world, 300 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance around the world.

And we all know the causes. There are no secrets.

New and resurgent conflicts around the world with deep and long-lasting consequences, almost none of which are resolved and become what we call intractable. This year, we have seen the eruption of yet more brutal conflicts. There’s been one after the other. In Sudan in April and, as I’ve just referred to in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory in October – these two massive geostrategically important, humanitarianly vital conflicts have joined the myriad other unresolved conflicts that have kept millions of people in the state of prolonged need and that we wouldn’t be discussing where we here a year ago. Ukraine, remember that? In Syria, remember that? In Yemen – I remember that – to name only a few.

The global climate emergency as well, we are now in the last day, I think, of the [UN Climate Change Conference] COP[28], and I’m very, very proud to be sitting in the same space as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International [Affairs] of Somalia, [Mr. Abshir Omar Jama]. The global climate emergency has continued to spiral out of control. And I was asking him just before we started, what is your impression of the COP? And he wisely said, it’s far too complicated to put into a few words – as is climate, as is climate. It leaves a trail of destruction in the path that we are involved in. 2023 has been the hottest year on record. We have seen multiple concurrent climate disasters, from Topical Cyclone Freddy in southern Africa to wildfires in Europe, and the other devastation wrought by storm Daniel in Libya. And we were lucky, were we not, to escape famine in the Horn of Africa, which we worry about so much. And persistent, unequal economic pressures continue to overlap with conflict. I am told, and I have quoted this elsewhere, that more children now are displaced by climate than by conflict, which is a terrible comment, a terrible comment on human behavior.

Persistent unequal economic pressures, climate disasters, disease outbreaks and other factors – all of these are significant drivers of operational need for humanitarian agencies, all of which are here represented today and will be speaking today.

The result is that across the world more, than more people are displaced than at any time since the beginning of this century: One in every 73 people around the world, a ratio that has been doubled in more than 10 years. Nearly one in five children around the world is either living in or fleeing from conflict. One in five children – can you imagine looking around our distinguished audience today, imagine children of so many people here – one in five, living in conflict. 258 million people, just to keep the numbers going, are facing acute food insecurity or worse, and as disease outbreaks continue to cause significant loss of life, the deadly cholera outbreaks in 29 countries, I was reading last night about the cholera outbreaks in Sudan, fueled by overstretched health systems. My colleague Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization] has been very vociferous and rightly so on this – shortages of vaccines and lack of access to clean water and sanitation.

There are more than four horsemen of the apocalypse now – there are many and we have seen them every day.

In the face of these immense challenges, the humanitarian community, once again, as the Secretary-General said, showed its mettle, providing some form of assistance this year to [128] million people worldwide – a heroic effort thanks to the generosity of many people here today.

Thank you for the generosity of humanitarian funding. These efforts did save lives. They did make a decisive difference in many crises. In Somalia, if I may, for instance, the efforts of local communities – and you emphasized the need to listen to local communities – the scale up of humanitarian assistance plus, thank God, the arrival of rains, meant the famine was averted, the dog did not bark. And I was one of those who was pessimistic on the matter, but this is a tenuous game. The success in averting of famine in this year could easily be derailed if there is no improvement in the underlying drivers of the crisis in the Horn of Africa and Somalia.

Across the humanitarian community, we persisted in efforts to make humanitarian action more efficient, more effective and accountable to those we serve. This year, for example, I launched the so-called Flagship Initiative, a three-year pilot project in four countries that aims to empower affected people and make them the center, the prime center, of our programming effort to empower them and devolve more direction and decision making to the local level. Not an easy task, one that will be a challenge to all of us, particularly in the large humanitarian agencies, and we will see this challenge during the course of this year. We have expanded our use of faster, more dignified, more cost effective, anticipatory responses to predictable crises. I’m grateful for Germany for also championing anticipatory action.

But these efforts have taken place against the backdrop of a severe and ominous funding crisis, which we’ve all heard of. In 2023, we have so far received, as of now, just over one third of the $57 billion required, making this the worst funding shortfall, as we have heard from the Secretary-General, in years.

For the first time since 2010, we will have received less funding than in the previous year. It has always gone up – it’s flattened. It’s flattened, not, I should add, because of Ukraine because the gender the generosity of the major donors has protected the aid for other parts of the world. It’s flattened because the needs have also grown.

But we fear for the worst for next year. The result is that many people, around 38 percent of those targeted through our emergency-specific plans in countries, did not get the humanitarian assistance we aim to provide. Throughout the year, humanitarian agencies had to make increasingly painful decisions, including cutting life-saving food, water and health programming. I believe WFP [World Food Programme] has said that every one per cent cut was 400,000 more people in serious food insecurity. And we would like, we would hope, not to continue this trend into next year.

In preparing this Global Humanitarian Overview for 2024, we are trying to do our part to meet these particular needs, this particular gap, to ensure that the people we reach in the places that we need the most in 2024 are properly served.

We have worked hard with robust, evidence-based appeals anchored in comprehensive analysis of needs, with an even more disciplined focus on the most urgent on life saving, focusing down, boundary setting, looking at life-saving needs as the overwhelming priority.

The result is that we will be targeting fewer people in 2024 than in 2023, and we are appealing for less money. This is the first time that this has happened in recent years. And it’s not because there is no need, it is because we have had to prioritize urgent life-saving need as our core business. We’ve had to make the assumptions to make money efficiently spent, the use of cash, for example.

Therefore, on behalf of more than 1,900 humanitarian partners around the world, in this great process that produces country-based Humanitarian Response Plans, what our ask for 2024 is $46 billion. That’s a lot of money, but a lot less than the $57 billion that we asked for in 2023, and I congratulate and I know exactly the difficulties that many agencies have gone through in countries with those Governments to reduce those numbers.

In return, of course, we’re appealing for donors to do their part, to dig to dig deeper and to fully fund these robust, these more rigorous and these more prioritized plans.

We’re issuing a wider call to action. Humanitarian assistance cannot be the entire solution – everyone needs to be part of this process. It is not something that you hand the baton on from one community to the next: It is one we share from the outset. It is time that we make a reality in the field, not in high-level panels, in the field with development and other financial investments in fragile settings and marginalized communities. I was most struck, recently in a meeting that we all attended in Brussels the other day on Afghanistan, how much time was devoted to the issue of economic issues in Afghanistan. It was a surprise, I think, to me and to many others and not to say there are many, not many other, perhaps even more important issues in Afghanistan, but looking at it economics, making ourselves and the humanitarian community economically literate has become essential.

It is time to redouble our efforts to look at the root causes of humanitarian need: Conflict, climate change and economic dynamics. It is just time to look at ways to back durable solutions. Robert Piper[, Special Adviser on Solutions to Internal Displacement] is one very much involved in that. We must all be part of the process of looking at ways that for people.

I am one of those, many of you in the room among them, who have gone to IDP [internally displaced people] camps where people have been staying for 10 or more years. I was in Myanmar in August, and a woman there who spent the last 12 years in that IDP camp for which she could not escape, not allowed to escape, has still not been able to find the basics of life, certification for three children that she had borne, resilience help. Ten years, 11 years, in an IDP camp is a failure of our system.

More than ever, it’s time to put everyday people, the Minister has [also] spoken, particularly the most vulnerable and those affected by crisis, at the center of our discourse, diplomacy, hence the title, and decision making. And diplomacy also brings us, I think, to the kind of approach that Qatar applies to crisis: It applies private diplomacy, it applies generosity, it applies leverage, and it applies partnership.

This year, we’ve yet again seen the critical role played by humanitarian diplomacy in overcoming certain barriers. When Security Council authorization lapsed for cross-border UN assistance into north-west Syria, diplomatic outreach, enabled bilateral understandings to ensure aid could continue. I think it’s still fragile – I was receiving a message this morning that it’s still fragile, we should keep a very close eye on it. The renewal of the Bab Al-Hawa crossing is our immediate aim – without it, we will be operating at a minimum. But we did get that agreement through diplomacy.

Urgent diplomatic efforts, of course, continue nonstop – here we are in the capital of those efforts – in relation to the tragic situation in Gaza. And as the Doha Forum is discussing this year, we’re facing an increasingly multipolar, fragmented, competitive and unstable world – an angry world, an angry world. It’s a world in which we’re seeing the multiplication of State and non-State actors, with 175 million people, estimated now believed to be living under the control of armed groups. It’s a world that is increasingly globalized, increasingly interconnected, in which a crisis in one place affects millions of people in other places and precisely provides the challenges to multilateral action and stability.

And my answer to that is that in these challenging times, more vigorous diplomatic action is required in support of swift humanitarian response, and that the interventions that have become not optional, not nice to have, but imperative. This needs to happen much more frequently.

We, as a community, need to engage in much more diligently and with dynamic creativity with the other parts of the international communities to reach the people in communities whose lives have been so quickly turned upside down.

Look at Sudan. Look at how the humanitarian situation is unrolling, unspooling, in front of us in the context of so little, in the context of little diplomatic progress. We have to engage with that, we have to make our voice heard, and we have to make our contribution that we can make without being politicized. This is why my office, the clunkily named UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, with our colleagues in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, are putting humanitarian diplomacy at the center of our strategy for the coming years, drawing on the wealth of expertise in that committee, the links, the networks, the knowledge, the experience, the influence that they have, but they, we cannot do it alone.

If we are to overcome increasingly complex challenges to humanitarian action, which we will see in 2024 – and we will be having a bad report at the end of this year unless a miracle happens – then it’s all of us. Just as in Gaza, it’s all of us, need to come together to play our part.

After all, honorable Prime Minister, absent solutions, the most important role the international community can play in crises is to do everything possible to save lives, to reconfirm humanity, to reconfirm that we are, at our core, humane and thoughtful and generous.

Thank you very much.