Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration November 2012 The international humanitarian regime remains critical for absorbing and reducing the impacts of shocks and stresses caused by extreme weather-related events and processes, particularly in some of the world’s poorest countries that lack sufficient resources and capacities to respond effectively. Yet many key normative, institutional, operational and resource structures and systems within the international humanitarian system appear insufficient or inappropriate for addressing the multiple and complex challenges to human security posed by climate change, and continue to undermine the system’s global capacities. This paper presents priorities for increasing the effectiveness of the humanitarian regime, including: improved connectedness, consistency, quality, scope and coverage of humanitarian needs assessments; improved flexibility and suitability of humanitarian funding to highly varied and complex situations of vulnerability and need; improved strategic engagement, cooperation and/or coordination of international humanitarian actors with state and other national and local actors; improved standards of international humanitarian engagement in major emergencies; greater attention and support given to the protection and support of livelihoods in humanitarian (including emergency) preparedness, planning and response mechanisms; and prioritization of support for preparedness, planning, early recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts across all areas of humanitarian funding, programming, coordination and monitoring.
Meeting the Challenges of Severe Climate-Related Hazards: A Review of the Effectiveness of the International Humanitarian Regime by Sarah Collinson The 2011-12 famine in Somalia raised serious questions about how well equipped the international humanitarian aid system is to cope with the consequences of severe climate-related hazards and disasters that are predicted to increase in the future. The current assessments of many who have closely observed previous droughts in the Horn are stark and unforgiving; they point to how a declaration of famine amounts to a declaration of failure to prevent widespread deaths, malnutrition and failing livelihoods,1 and a failure of the system to improve on past mistakes. The current emergency follows a series of predictable droughts and crises that have hit the Horn every few years over the past decade and each time the humanitarian response has been too late and inadequate.2 This and other recent disasters – including Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the 2010 floods in Pakistan – not only signal the sheer scale of devastation likely to be associated with any escalation in climate-related hazards and crises, but also signal the immensity of the challenges that these will pose for a
This paper builds on a previous background paper for the German Marshall Fund Transatlantic Study Team on Climate Change and Migration which explored some of the potential implications of climate-induced migration for humanitarian responses.3 As observed in that paper, climate change simultaneously represents a ‘threat multiplier’ in terms of its impacts on human vulnerability4 and a ‘demand multiplier’ in its likely impacts on humanitarian needs and the consequent pressures on the international humanitarian system. Many of the world’s poorest and most crisis-prone countries will be disproportionately affected by climate change owing to higher exposure to climate-related hazards such as droughts and floods, pre-existing human vulnerabilities and weak capacities for risk reduction measures.5 As formal frameworks of state-led climate change adaptation are unlikely to have much traction here, pressure will continue to mount on the inter-
H. Young and S. Jaspars, “A Mockery of Famine Early Warning Systems”, posted at http://www.filtrenews. com/2011/07/mockery-of-famine-early-warning-systems.html (source: The Guardian), 22/07/11. S. Levine, “Here we go again: famine in the Horn of Africa”, posted at http://blogs.odi.org.uk/blogs/main/archive/2011/07/06/horn_of_africa_famine_2011_humanitarian_system.aspx (Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute), 06/07/11. 3 S. Collinson, ‘Developing Adequate Humanitarian Responses’, Background Paper for the Transatlantic Study Team on Climate Change and Migration, German Marshall Fund, Washington DC, 2010. 4 J. Kirsch-Wood, J. Korreborg and A.Linde, ‘What humanitarians need to do’, Forced Migration Review, Issue 31, October 2008 (pp.40-41). 5 Informal Taskforce of the IASC et al., op cit. 1
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humanitarian regime that already appears to be falling woefully short.
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration national humanitarian system to help to prevent disasters, reduce vulnerability and respond to humanitarian crises in these contexts. Yet many key normative, institutional, operational and resource structures and systems within the international humanitarian system appear insufficient or inappropriate for addressing the multiple and complex challenges to human security posed by climate change, and continue to undermine the system’s global capacities.
tions of long-term or recurrent crisis, this assistance has typically done little to bring about sustainable improvements in humanitarian indicators or any significant changes in the underlying conditions causing vulnerability. As discussed within this paper, what counts as ‘humanitarian’ action and what should define it and its primary actors, and how they should link with others, such as international development actors, is a long-standing and still unresolved question that is thrown into sharp relief by the challenges of responding to new and future climate-related hazards. And while the spotlight is usually focused on international aid organisations and their national or local partners (UN agencies, NGOs and Red Cross organisations) and official donors, humanitarian responses always involve a host of other important actors that can include national militaries, governmental institutions, community groups, businesses, churches, private contractors, etc. It is very often these other ‘non-system’ responders who play a more significant role at critical points in a crisis response.
This follow-on paper is concerned with exploring these challenges and limitations more closely to seek to identify improvements that are needed in the current humanitarian regime to address the likely intensification and increasing frequency of severe climate-related natural hazards in future years. For all its faults and weaknesses, the international humanitarian regime remains critical for absorbing and reducing the impacts of shocks and stresses caused by extreme weather-related events and processes, particularly in some of the world’s poorest countries that lack sufficient resources and capacities to respond effectively. Many of the most serious shortcomings of the regime come down to the sheer extent and complexity of humanitarian and related challenges that the world currently faces; the capacities of the regime to respond cannot be assessed without first recognizing the enormity of the challenges that are placed upon it. Many of the countries that are most prone to severe climatic hazards – and especially those countries that are most reliant on international assistance to cope with these hazards – suffer complex problems that greatly exacerbate and complicate the impacts of these hazards, including high levels of poverty and food insecurity, weak state capacity or legitimacy, rapid population growth and urbanization, conflict, insecurity and large-scale displacement. In combination, these factors not only generate extreme vulnerability to climate and other hazards, but often also make these contexts very hazardous and difficult environments for humanitarian actors to operate in.
Assessing or scrutinising the strengths and deficiencies of the international humanitarian regime thus not only raises questions about the functioning of the system itself, i.e. the mechanics of the system, the technical performance of its key actors, its coverage, etc., but also about the extent or limits of its responsibilities and capacities, and the relationships that mainstream humanitarian actors have with others that have central roles to play in responding to the many short- and longer-term crises and challenges caused by severe climate-related hazards. This paper will therefore start with a discussion of key issues and challenges related to the regime’s ‘internal’ effectiveness and the improvements that might strengthen its capacity to cope with the impacts of future climate-related hazards. These include questions around coverage and the capacity of the regime to identify and respond appropriately, equitably and swiftly to humanitarian needs in contexts of climate-related and related crises. The discussion will then turn to consider issues and questions associated with the scope and expectations of the regime in connection with broader challenges of improving preparedness and reducing risks and vulnerabilities in the face of climate-related disasters.
Judging the effectiveness of the current humanitarian regime and the improvements that are required to meet the challenges of future climate-related hazards in these contexts thus rests to a great extent on what is or should be expected of the regime, and, indeed, how that regime itself is defined. Neither of these is a straightforward question to answer. Humanitarian assistance that is designed and intended as a short-term instrument for meeting acute needs, for instance, is never likely to represent an adequate instrument for addressing longer-term or structural problems generating chronic vulnerability.6 Although international humanitarian assistance has often succeeded in delivering a range of basic services in situa-
Responding to needs? A recent global assessment of the international humanitarian system and its current effectiveness highlights a lack of basic information about its overall size, reach, scope of action and capability.7 There is even less information about the global extent of humani-
Paul Harvey, Rebecca Holmes, Rachel Slater and *. Martin, ‘Social Protection in Fragile States’. Overseas Development Institute (London), November 2007, p.5. Harvey, A. Harmer, A. Stoddard, G. Taylor with V. DiDomenico and L. Brander, The State of the Humanitarian System: Assessing Performance and Progress – A Pilot Study. Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP). London, ODI, 2009. 6
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration tarian needs, whether caused by climate-related or by other hazards. As discussed, the assessment of humanitarian needs remains fraught with problems across the sector, with humanitarian funding appeals typically used as a collective proxy for indicating the overall extent and nature of humanitarian needs across contexts where comprehensive or reliable data on key humanitarian indicators is often very poor, uneven or non-existent, and thus where the real scale and scope of needs are unknown. Humanitarian agencies commonly base their funding appeals – and hence their overall indications of needs to meet – on what they consider realistic to expect from donors and on needs assessments and appeals that are focused in geographical areas and/or operational sectors where they are already working or are specialized and/or can gain access. Most evaluations are focused on individual projects, while a small number of system-level analyses are concerned with specific emergencies rather than the overall performance of the international humanitarian regime.8 There is therefore no robust evidence base for assessing the system’s overall ‘success’ in meeting humanitarian needs globally.
of most vulnerable groups. An IASC real-time evaluation of the international humanitarian response to the 2010 floods in Pakistan, for instance, reported a general perception that more could have been done to ensure that needs assessments were more strategic and instrumental: some joint assessments were conducted, but linkages were missing and there was an absence of joint programming around the assessments, and no clear strategy was developed to guide how different assessments would feed into programming for transition from relief activities to support for recovery. The second joint appeal (the Pakistan Floods Relief and Early Recovery Response Plan) was widely seen as a fundraising tool with limited prioritisation, based on assumption rather than robust needs assessments.10 The operational and political complexity of many contexts that are most severely affected by climate-related or other crises or disasters adds further complication to the question of the humanitarian regime’s effectiveness in assessing and meeting overall needs and how this might be improved. Physical access is often a primary problem, often due to immediate damage and devastation caused by the disaster itself. The real-time evaluation of the international response to the 2005-2006 drought in the Horn of Africa noted how the whole region represented a logistical challenge to emergency responses: roads were often impassable and the distances to be covered were often vast, with difficult security conditions further hampering the reach and coverage of relief interventions.11 In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, logistic constraints and access problems meant that needs were first assessed and assistance provided to urban and easy-to-reach areas in the Myanmar Delta area, with more remote areas targeted much later even though they were hit harder by the cyclone; the geographical imbalance in the international response in Myanmar was exacerbated by the fact that the ‘cluster’ coordination framework established by international relief agencies focused resources and activities almost entirely on the Delta without equal attention given to long-standing humanitarian needs in other parts of the country.12 Similarly, in Pakistan in 2010, the geographical coverage of the humanitarian response was focused predominantly on the most accessible areas and concentrated in particular provinces, districts and larger towns; and within the provinces that were the focus of humanitarian operations, smaller communities and entire areas received less help or no as-
Nevertheless, there is near-unanimous agreement that accurate and comprehensive needs assessments are a fundamental prerequisite for efficient and equitable humanitarian relief and recovery.9 While this remains a long-standing weakness across the sector, there has been some improvement in the quality of needs assessments in the context of specific crises and individual agency operations, with a variety of new frameworks and tools now developed and applied across a range of different areas of humanitarian response, including efforts to strengthen joint needs assessments and associated planning and prioritisation of responses. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), for instance, has led the development of a ‘Humanitarian Dashboard’ under the auspices of an Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Task Force on Needs Assessment that aims to present key humanitarian information on particular countries affected by humanitarian crisis. In the majority of crises, however, most needs assessments are carried out by single agencies using different formats of varying quality and effectiveness and focusing in different areas or sectors of need in ways that cannot support a comprehensive picture of needs to be met or the joint prioritisation of interventions and targeting
Ibid. K. Stokke, Humanitarian Response to Natural Disasters: A Synthesis of Evaluation Findings. Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), Oslo, 2007; citing also ALNAP, Annual Review 2003. Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action, London, ODI, 2004. 10 R. Palastro, A. Nagrah, N. Steen and F. Zafar, Inter-Agency Real-Time Evaluation of the Humanitarian Response to Pakistan’s 2010 Flood Crisis. DARA, Madrid, 2011. 11 F. Grünewald, K. Robins, A. Odicoh, M. Woldemariam, N. Nicholson and A. Teshome, Real Time Evaluation of the Drought Response in the Horn of Africa: 13/08/2006 – 20/10/2006 – Regional Synthesis. Final Report 16/12/2006. 12 D. Kauffman and S. Krüger, Myanmar. IASC Cluster Approach Evaluation 2nd Phase Country Study. Groupe URD & Global Public Policy Institute, April 2010. 13R. Palastro et al., op cit. 8 9
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration sistance at all. Here, infrastructure damage and security problems had a major impact on the reach and coverage of relief activities.13
ticularly in the earliest stages of a crisis. The humanitarian response to the 2010 floods in Pakistan represented the largest emergency operation ever mounted by the international humanitarian regime to date, and yet resources were quickly over-stretched due to lack of preparedness and the overwhelming scale and spread of the disaster. Initial funding in response to the floods was swift and substantial, with the first UN appeal 90% funded with a month of being launched. However, most UN agencies did not have the capacity to disburse all the money received during the initial response period. At the same time, many NGOs were struggling to mobilize funding quickly, as bilateral donor funding outside of the UN appeal was limited by donors’ existing commitments to other crises, including Haiti. Organisations that didn’t have their own quick response funds available or that couldn’t easily reallocate funds from other activities had particular problems in responding swiftly immediately following the onset of the disaster.19
Restrictions or control imposed by government or military actors for political or strategic reasons, or security problems in areas affected by violence also play a major part in reducing and distorting the coverage of humanitarian responses to climate-related and other disasters. Political influence over people’s access to relief and the political or military control and manipulation of assistance in many countries is widely recognized as a common and long-standing problem across the sector, yet it is an issue that is reportedly paid relatively little attention in evaluation reports and remains poorly addressed by the sector as a whole.14 In Pakistan in 2010, many constraints to humanitarian access following the floods were caused by the authorities’ control and restriction of access to certain areas affected by ongoing conflicts, such as FATA and Balochistan. The real-time evaluation of the floods response also reported situations where aid mainly reached people that were locally well positioned and/or aligned to political parties, and noted situations in which agencies were unable to carry out independent needs assessments and/or were given lists of beneficiaries directly by the local administration or feudal landlords which were not always verified or prioritized.15 In Sri Lanka, post-tsunami and ‘post-conflict’ assistance has been and remains highly controlled and politicized at every level, with recovery assistance purposefully channelled to support the government’s political and strategic agenda towards the minority Tamil populations in the east and north of the country.16 Similarly, in Somalia, where international humanitarian assistance has a long history of political manipulation and diversion, the access of relief agencies has been highly constrained since 2009 by the Islamist group al-Shabaab,17 contributing substantially to the conditions causing the 2011 famine. In Myanmar, the government was slow to provide access for international aid workers following Cyclone Nargis, imposing tight restrictions on foreign aid workers’ access, especially to the worst affected areas in the Delta.18
These bottlenecks reflect significant constraints in the international system’s capacity to swiftly scale up and use financial resources quickly and effectively in response to major sudden-onset emergencies such as the Pakistan floods. Yet problems associated with the financing of major responses are not always a consequence of funding constraints. International humanitarian responses to the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Haiti earthquake both suffered instead from humanitarian overload, with large numbers of disparate and poorly coordinated humanitarian actors arriving en-masse with substantial funding and huge pressure to achieve concrete results in a short period of time. This led to situations in which assistance was driven by over-resourcing and agency interests rather than people’s actual needs on the ground.20 Here, the major limitations were those of standards and operational coordination overstretch rather than constrained financial resources. The potential for over-stretch has been exacerbated when major disasters have hit different countries simultaneously, and/or when a series of disasters take place consecutively or coincide in a single country. When the humanitarian system was called upon to respond to the floods in Pakistan, most humanitarian donor
The sheer scale and severity of many climate-related disasters is also a primary reason for humanitarian needs not being met, par-
F. Grünewald, K. Robins, A. Odicoh, M. Woldemariam, N. Nicholson and A. Teshome, Real Time Evaluation of the Drought Response in the Horn of Africa: 13/08/2006 – 20/10/2006 – Regional Synthesis. Final Report 16/12/2006. 12 D. Kauffman and S. Krüger, Myanmar. IASC Cluster Approach Evaluation 2nd Phase Country Study. Groupe URD & Global Public Policy Institute, April 2010. 13R. Palastro et al., op cit. 14 K. Stokke, op cit. 15 R. Palastro et al., op cit. 16 J. Goodhand, ‘Stabilising a victor’s peace? Humanitarian action and reconstruction in Sri Lanka’, Disasters 34(S3), 2010, pp.S342-S367. 17 See K. Menkhaus, ‘Stabilisation and humanitarian access in a collapsed state: the Somali case’, Disasters 34(S3), 2010, pp.**. 18 D. Kauffman and S. Krüger, op cit., p.20; citing International Crisis Group, ‘Burma/Myanmar after Nargis: time to normalise aid relations’, ICG, October 2008. 19 R. Palastro et al., op cit. 20 On the Indian Ocean Tsunami response, see J. Telford and J. Cosgrave, Joint Evaluation of the International Response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami: Synthesis Report, Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, 2006, at http://www.alnap.org/pool/files/889.pdf. See also K. Stokke, op cit. 11
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration resources were already committed to the earthquake response in Haiti and a major UN appeal had just been launched to address the needs of Pakistan’s 2.6 million IDPs and other conflict-affected populations.21 While the international funding response to the first UN appeal for Pakistan flood relief was unprecedented, it appears that funding for lower-profile crises may have suffered as a consequence, as suggested by the fact that funding for complex emergency appeals decreased considerably in 2010 while funding for flash appeals skyrocketed by 1,635% compared with the previous year.22 When drought hit the Horn of Africa in 2005-2006, international awareness of the extent of humanitarian needs across the region were raised after donor resources had already been heavily committed to the responses to the South Asia Tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake. According to a real-time evaluation of the international response to the drought, donors’ humanitarian reserves were at the lowest possible level precisely at the time when they were most needed in the Horn.23
still very unevenly distributed across crises, with many complex emergencies left disproportionately under-funded compared with many sudden-onset disasters such as the Haiti earthquake.24 While the Pakistan flood response represented one of the largest in history, the scale of the crisis meant that contributions per person affected were reportedly substantially lower compared with other major sudden-onset emergencies in recent years,25 and the focus on the flood response sidelined the concurrent appeal for IDP assistance in Pakistan through the Pakistan Humanitarian Response Plan.26 The potential for high-profile and large-scale disasters to capture international attention and resources at the expense of more hidden and/or longer-term crises may become a growing problem for the international assistance regime and its capacity to meet humanitarian needs. Moreover, if, as predicted, climate change brings about greater unpredictability and variability in climate-related hazards and increasing vulnerability to these hazards in many countries in the future: while the frequency and scale of major disasters is likely to escalate, so too is the occurrence of smaller-scale crises, many of which are likely to fall completely under the radar of the mainstream humanitarian system. Those that do figure on the international humanitarian agenda may still not elicit an adequate or timely response because the greater number of crises is likely to exacerbate problems of donor fatigue and information overload – as is already witnessed in many countries that suffer multiple, chronic, recurrent and overlapping humanitarian crises caused by a combination of environmental, political and other shocks and stresses. A real-time evaluation of the international response to the drought in the Horn of Africa in 2005-2006, for instance, observed that the repetition of appeals – in some cases over 20-30 years – and their increasing frequency, including mid-year and flash appeals, may have contributed to donor fatigue; donors reported difficulty in obtaining resources from their headquarters until the ‘CNN effect’ had occurred in their home countries. Donors were also waiting for the second rains to fail in 2005 to ensure that both rainy seasons had failed before acting. Another review of the 2005/6 drought response has suggested that, in a context of chronic food insecurity where emergency alerts are signalled repeatedly, many humanitarian and development actors found it difficult to distinguish the symptoms of chronic destitution from
The growing likelihood of major climate-related and other disasters occurring concurrently and/or consecutively thus raises the stakes substantially for an international humanitarian regime that is already struggling – and often failing – to meet humanitarian needs in those countries that are most vulnerable to and least able to cope with the impacts of climate-related hazards. Pooled humanitarian funds managed by OCHA – the global pooled Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), and the Common Humanitarian Funds (CHF) and Emergency Response Funds (ERF) at country level – have helped substantially to address imbalances and shortfalls of humanitarian financing for both slow and sudden-onset disasters. Meanwhile, through the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative, official humanitarian donors have committed to strengthen their efforts to ensure that funding is allocated in proportion to needs and on the basis of needs assessments, and that funding of humanitarian action in new crises does not adversely affect the meeting of needs in ongoing crises. International government funding for humanitarian assistance has increased in recent years, reaching a historic high of over $12 billion in 2010, mirroring a parallel escalation in funding demands expressed through UN appeals. Yet, in 2010, the level of needs that were unmet in the UN’s consolidated appeals process (CAP) increased and humanitarian funding was
Ibid. Global Humanitarian Assistance, GHA Report 2011, Development Initiatives, 2011, p.7, at http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ghareport-2011.pdf. 23 F. Grünewald, K. Robins et al., op cit. 24 Global Humanitarian Assistance, op cit., pp.6-7. 25 M. Zaidi, ‘Why Doesn’t the World Care about Pakistanis?’, Foreign Policy 19/08/10, at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/19/why_doesnt_the_world_care_about_pakistanis. 26 R. Palastro et al., op cit. 21
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration those of a critically unstable situation, while the repeated alerts also may have desensitized agencies to the evolving crisis.27
those most in need of assistance remains a huge and unsolved challenge for humanitarian agencies. Improved recognition of different groups’ and individuals’ relative vulnerability to climate-related and other hazards has spawned the development of a variety of different tools designed to measure the susceptibility of particular populations or geographical areas, such as the now widely-used Vulnerability and Analysis Mapping tool. These tools and frameworks face a problem of tracking complicated relationships between a host of interacting social, economic, environmental and other factors in situations of volatility, uncertainty and often lack of data. While some approaches to vulnerability mapping single out certain groups as particularly vulnerable (e.g. women, children, the disabled, etc.), more critical analyses have highlighted that certain groups cannot be assumed to be more vulnerable than others simply because of presumed socio-economic or other status. More problematic again is the challenge of establishing an effective link between robust vulnerability analysis and effective operational programming and prioritisation. This remains an elusive goal for the humanitarian sector as a whole. Part of the difficulty for developing appropriate responses to the vulnerability identified lies in explaining that vulnerability in the first place. Analytical capacities across the humanitarian sector remain weak overall, and the complexity of causes and consequences of vulnerability in most contexts of chronic or acute humanitarian need may be extremely difficult to disentangle, as discussed further below. The real-time evaluation of the response to the 2005-2006 drought in the Horn of Africa, for instance, observes that the complex relationship between family food supply and child nutritional status continues to prove a serious challenge to donors, scholars and humanitarian actors alike.30
Just as lower-profile or small-scale crises are liable to be overlooked by the mainstream humanitarian system, so too are the so-called ‘idiosyncratic’ needs of particular groups or households affected by climate-related and other hazards. While systems of international humanitarian response are set up to address widespread or ‘covariate’ shocks such as floods, cyclones or severe droughts affecting large numbers or concentrations of people or whole populations simultaneously, there is a growing body of evidence to show that the overwhelming majority of hunger-related deaths worldwide – many of which may be related directly or indirectly to climaterelated hazards – occur outside any kind of declared ‘humanitarian emergency’ or recognized ‘disaster’ as such, and that acute transitory shortfalls in access to food and shocks to other assets and income – often caused by climate-related hazards – are disproportionately specific to individuals and households rather than experienced community- or population-wide.28 A recent study of household vulnerability in flood-prone coastal villages in Gujarat, India, for example, points to significant variations in different households’ relative exposure and vulnerability to floods and related hazards, with gender, physical location, livelihood diversification, social support networks and other assets all influencing the particular vulnerability profiles of different individuals and households. In one village, a female head of household with a single insecure income source as a daily wage labourer, a large number of dependents, no social support and a house in a low-lying flood-prone area of the village was substantially more vulnerable than a male village leader living in a house with a raised plinth to avoid flood damage and a diverse income stream.29 With global systems of emergency response set up to respond to the more clearly identifiable covariate needs, the fact that the greatest proportion of vulnerability to climate-related hazards is highly idiosyncratic in this way means that the humanitarian regime may be marginal or irrelevant to meeting the humanitarian needs of perhaps the majority of people globally who are severely affected by climate-related hazards and/or acute food insecurity.
Responding to needs: key messages and recommendations Calls for improvements in the connectedness, consistency, quality, scope and coverage of humanitarian needs assessment have been repeated in numerous evaluations and specialist assessments for well over a decade, and yet this remains a key weakness across the sector and in many situations of response to climate-related and other hazards. The imperative to improve systems of needs assessment is all the greater given the growing demands that will be placed on the humanitarian system as a con-
Even in situations of concerted humanitarian action in response to a clearly recognized crisis, targeting the most vulnerable and
Humanitarian Policy Group, Saving lives through livelihoods: critical gaps in the response to the drought in the Greater Horn of Africa. HPG Briefing Note. Overseas Development Institute (London), 2006. 28 C. Barrett, Food Aid In Response to Acute Food Insecurity. Background Paper prepared for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Cornell University, 2006. 29 D. Mustafa, S. Ahmed, E. Saroch and H. Bell, ‘Pinning down vulnerability: from narratives to numbers’, Disasters 35(1), pp.62-86. 27
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration Responding effectively and in time?
sequence of climate change and other processes causing growing levels of vulnerability across the globe. There is a need for more common and/or joined up and consistent needs assessments that are linked more strategically among key humanitarian actors in ways that can support join strategy and/or programming. Needs assessment should be central to the coordination of humanitarian response, including within the cluster system.*
There is considerable ambiguity and instability in the governance of the humanitarian system which is brought about by the multiplicity of actors and agendas within it. While, to a large extent, ‘money always talks’, power to determine and implement policies at the system-wide level is nevertheless dispersed relatively horizontally among UN specialized agencies, the bigger INGOs and donors. It is no great surprise, therefore, that coordination and leadership within and across the international humanitarian system remains a perennial problem and a continuing preoccupation of the major humanitarian policy networks. This is clearly reflected in key policy-related networks within the humanitarian system, including the Inter-Agency Standing Committee and the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative,31 and in the wide-ranging reforms introduced across the sector following a comprehensive review of international humanitarian response systems commissioned by the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2004. Most notable among these reforms has been the introduction of the ‘cluster’ system as a framework to support international operational responses to humanitarian crises. The cluster approach aims to strengthen overall humanitarian response capacity as well as the effectiveness of the response by ensuring sufficient global capacity, predictable leadership, stronger partnerships and accountability and strategic fieldlevel coordination and prioritisation. While sector coordination existed before the cluster approach was adopted, the biggest difference with earlier initiatives is the naming of cluster lead agencies, which assume responsibility for coordinating activities within their sectors and identifying gaps, and function as the ‘providers of last resort’, intended to fill critical gaps that no other humanitarian agencies are able to address. The cluster lead also works with the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator at country level and with donors to mobilize humanitarian funding and advocate on humanitarian issues, such as access. The cluster approach has not been implemented in over 36 countries, and the intention to extend it eventually to all countries where the UN has a Humanitarian Coordinator.
The coverage of needs assessments in the midst of crises or following disasters needs to be improved to reduce the arbitrary and/or input-led concentration of humanitarian assistance on particular forms of assistance or easy-toreach geographical areas or social groups. Therefore, in a given context, assessments should be implemented and coordinated so as to ensure that humanitarian agencies – both individually and collectively – are able to identify relative levels of need across a range of parameters, including geographic, temporal, social (including gender, age, ethnicity, etc.), political and economic and able to incorporate an understanding of people’s coping strategies and adaptive behaviour.** As many of the most vulnerable people will be in urban areas, efforts to improve needs assessment and associated planning and coordination of humanitarian responses must encompass improved strategies for assessing humanitarian needs among urban as well as rural populations; at the same time, efforts to improve the coverage of needs assessments must ensure that difficult-to-reach rural areas are included. In situations where it is difficult or impossible to reach conflict-affected populations, efforts must be made to ensure best estimates of their number and location and the nature and severity of needs and the risks that they face. Where people in inaccessible areas are likely to be at severe risk, they should be considered a priority for humanitarian action.
A recent comprehensive evaluation of the cluster approach found that, so far, the cluster framework seems to have improved coverage in certain sectoral or thematic areas (e.g. nutrition, disability, water and sanitation), it has identified gaps in assistance and reduced duplications, it has helped humanitarian actors to learn and thereby improve practice. Moreover, it has supported better coordination and stronger partnerships between UN actors and other international humanitarian actors, especially with NGOs where they have
* J. Steets, F. Grünewald, A. Binder, V. de Geoffroy, D. Kauffmann, S. Krüger, C. Meier and B. Sokpoh, Cluster Approach Evaluation 2 Synthesis Report. IASC Cluster Approach Evaluation, 2nd Phase, April 2010. ** See, for example, J. Darcy and C.-A. Hoffman, According to Need? Needs assessment and decision-making in the humanitarian sector, HPG Report 15, London: Overseas Development Institute (Humanitarian Policy Group), 2003. See also K. Stokke, op cit.; P. Harvey et al., op cit..
F. Grünewald, K. Robins et al., op cit. S. Collinson, ‘The Role of Networks in the International Humanitarian System’, a report commissioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), Overseas Development Institute, May 2011. See also P. Harvey et al., op cit. 30 31
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration assumed co-lead or co-facilitator roles. It was also found to have strengthened the humanitarian identity of cluster members, which has helped in mobilizing actors and resources for humanitarian assistance and improved the planning and quality of proposals and appeals. However, the evaluation also highlighted a number of problems and shortcomings, including often poor cluster management and facilitation, ineffective inter-cluster coordination and weak integration of cross-cutting issues such as protection, livelihoods, disaster risk reduction and early recovery. Importantly, the evaluation found that the cluster system tends to exclude national and local actors and frequently fails to link in with, build on or support existing coordination and response mechanisms, with insufficient analysis of local or national structures and capacities; in several cases, this was found to have weakened national and local ownership and capacities. The evaluation also identified problems in the distribution of roles and coordination between the cluster system and other international mechanisms for immediate emergency response, most notably with the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination System (UNDAC) and its coordination mechanisms, which include UNDAC field teams, the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group and On-Site Operations Coordination Centres.32
they did not serve as forums for needed strategic planning and prioritization, nor as a platform to support joint communication and planning between international and national actors. Instead, the clusters were used primarily for information sharing but generally within silos, with little or not cross-linkage across areas or sectors. This raises questions about the proportionality of the huge financial and human resources invested in the cluster system: the evaluation observes that the ‘information flow was massive but with limited strategic usage’. There was little leadership and agenda-setting at the inter-cluster coordination level, and weak communication between the international humanitarian system and Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority. UN coordination appeared to become an end in itself for many stakeholders within the system, rather than an effective or strategic means to improve the response.34 The failure of international response systems actors to link effectively with national and local counterparts remains a perennial problem across the humanitarian regime.35 This is despite a growing recognition across the sector that many governments are able and/ or determined to take the lead in responding to climate-related and other disasters within their borders, and despite clear evidence that the most important and effective first-responders to sudden-onset disasters are usually local and national actors rather than the system’s international agencies. Mozambique’s Government led a successful response to floods and a cyclone in 2007 without launching an international appeal for assistance; international humanitarian actors were initially excluded from Myanmar’s response to Cyclone Nargis; and the Pakistan military and civilian authorities played the primary role in responding to the 2010 floods. In Ethiopia and Kenya, there are well-established government-led processes supporting national appeals in response to droughts and other crises.
At country level, the implementation of the cluster approach and its strengths and weaknesses was found to vary significantly. In the response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, high staff turn-over and lack of training in facilitation and coordination techniques, lack of clarity around the roles of UN agencies with regards to food aid, food security, agriculture and early recovery and poor leadership in these areas led to confusion around roles and reporting and coordination between different clusters. Other observers have pointed to the danger of segmenting needs and activities into discrete sectors, which further limits humanitarian actors’ ability to address cross-cutting problems effectively.33 Similar problems were highlighted by the 2010 real-time evaluation of the international response to the Pakistan floods. It was noted that while all the clusters were to some extent effective in addressing the needs of affected populations, there was a widespread view that the heavily institutionalized cluster set-up was too cumbersome and distracted focus and resources from the response on the ground. It appeared that the severity and scale of the disaster made it impossible for the humanitarian community to respond effectively through the cluster framework, and that the clusters added little value since
The reasons for weaknesses in the links between international and national authorities are multiple, complex and highly contextspecific. In Pakistan in 2010, for instance, most OECD-DAC donors chose to channel their funds through the UN response plan rather than the Pakistan Government’s Response Fund because of worries about corruption and transparency in the disbursement of funds, and operational coordination with the civilian authorities was hampered by lack of capacity and resources at key levels of the civilian government and administration.36 In Kenya and Ethiopia, the feasibility and effectiveness of national contingency
J. Steets, F. Grünewald, A. Binder, V. de Geoffroy, D. Kauffmann, S. Krüger, C. Meier and B. Sokpoh, Cluster Approach Evaluation 2 Synthesis Report. IASC Cluster Approach Evaluation, 2nd Phase, April 2010. 33 P. Harvey et al., op. cit. 34 P. Harvey et al., op. cit. 35 P. Harvey, Towards Good Humanitarian Government: the role of the affected state in disaster response’. HPG Report 29, Overseas Development Institute (London), 2009 36 R. Palastro et al., op cit. 32
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration plans to which international actors might engage have been significantly constrained by the lack of adequate financial resources for supporting contingency funds.37 In Myanmar, the government’s long-standing hostility towards key Western actors resulted in ASEAN playing a more important role than the UN in the early stages of the response to Cyclone Nargis. In China, over 5 million people have been affected by floods in the east of the country in 2011, and yet this and previous flood responses in China have barely registered on the international humanitarian (or media) radar since the responses have been carried out more or less entirely by China’s own civilian authorities and army.38 Meanwhile, the restrictions imposed on international actors by al-Shabaab in Somalia are motivated by a militant political agenda which is unrelated to any national capacity to meet the needs of populations most severely affected by the current drought; these restrictions have only been partially relaxed in recent weeks despite the worsening famine.
considered life-saving and so instead the response amounted more to a ‘second wave’ of support. Among the international organizations, it was mainly those that already had a longstanding presence in the country who were able to act quickly and mobilize staff and resources. More important, still, however, was the immediate action taken by the local population, local district governments, local philanthropists and the military.40 Similarly, in Myanmar following Cyclone Nargis, most of the life-saving activities were carried out by national actors before the arrival of international agencies, with individuals, private businesses, student groups, local agencies and the business community playing a primary role in distributing relief and providing assistance in the early stages of the response.41 A 2007 meta-evaluation of international humanitarian responses to natural disasters reported that lessons learned from sudden-onset disasters repeatedly highlight the key role played by local actors and institutions but also point to the frequently problematic relationship of local with non-local actors. Once the international agencies move in, local structures are typically marginalized in decision-making processes and implementation, or key personnel in local organizations are recruited by international organizations, or local organizations simply sub-contracted by the bigger international players. These relationships often undermine rather than develop the capacities of local actors.42
The role of national and local actors is central to any assessment of the timeliness of humanitarian responses in any particular disaster context. Delays in international actors responding to sudden or acute emergencies or disasters are sometimes caused by the reluctance of national governments to request assistance or issue appeals. In the Horn of Africa in 2005, the trigger for a major regional response to the drought was the official declaration by the Kenyan Government that the drought was a national disaster; because this declaration came late (at the end of December), and the critical time for saving lives and livelihoods had already been lost, with an estimated 40% of livestock already lost along the Kenya-Somalia border.39 The real-time evaluation of the Pakistan floods response notes that Pakistan’s Government has been reluctant to have too many appeals because it does not want to be perceived as a failed state; in the case of the floods, however, the magnitude of the disaster was so great that national capacities were overwhelmed and the government had no choice but to request international assistance.
The need for more timely and flexible donor funding to support timely responses remains a key challenge for the international humanitarian system, although some improvements have been reported in this regard – for instance, a greater percentage of OECDDAC donors’ contributions to chronic crisis contexts is committed in the first and second quarters or in preceding years.43 Since most humanitarian aid is de facto long-term assistance into countries affected by chronic or long-term crises (just under 70% in 2009), this trend is significant.44 The expanded CERF and other pooled funds have also made an important contribution to improving the timeliness of international humanitarian funding to support responses to sudden-onset emergencies; meanwhile, agencies that have their own reserve funding best placed to respond in the initial phases of response.45 Matching efforts to improve the timeliness of funding, key international agencies have also invested substantially in strengthening and expanding their standby capacities to support swifter responses to rapid-onset emergencies and improving con-
Following that request, the international humanitarian system started to mobilize relatively quickly. Disagreements between the UN and the Government over priorities and scope of the revised international response plan resulted in a significant delay that threatened to derail the appeal process, and for those affected on the ground, the international response was generally too slow to be
Humanitarian Policy Group, op cit. BBC News Asia-Pacific, ‘China floods: millions affected by deadly downpours’, 20 June 2011, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13831068. 39 Humanitarian Policy Group, op cit. 40 R. Palastro et al., op cit. 41 D. Kauffman and S. Krüger, op cit. 42 K. Stokke, op cit. 43 P. Harvey et al., op cit. 44 Global Humanitarian Assistance, op cit. 45 P. Harvey et al., op cit. 37
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration tingency planning and preparedness.46 Strengthening the system’s so-called ‘surge capacity’ comes at a potential cost, however, since it carries the risk of the system swamping certain higher-profile emergencies with inappropriate input-led responses and diverting human and financial resources away from others.
limitations of early warning if it isn’t directly linked to national and international plans and capacities that will support timely and appropriate responses.50
In theory, recent improvements and innovations in developing and strengthening early warning systems should have played a significant role in improving the timeliness and effectiveness of international humanitarian responses to climate-related and other hazards and disasters. In Bangladesh, for example, it is noteworthy that devastating floods caused famine in the mid-1970s, but even worse floods in recent years have been much more capably managed to reduce vulnerability and prevent and mitigate the impacts. Part of the solution has been a cyclone warning system using a radio network that links Dhaka with 143 local radio stations relaying alerts to 33,000 village-based volunteers who are then able to signal the alert via megaphone to villagers who are at risk47 and may then have a chance to seek safety in community cyclone shelters. Yet early warning systems, however sophisticated, do not guarantee timely or effective humanitarian responses to all climate-related hazards in all contexts. In the Horn of Africa in 2005-2006, early warning systems were well-established, and included both international systems such as the Famine Early Warning Systems Framework (FEWSNET) and the Food Security Assessment Unit in Nairobi for Somalia, and national-level systems including assessments by Ethiopia’s Early Warning Department and Kenya’s Arid Lands Resource Management Programme. These systems were providing good-quality and timely data that was quickly disseminated to donors and agencies, and by November 2005, there were emergency warnings of ‘pervasive pre-famine conditions’ with potential for widespread famine in pastoral areas.48 The real-time evaluation of humanitarian action in the face of the crisis concluded that critical delays in response were not due to lack of early information, but to operational, policy and political constraints, which included restricted earmarking of funding (for food), security problems (Somalia), lack of trusted local partners able to respond immediately on the ground (Somalia and Kenya), and the reluctance to support mitigation responses beyond food aid.49 In Pakistan, meanwhile, the rapidity of the onset and spread of the floods meant that whatever early warning there was could not be early enough to allow sufficient time to support effective preparedness and mitigation interventions on any substantial scale. These recent experiences of both slow- and rapid-onset disasters demonstrate all too clearly the 46 47 48 49 50
Responding effectively and in time: key messages and recommendations Donors and major operational agencies need to strengthen and maintain improved analytical capacity and analysis support structures that link field assessments effectively and strategically to country and HQ levels to ensure that they are able to respond appropriately and strategically to repeated and concurrent appeals. This will enable them to cope with associated information flows, so as to support timely and effective responses and reduce the risk of key windows of opportunity being missed to implement preventive and other action that might mitigate the worst impacts of climate-related hazards or disasters. This needs to include improved analytical capacity to support better understanding of and responsiveness to vulnerability and to support improved targeting of short- and longer-term responses. With expanded engagement in countries affected by complex crises, many aid agencies have sought to inform and refine their programming with strengthened political economy or broader context analysis and monitoring. Yet, for the majority of agencies, robust analysis of this kind remains largely ad hoc and at the margins of assistance activities on the ground. This encourages standardized interventions that may not be appropriately adapted to local conditions – such as an over-reliance on food aid rather than livelihoods support in situations of chronic or recurrent food insecurity – and it weakens downward and outcome-focused accountability and agencies’ ability to apply ‘do no harm’ and other principles and standards of good practice. The weakness of much context analysis cannot be attributed entirely to a lack of appropriate or accessible information or appropriate analytical tools; it is also likely to result from institutional impediments to mainstreaming context analysis due to organisational and resourcing structures, cultures of practice, and incentive and governance systems within aid organisations and the wider aid industry. Humanitarian agencies and donors
P. Harvey et al., op cit. C. Barrett, op cit. F. Grünewald, K. Robins et al., op cit.; & Humanitarian Policy Group, op cit. F. Grünewald, K. Robins et al., op cit. Humanitarian Policy Group, op cit.
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration and key fora within the mainstream humanitarian system need to address continuing difficulties and impediments to mainstreaming high-quality context analysis into relief, livelihoods and related operational programming, including in situations of conflict and insecurity where they will continue to face a variety of security-related and other obstacles and dilemmas in their efforts to assist or protect vulnerable populations. In these situations, improved analytical capacity needs to be closely linked to better systems of strategic analysis, planning and negotiation where there is a risk of political manipulation or restriction of assistance.
to weaken cross-sectoral assessments, coordination and programming, to prioritize technical and logistical initiatives and information-sharing over strategic leadership and planning, and to impose heavy institutional and bureaucratic demands on humanitarian agencies that are often to the detriment of responsive and effective action on the ground. As recommended by the most recent crosssector evaluation of the cluster system, there is a need to strengthen cluster management and implementation modalities, to continue to mainstream cluster lead responsibilities, to clarify and strengthen the roles of OCHA and Humanitarian Coordinators, and to define more clearly the roles and responsibilities of different cluster meetings and fora.**
At the same time, donors need to ensure that humanitarian funding remains sufficiently flexible to support responses suited to highly varied and complex situations of vulnerability and need resulting from climate-related and other hazards and shocks across a broad range of both urban and rural contexts. This must include action to address both chronic and acute needs in countries of varying state capacity and in situations where access and/or monitoring may be very difficult or restricted. It depends on donors maintaining a range of different funding channels that can be used responsively and flexibly according to the demands of particular contexts,* allowing for funding to be reallocated quickly and easily between emergencies and ensuring that the humanitarian system can respond to major crises that hit concurrently and/or consecutively within a short time-frame, and ensuring that responses to major crises do not result in under-funding of lowprofile, chronic and/or ‘forgotten’ crises. This should include support both for pooled funds managed by OCHA and bilateral funding direct to operational agencies.The larger operational agencies should try to establish or expand their own quick-response funds. Donors therefore need to maintain or develop their own capacities to manage mixed funding and to manage and respond effectively to complex information flows associated with different forms and contexts of humanitarian need associated with climate-related and other hazards and shocks.
Recognition of the mounting demands on a humanitarian system that is already seriously overstretched underlines the need for key actors and fora within the system to engage, coordinate and cooperate more effectively and strategically with state and other national and local actors in countries facing the greatest humanitarian challenges due to climate-related hazards and shocks. As recommended in a recent review of the role of disaster-affected states, a key goal of international humanitarian actors should always be to encourage and support states to fulfil their responsibilities to assist and protect their own citizens in times of disaster. Yet, international aid agencies often pay little heed to the central role of the state, with principles of political neutrality and independence often taken as a reason for disengagement from state structures rather than principled engagement with them.*** As recommended by the most recent cluster evaluation, there is a need for international humanitarian actors to identify existing preparedness, response and coordination mechanisms and capacities in affected countries and to link with, support or complement them where appropriate. This requires an analysis of the context and existing coordination and response mechanisms and capacities before implementing clusters and ensuring appropriate links with rapid response mechanisms, the identification of appropriate partners in national and local authorities, and strengthened cooperation and coordination between clusters, national actors and development actors at every stage from preparedness to response through to development-focused programming, and better facilitation and support for the participation of national and local NGOs
Despite the contributions that the clusters have made to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian programming, major shortcomings of the cluster system have also been identified in recent cross-system evaluations and other assessments. These include a tendency for the clusters
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration in the clusters and more effective efforts to strengthen their capacities.**** It also calls for agencies and the clusters individually and jointly to invest in improved mechanisms to directly support politically-informed engagement and strategic coordination with national institutions and organisations, rather than focusing all attention and resources on the system’s own technical capacities and operational priorities.
tors (or combinations of these), but also from underlying political and socio-economic structures and the processes that affect their capacity to cope with those risks or shocks.51 If humanitarian action fails to address people’s vulnerabilities, it is easily seen as fundamentally deficient, particularly when it is provided year-on-year into situations of widespread and chronic vulnerability or into situations where people’s pre-existing vulnerability has largely caused the disaster, or where the disaster itself has left large numbers of people vulnerable to future hazards. Evaluations of humanitarian action in situations of drought, for instance, consistently criticize frameworks of response that define food insecurity and famine in terms of food shortage rather than livelihood crises and that therefore encourage a focus on the distribution of food (short- or long-term) rather than livelihoods-focused interventions that may reduce people’s vulnerability to new disasters.52
At the same time, the system’s most established institutions and organisations need to consider what steps might be taken to improve standards of international humanitarian engagement, including steps to prevent or mitigate the potential for harmful ‘swamping’ of major sudden-onset emergencies by large numbers of international organizations. This may include efforts by the clusters to define and promote relevant standards in particular sectoral and cross-cutting areas of response.** * See A. Stoddard, ‘International Humanitarian Financing: Review and comparative assessment of instruments’, Study for the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative commissioned by the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, July 2008. ** J. Steets et al., op cit. *** P. Harvey, Towards Good Humanitarian Government: The role of the affected state in disaster response, HPG Policy Brief 37, London, Overseas Development Institute (Humanitarian Policy Group), 2009.
Strengthening preparedness and reducing vulnerability? As noted in the introduction, the question of adequacy or appropriateness in relation to humanitarian action begs the question of what is intended or expected of international humanitarian action in response to climate-related or other hazards or disasters. Humanitarian assistance is conventionally depicted or defined as a short-term and limited response to immediate humanitarian needs focused on life-saving interventions. And yet the bulk of humanitarian aid is in fact directed to situations of long-running crisis involving complex and variable cycles and combinations of both chronic and acute humanitarian and/or livelihood needs caused by equally complex and variable combinations of risks, hazards and vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, in the context of acute or rapid-onset emergencies, humanitarian action usually expected in practice to go beyond immediate life-saving activities to include interventions to support recovery and address people’s vulnerabilities that preceded and/or resulted from the disaster. Vulnerability results not only from people’s direct exposure to particular shocks or risk fac-
Thus, in the context of the Horn of Africa, Pantuliano and Pavanello argue that an adequate response to drought needs to be based on recognition that droughts are a predictable event in this region and are likely to intensify in frequency and magnitude as a consequence of climate change. Effective responses therefore demand a framework of humanitarian action that is part of a comprehensive strategy to address the vulnerability of pastoralist populations in this region. This requires a combination of short-term and longerterm interventions and policies, all of which need to include a central focus on reducing vulnerability and building resilience to future droughts and other shocks or hazards. The challenge, therefore, is not only to strengthen the institutional and programmatic links between short-term ‘relief ’ and longer-term ‘development’ interventions – this is widely recognized as a continuing challenge for humanitarian and development donors and agencies – but also to ensure that vulnerability reduction is integrated into the core of short-term emergency programming and that this, in turn, is integrated effectively with longer-term action: strengthening pastoralists’ resilience in the Horn of Africa requires livelihoods-focused programming that is matched to the different stages of a crisis and that surmounts the conventional distinction between humanitarian and development approaches.53 In situations of acute food insecurity or famine, the direct provision of food through food aid has a crucial role to play in reducing vulnerability. This is because a sudden or dramatic collapse in access to food can directly threaten lives and cause long-term or permanent damage to people’s livelihoods even when the shock it-
R. Chambers, 1989, **. K. Stokke, op cit. 53 S. Pantuliano and S. Pavanello, Taking drought into account: addressing chronic vulnerability among pastoralists in the Horn of Africa.HPG Policy Brief 35 (May 2009), Overseas Development Institute (London), 2009. 51
52
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration self may be short-lived, since people who are acutely food insecure often have to deplete or liquidate productive assets and so compromise their future livelihoods and food security in order to survive in the short term. Thus timely and well-targeted delivery of food aid for populations suffering severe food security shocks can be crucial for protecting the livelihoods and reducing the vulnerability of those affected. Yet, food is never the only resource that people need in situations of acute food insecurity, and thus food aid without complementary non-food assistance is invariably insufficient. Moreover, if continued over extended periods of time and if not balanced appropriately with other broader-based interventions to support livelihoods, food aid has the potential to increase vulnerability in areas affected by chronic or recurrent food insecurity by undermining local food production, limiting the diversification of livelihoods and supporting unsustainable population growth.54 Despite wide recognition across the humanitarian sector of the limitations and liabilities of long-term food aid, it continues to dominate over all other forms of assistance in most situations of both chronic and acute food insecurity, representing a very high share of humanitarian aid for some countries over long periods; for instance, Ethiopia has received 80.5% of its humanitarian aid as food aid over the last five years.55 The preference for food aid is partly explained by donors’ preference for a ‘safe option’ with well-understood and reliable mechanisms and expected short-term results.56 For instance, a review of the 2005-2006 Horn of Africa drought response observed that, against a well-understood and accepted food system and widely available food assistance, donors were not convinced that livelihoods interventions would do more to save lives. Their lack of support for livelihoods-focused assistance was exacerbated by the quality and nature of livelihoods assessments, which were seen by many as too general and too short of the kind of ‘hard’ data that can be provided by more narrowly-focused food assessments.57 Meanwhile, operational agencies lacked an adequate understanding of pastoral populations and they lacked the technical capacities, resources and operational responsiveness needed to mount effective emergency livelihoods interventions, which are typically complex, time-consuming and expensive. The disconnect between humanitarian and development financing and interventions limited the scope for adapting and expanding pre-existing livelihoods
interventions in response to the crisis, and meant that opportunities for both short- and longer-term action to reduce or prevent asset depletion and collapse of livelihoods were missed at crucial points before, during and following the crisis.58 These failures have undoubtedly contributed to the current food security emergency in the Horn.59 Clearly, however, there are limitations to the mitigating action and impacts that the international humanitarian regime can achieve in the face of severe food security and other crises that have deep and complex structural causes. While vulnerability to food insecurity may be caused most immediately by factors such as land degradation, recurrent drought, population pressure and low agricultural productivity, at root this vulnerability is generated by deeper processes of marginalization, disempowerment, impoverishment and/ or displacement that place some people or groups at particular risk in many countries. While livelihoods interventions and other actions to improve people’s resilience in the face of climate-related and other hazards may lessen the impacts or implications of structural vulnerability and the sudden or progressive exacerbation of this vulnerability by shocks and stresses to people’s livelihood systems, ultimately any substantial or sustainable steps to address vulnerability to climate-related hazards must themselves be fundamentally structural or transformative – hence the need to for humanitarian action to be linked with or supported by ambitious and effective development policies and interventions. But it is not any kind of ‘development’ that is required, since development processes are themselves frequently a primary cause or driver of vulnerability. Pastoralists’ vulnerability in the Horn – and hence the current food security emergency affecting that region – has been partly caused by development programmes that have increasingly encouraged sedentary farming and enclosed private grazing land, such as commercial sugar plantations and the creation of a national park in Ethiopia. These have progressively prevented pastoralists from accessing their traditional grazing and watering areas. A 2007 survey of pastoral groups in Ethiopia’s Oromiya Regional State, for instance, found that among some groups, between 79% and 100% of households had lost their grazing and watering resources to non-pastoral uses and more than 90% of respondents indicated that they had experienced some fundamental changes in
S. Levine, ‘Here we go again: famine in the Horn of Africa’, Humanitarian Policy Group, 6/7/11, at http://blogs.odi.org.uk/blogs/main/archive/2011/07/06/horn_of_africa_famine_2011_humanitarian_system.aspx. 55 Global Humanitarian Assistance, op cit., p.29. 56 Sara Pantuliano and Mike Wekesa, ‘Improving drought response in pastoral areas of Ethiopia: Somali and Afar Regions and Borena Zone of Oromiya Region’. Humanitarian Policy Group (Overseas Development Institute, London). Prepared for the CORE group (CARE, FAO, Save the Children UK and Save the Children US), January 2008. 57 S. Pantualiano and S. Pavanello, op cit. 58 Ibid. & F. Grünewald, K. Robins et al., op cit. 59 S. Levine, op cit. 54
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration their mobility and grazing patterns through losing their traditional migration sites. The curtailment of seasonal migration combined with increasing livestock and human populations has created unsustainable pressures on already fragile ecosystems due to overgrazing, with progressive soil degradation leading to a progressive decline in the quality of pasture and declines in animal productivity. Conflict over grazing and water resources and boundary claims have further limited people’s mobility. The study concludes that land alienation, linked to agricultural and other forms of development, has significantly weakened the capacity of pastoralists to cope with drought through mobility and increased their exposure to food insecurity and famine.60 Vulnerability to climate-related hazards is all the greater where national disaster preparedness policies are weak or non-existent. At the time of the 2005-2006 drought in the Horn of Africa, there were no national preparedness plans in Somalia and Ethiopia, and contingency funds in Ethiopia and Kenya were too small to support the rapid implementation of any contingency plans on a scale to have any substantial impact.61 As international actors also lacked any pre-existing emergency plans to work collectively, there was little consensus on the right balance between preventative livelihoods interventions and direct food assistance.62 In Pakistan, the ‘One UN’ initiative includes disaster risk management as one of five strategic priorities, and yet, according to the 2010 real-time evaluation of the flood response, little has been achieved in the way of contingency planning that establishes a clear division of labour between the government and international actors. Hence a reactive emergency response approach remains the predominant way of addressing disasters despite the perennial risk of severe and recurrent disasters in Pakistan.63 Bangladesh provides a more positive example of national disaster preparedness policies integrated with development and recovery planning, which explicitly encompass vulnerability reduction. Here, national planning has included strategies to protect local livelihoods, with floods treated as an inevitable and predictable aspect of development challenges rather than isolated ‘natural’ events, and priority has been given to strengthening flood-prone households’ rehabilitation capacities.64 Mozambique is also widely referred to as a country that has developed effective and integrated
disaster preparedness policies that include annual contingency plans for floods, cyclones and droughts. Agencies involved in the response to floods and a cyclone in 2007, for example, were able to draw on the experience of a simulation exercise carried out the previous year by the National Institute of Disaster Management (IGNC). International donors have given strong support to the (IGNC), helping to fund the employment and training of 285 staff and equipping a national headquarters and several regional offices; the government has also benefited from capacity support provided by Guatemala.65 Examples of good practice as regards risk and vulnerability reduction appear to be relatively few and far between, however. The international Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 – 2015, sponsored by the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), is intended to raise the profile and support for disaster risk reduction at the national level, including early warning and the assessment and monitoring of risks and action to reduce underlying risk factors and strengthen preparedness and responses at all levels. The need for better disaster preparedness and long-term vulnerability reduction is also repeated in most evaluations of humanitarian response to climate-related and other disasters. Yet, there is little evidence yet of this rhetoric being translated into significant action on the ground. Chronic lack of funding for disaster risk reduction (DRR) and preparedness continues to hamper progress in many countries where, due to pre-existing poverty, governance problems and other challenges affecting human security, vulnerability to climate-related and other hazards is particularly high. Current data on official aid flows indicates slowly increasing international funding of DRR, but still at only extremely low levels, with total reported assistance earmarked for DRR having reached only US$835 million in 2009, representing 0.5% of total ODA. Of the US$150 billion spent on the biggest humanitarian recipients over the past five years, only 1% of that has been reported as DRR.66 Although DRR activities are largely supported through humanitarian rather than development funders and institutions, these remain generally marginalized within the humanitarian system. In the response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, for example, DRR was separated off to be managed by a separate working group rather than being mainstreamed across the cluster system.67
Elias and F. Abdi, Putting Pastoralists on the Policy Agenda: Land Alienation in Southern Ethiopia, IIED Gatekeeper Paper No.145 (July 2010), International Institute for Environment and Development (London), 2010, at http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/14599IIED.pdf. 61 F. Grünewald, K. Robins et al., op cit.; & S. Pantualiano and S. Pavanello, op cit. 62 S. Pantualiano and S. Pavanello, op cit. 63 R. Palastro et al., op cit. 64 K. Stokke, op cit., citing T. Beck, Learning Lessons from Disaster Recovery: The Case of Bangladesh. The World Bank (Washington, D.C.), 2005. 65 P. Harvey, op cit. 66 Global Humanitarian Assistance, op cit., p.7. 67 D. Kauffman and S. Krüger, op cit. 60
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration Early recovery activities, central to any integrated disaster management and risk reduction agenda, suffer similarly from lack of funding and poor prioritization and poor and/or confused implementation across the humanitarian sector. A recent review of the state of the humanitarian system reports the lack of effective support to enable recovery of livelihoods as a persistent theme,68 and the most recent global evaluation of the cluster system highlights systemic obstacles to the functioning of early recovery clusters, which have been hampered by seemingly irresolvable debates about their scope and mandate and lack of relevant knowledge and expertise at field level.69 According to a 2007 meta-review of humanitarian responses to natural disasters, most evaluations leave the impression that most disaster-affected areas and groups receive humanitarian assistance without any appreciable reduction in their vulnerability.70 As observed in the previous German Marshal Fund background paper concerned with the potential implications of climate-induced migration for humanitarian responses,71 there is a growing debate among humanitarian donors on how to better mainstream DRR within humanitarian and development assistance frameworks. Key challenges include the need for higher levels of funding from development as well as humanitarian donors, and funding cycles that are more sensitive to the realities and complexities of delivering DRR and humanitarian assistance in difficult and turbulent environments. But uncertainty and inconsistency in policy priorities seem set to continue due to the complexity, scale and scope of the transitions and transformations needed in many countries that are most vulnerable to the negative human impacts of climaterelated hazards. Many of the world’s poorest and most crisis-prone countries will continue to be disproportionately affected by climate-related hazards such as droughts, floods and cyclones, with the resulting disasters and their impacts amplified by high levels of human vulnerability and lack of resources, institutions or capacities for effective risk reduction.72 Growing pressures on the international humanitarian system to help prevent disasters, reduce vulnerability, and respond to humanitarian crises in these contexts will only serve to deepen uncertainty about the capacities of the international humanitarian system to respond sufficiently and effectively.
Strengthening preparedness and reducing vulnerability: key messages and recommendations As noted in the previous GMF background paper on the humanitarian challenges associated with climate-induced migration, people will continue to be most exposed to the risks of climate change and other stresses where formal governing institutions are particularly weak or distorted, especially where violence and poor governance have already weakened their coping and survival capacities. Many so-called ‘fragile states’ already lack legitimacy and fail to provide adequate social protection to poor and vulnerable populations, so any climate-related deterioration in human security has the potential to generate extreme welfare needs that are far beyond the capacities or willingness of these states to address. These state capacities may themselves be directly undermined by the broader economic and other impacts of climate change, further impeding the provision of even minimal basic services or any state support of livelihoods. In these contexts, humanitarian assistance that is designed and intended as a short-term instrument for meeting acute needs has often come to represent an inadequate long-term instrument for meeting chronic needs. Although agencies have often succeeded in delivering a range of basic services in these situations, this assistance has typically done little to bring about sustainable improvements in humanitarian indicators or any significant changes in the underlying conditions causing vulnerability. Meanwhile, the longer-term engagement of development actors is often hampered by continuing instability or conflict, or weak or illegitimate state institutions. More joined-up and effective engagement of humanitarian and development donors is also negatively affected by tightly defined and risk-averse systems of funding and engagement. The preference for food aid, for example, appears to be determined often by preexisting earmarking and a preference for the ‘safe option’, with its well understood mechanisms and expected shortterm results.* An increasing recognition in development circles of the need to address the welfare needs of populations in these
P. Harvey et al., op cit. J. Steets, F. Grünewald et al., op cit. See also S. Bailey, S.Pavanello, S. Elhawary and S. O’Callaghan, Early recovery: an overview of policy debates and operational challenges, HPG Working Paper, Overseas Development Institute (London), 2009. 70 K. Stokke, op cit. 71 S. Collinson, op cit. 72 Informal Taskforce of the IASC et al., op cit. 68 69
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration difficult environments, and continuing preoccupation among humanitarian and development actors with bridging the relief-to-development ‘gap’ reflect a longstanding concern with finding new and more effective mechanisms for international engagement in many fragile states. A recent meta-evaluation of humanitarian responses to natural disasters concluded that despite growing awareness of the need for disaster preparedness and vulnerability reduction, there are relatively few examples of good practice.** As observed in assessments of international humanitarian responses to acute food insecurity among pastoral communities in the Horn of Africa, there is a need for the protection or support of livelihoods to be placed at the centre of humanitarian (including emergency) preparedness, planning and response mechanisms, and for vulnerability analysis to be incorporated more effectively into humanitarian needs assessments. In addition, early warning systems should not simply be seen as an ‘emergency’ instrument, but rather as a means of managing predictable risks in areas prone to recurrent and/ or chronic hazards and as a key instrument for informing and supporting efforts to protect lives and livelihoods.*** The mainstreaming of livelihoods-focused programming will require significantly improved integration and prioritisation of support for preparedness planning and early recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts across all areas of humanitarian funding, programming, coordination and monitoring, with due attention given by donors and mixed-mission or multi-mandate operational agencies to the responsiveness of humanitarian funding and programming to chronic and ‘idiosyncratic’ vulnerability to climate-related shocks and stresses, and to the links between early warning and contingency planning. Monitoring, assessment and early warning systems must be able to discern differences between populations and within particular population groups, and also predict how a particular trend or shock might affect food and livelihoods security and other key aspects of vulnerability. For this, there is a need for a good understanding of specific livelihood systems and frameworks that can help identify the importance of different indicators for households with different livelihoods and levels of wealth. For further improvements in preparedness planning and more effective cross-sector responses to both long- and short-term vulnerability to climate-related hazards and shocks, common
approaches are needed – supported by the clusters and other key humanitarian fora – to avoid agencies making decisions in isolation from one another. This, in turn, will require capacity-building on the development and utilisation of livelihoods-based information systems among senior decision-makers in the humanitarian community.*** * S. Collinson, op cit. ** K. Stokke, op cit. *** Getting it Right: Understanding livelihoods to reduce the vulnerability of pastoral communites, HPG Synthesis Paper, Overseas Development Institute (Humanitarian Policy Group), 2009.
Conclusion The relationships between human vulnerability and environmental change and extreme weather events are extremely varied and complex. What is clear, however, is that the future humanitarian impacts of severe climate-related hazards and events will continue to be determined primarily by existing patterns of human vulnerability: humanitarian disasters are caused as much by people’s vulnerability to hazards as they are by the scale, intensity or severity of the hazards themselves. When levels of vulnerability are already high, the potential for climate-related and other hazards to further exacerbate people’s susceptibility and amplify the scale of disasters is all the greater. The international humanitarian system thus faces a dual challenge: not only one of responding to climate-related disasters (often in countries already suffering humanitarian crises caused by conflict or other factors), but also of addressing the vulnerability that plays such a big part in determining the severity of humanitarian disasters when they occur. How responsive the system will be to crises and disasters in the future, and whether it will be effective in reducing or minimizing vulnerability, are both questions that highlight the core limitations of the international humanitarian system as it currently functions. Responses are inevitably limited by the financial and other resources needed to support them, and while levels of global humanitarian funding have increased substantially over recent decades, they remain insufficient and too uneven to meet escalating levels of humanitarian need across the world. While there are improvements to be made in how humanitarian actors address vulnerability – for example, by expanding and improving emergency livelihoods support – the sheer scale and complexity of human vulnerability in those countries most severely affected by complex humanitarian crises will remain beyond the overall capacities of humanitarian actors to address in any comprehensive
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration way, particularly through short-term relief interventions. Nonetheless, in many situations, international humanitarian responses will continue to have a decisive impact on the scale, severity and longer-term impacts of disasters resulting from severe climate-related hazards. Lessons from previous famines in the Horn of Africa, for instance, point to a key role that humanitarian actors could and should play in helping to build the resilience of vulnerable populations to drought and other predictable climate-related hazards. The humanitarian system’s preparedness and capacities to respond to disasters therefore must be seen as a key component of the international climate change adaptation agenda, particularly in respect of countries affected by conflict or multiple interacting crises where existing humanitarian needs are concentrated and where many international humanitarian agencies are often already heavily engaged. Scaling up disaster preparedness and response to severe climate-related hazards will depend on investment in climate change adaptation extending to some of the most turbulent and crisis-prone contexts where the implementation of conventional development or disaster preparedness measures are most problematic. The significance of humanitarian action as a key component of climate change adaptation may be hidden in these contexts, however, by the difficulty of identifying obvious or direct causal links between climate-related trends or events and particular patterns of humanitarian need, given the complexity of factors causing vulnerability and crisis. Whether or not humanitarian responses have any positive impacts in practice will depend to a large extent on whether key weaknesses are addressed that significantly hamper the effectiveness and impacts of the international humanitarian system. Priorities include:
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Improved strategic engagement, cooperation and/or coordination of international humanitarian actors with state and other national and local actors in countries facing the greatest humanitarian challenges due to climate-related hazards and shocks.
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Improved standards of international humanitarian engagement in major emergencies, including steps to prevent or mitigate the potential for harmful ‘swamping’ of major sudden-onset emergencies by large numbers of international organizations.
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Greater attention and support given to the protection and support of livelihoods in humanitarian (including emergency) preparedness, planning and response mechanisms, and better integration of vulnerability analysis into humanitarian needs assessments and better use of early warning systems to manage responses to predictable risks in areas prone to recurrent and/ or chronic hazards, including efforts to protect livelihoods.
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Prioritization of support for preparedness, planning, early recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts across all areas of humanitarian funding, programming, coordination and monitoring, with due attention by donors and mixed-mission or multi-mandate operational agencies to chronic and ‘idiosyncratic’ vulnerability to climate-related shocks and stresses, and to the links between early warning and contingency planning.
Sarah Collinson is a Research Fellow and Program Leader of the Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute.
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Improved connectedness, consistency, quality, scope and coverage of humanitarian needs assessments, including in urban areas where the humanitarian impacts of severe climate-related hazards may be increasingly concentrated in coming decades.
The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) is Britain’s leading independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues. PHOTO CREDIT: Floods in Ifo refugee camp, Dadaab,Kenya, UNHCR: B. Bannon, December 2006.
Improved flexibility and suitability of humanitarian funding to highly varied and complex situations of vulnerability and need resulting from climate-related hazards and shocks across a broad range of contexts, including conflict-affected areas, and extending to both chronic and acute needs in countries of varying state capacity and ensuring that responses to major crises do not result in under-funding of low-profile, chronic and/or ‘forgotten’ crises.
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration
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Study Team on Climate-Induced Migration Study team members
List of Papers
Susan Martin, Institute for the Study of International Migration, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC (Co-Chair)
Climate Change and Migration: Report of the Transatlantic Study Team September 2010
Koko Warner, Institute for Environment and Human Security, United Nations University, Bonn, Germany (Co-Chair)
Developing Adequate Humanitarian Responses by Sarah Collinson
Jared Banks and Suzanne Sheldon, Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC
Meeting the Challenges of Severe Climate-Related Hazards: A Review of the Effectiveness of the International Humanitarian Regime by Sarah Collinson November 2012
Regina Bauerochse Barbosa, Economy and Employment Department, Sector Project Migration and Development, German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), Eschborn, Germany Alexander Carius, Moira Feil, and Dennis Tänzler, Adelphi Research, Berlin, Germany
June 2010
Migration, the Environment and Climate Change: Assessing the Evidence by Frank Laczko June 2010
InterAction, Washington, DC Joel Charny, Refugees International, Washington, DC
Climate Change and Migration: Key Issues for Legal Protection of Migrants and Displaced Persons by Michelle Leighton June 2010
Dimitria Clayton, Ministry for Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women and Integration, State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf, Germany
Climate Change, Agricultural Development, and Migration by Philip Martin
Sarah Collinson, Overseas Development Institute, London, United Kingdom
Climate Change, NAPAs, Agriculture, and Migration LDCs by Philip Martin November 2012
Peter Croll, Ruth Vollmer, Andrea Warnecke, Bonn International Center for Conversion, Bonn Germany
Climate Change and International Migration by Susan F. Martin
Frank Laczko, International Organization for Migration, Geneva, Switzerland
Climate Change, NAPAs, Agriculture, and Migration in LDCs Climate by PhilipChange, Martin Migration and Adaptation by Susan F. Martin June 2010
Agustin Escobar Latapi, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Guadalajara, Mexico
Climate Change and Migration: The UNFCCC Climate Negotiations Climate Change, and Conflict: Receiving Communities under and Global ForumMigration on Migration and Development Pressure? by Koko Warner and Susan Martin by Andrea Warnecke, Dennis Tänzler and Ruth Vollmer June 2010
Michelle Leighton, Center for Law and Global Justice, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California and Munich Re Foundation-UNU Chair in Social Vulnerability Philip Martin, University of California, Migration Dialogue, Davis, California Heather McGray, World Resources Institute, Washington, DC Lorenz Peteresen, Climate Change Taskforce, German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), Eschborn, Germany Aly Tandian, Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les Migrations (GERMS), Gaston Berger University, Senegal Agnieszka Weinar, Directorate-General Justice, Freedom and Security, European Commissions, Brussels, Belgium Astrid Ziebarth, German Marshall Fund of the United States, Berlin, Germany
June 2010
June 2010
Meeting the Challenges of Severe Climate-Related Hazards: A Review of Assessing Institutional Governance Needs Related to Environmental the Effectiveness of the and International Humanitarian Regime Change and Human Migration by Sarah Collinson by Koko Warner November 2012 Climate Change and Migration: The UNFCCC Climate Negotiations and Global Forum on Migration and Development by Koko Warner and Susan Martin November 2012
Transatlantic Study Teams In 2008, GMF’s Immigration and Integration Program launched the Transatlantic Study Team on Climate-induced Migration. For the first time, this initiative systematically brought together researchers, practitioners, and policy representatives from both sides of the Atlantic to link two important debates and policy spheres that up until then were only sporadically linked: those of migration and those of climate change. For three consecutive years, the Study Team investigated the impact of environmental change on migration patterns, reviewed the current state of research, compiled existing data, convened opinion leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, went on study tours to affected or potentially affected regions, such as Mexico, Senegal and Bangladesh, and helped to advance the policy debate by feeding the findings into national policy meetings and international fora such as the Global Forum on Migration and Development and the International Climate Negotiations (COP). The Study Team laid the groundwork for future policy analyses and research. Led by Dr. Susan F. Martin, Georgetown University, and Dr. Koko Warner, UN University, the team consists of scholars, policymakers and practitioners from the migration and environmental communities. The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) is a non-partisan American public policy and grantmaking institution dedicated to promoting better understanding and cooperation between North America and Europe on transatlantic and global issues. GMF does this by supporting individuals and institutions working in the transatlantic sphere, by convening leaders and members of the policy and business communities, by contributing research and analysis on transatlantic topics, and by providing exchange opportunities to foster renewed commitment to the transatlantic relationship. In addition, GMF supports a number of initiatives to strengthen democracies. Founded in 1972 through a gift from Germany as a permanent memorial to Marshall Plan assistance, GMF maintains a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to its headquarters in Washington, DC, GMF has seven offices in Europe: Berlin, Bratislava, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade, Ankara, and Bucharest. The Institute for the Study of International Migration is based in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Staffed by leading experts on immigration and refugee policy, the Institute draws upon the resources of Georgetown University faculty working on international migration and related issues on the main campus and in the law center. It conducts research and convenes workshops and conferences on immigration and refugee law and policies. In addition, the Institute seeks to stimulate more objective and well-documented migration research by convening research symposia and publishing an academic journal that provides an opportunity for the sharing of research in progress as well as finished projects. The UN University established by the UN General Assembly in 1973, is an international community of scholars engaged in research, advanced training and the dissemination of knowledge related to pressing global problems. Activities focus mainly on peace and conflict resolution, sustainable development and the use of science and technology to advance human welfare. The University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security addresses risks and vulnerabilities that are the consequence of complex environmental hazards, including climate change, which may affect sustainable development. It aims to improve the in-depth understanding of the cause effect relationships to find possible ways to reduce risks and vulnerabilities. The Institute is conceived to support policy and decision makers with authoritative research and information.