The Changing Face of the Global Humanitarian Crisis: Gender, Climate Change, and Humanitarian Interventions

“In a changing world with galloping, growing needs, we can’t keep making the same efforts, issuing the same pleas, and just write bigger and bigger checks and expect different results,” said Samantha Power, Administrator of the United Agency for International Development (USAID), at the launch of the Global Humanitarian Overview, co-hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, USAID, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). “We must change the ways we deliver humanitarian assistance to include full participation, design, and leadership from local populations and organizations, from women and marginalized peoples who can help develop truly sustainable solutions to the risks they face in their own communities,” said Power. If all people requiring urgent humanitarian assistance lived in the same country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, said Martin Griffiths, UNOCHA’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. More than one percent of the world’s population is displaced, food insecurity is at unprecedented levels, there are more frequent complex emergencies and climate change is looming over it all, exacerbating losses and undoing gains, said Power. More funding is “urgently needed to chip away at the gap between donor commitments and this range of acute needs,” said Power, but we also need to shift our approach in ways that “go beyond the need for more resources.”

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