The Cost of Doing Nothing - An Urgent Call for a Better World

According to the recently published Cost of Doing Nothing report from IFRC, the approximately 108 million people worldwide requiring humanitarian assistance as a result of climate-related hazards annually could rise to 200 million by 2050, assuming there is no global drive towards climate adaptation. This would take the annual humanitarian cost of disasters – not including long-term recovery or private sector impact – to $20 billion. As the latest ALNAP State of the Humanitarian System report demonstrates, current record levels of investment in the humanitarian sector are still outmatched by unprecedented levels of global need. The humanitarian system is already stretched far beyond its limits, and further investment in response and recovery activity will be outstripped by the exponentially rising cost of damages as a result of a more unpredictable climate.

More frequent and more extreme storms, droughts, wildfires, and increasing water scarcity will lead to unprecedented levels of human displacement and suffering.

The cost of doing nothing to tackle climate risk is simply too high.

But this is not to say that there is no hope. Rather, IFRC’s report is a call for more sensible action in response to the climate crisis. Focusing on recovery is inherently a reactionary activity. And, as Hurricane Dorian has most recently demonstrated in the Bahamas, when nature gets to land the first punch, it hits hard. We cannot afford to stand back and allow our most vulnerable populations to be beaten and brutalised by the increasingly frequent mega storms devastating coastal communities on all corners of the globe.

The good news is, we do not have to stand back and wait for the next big one. IFRC estimates that for each $1 spent in prevention and mitigation activities, $4 are saved in the recovery process. For 25% of the cost, you can also dramatically reduce loss of life and protect livelihoods, enabling a faster economic recovery post-disaster.

There are two forms of preparatory activity for climate-related disasters: mitigation and adaptation.

Mitigation activities involve reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and slowing environmental degradation, in attempts to limit humanity’s impact on the planet. Movements such as the global climate strikes, extinction rebellion, and UN-led awareness movements such as the recent IPCC reports that gave us 12 years to avoid climate catastrophe, focus on mitigation efforts. Cutting the use of fossil fuels, preventing deforestation, limiting the use of harmful substances such as unrecyclable plastics, and lowering meat consumption are all fundamentally important mitigation activities that can serve to slow climate change and limit the impact of rising temperatures, which are largely responsible for the increasingly precarious climate conditions.

However, even if we completely eradicated greenhouse gas emissions and stopped our planet-changing activity tomorrow, the world would continue to warm. The carbon already in the atmosphere acts as a warming blanket over the Earth, and will continue to do so for decades to come. Several climate research organisations have therefore claimed that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is now locked in, and whilst there is debate around this, the consensus is that additional warming will occur. And we can expect more storms, more droughts, and more extreme temperatures to accompany that.

It is therefore necessary that we not just engage in mitigation activities, but also focus on climate adaptation. As the IFRC Cost of Doing Nothing report demonstrates, we will be unable to cope globally with the new climate reality by 2050 if we do not start to adapt our infrastructure, livelihoods, and homes now. Resilience must become a much greater focus of all of our lives. Weather will become more unpredictable and more severe. Businesses, communities, and countries will find themselves disrupted more often, and having to deal with greater consequences of climate-related hazards. The Global Commission on Adaptation argues that adapting to the new global climate requires a revolution on three fronts: a revolution of understanding, by educating and training all members of society to identify risks and to prepare against them; a revolution in planning, to better prepare for disasters, to design infrastructure and cities in ways that make them resilient, and to put response action plans in place long before they are necessary; and a revolution in finance, to mobilise the resources necessary to achieve this before it is too late.

This means that the time for climate scientists, national governments, and environmental activists to argue these points and to make small changes to policy is over. This means we all must do what we can to increase our resilience, within our homes, within our communities,  within our countries and across the globe. This requires me, you, and everyone we know to start paying attention.

But, and this is important to stress, this is not simply a dire warning of a future that sees us at the mercy of an angry and out-of-control Mother Nature.

Indeed, the adaptations and mitigation efforts that are required to protect vulnerable communities from climate-related hazards are not just good, humanitarian interventions. They also represent a unique opportunity for urban growth globally. As Urban Transitions highlight in their new report Climate Emergency, Urban Opportunity, “A transition to zero-carbon cities offers an immense opportunity to secure national economic prosperity and improve quality of life while tackling the existential threat posed by climate change” (p22).

A more climate-resilient world requires that we build better, more sustainable infrastructure in all countries. It requires that we enhance our disaster response and recovery plans, to ensure that the humanitarian sector can achieve as much as possible with the resources they have. It requires that we listen to indigenous groups, vulnerable populations, and citizens of small island states most at-risk of natural hazards, to ensure nobody is left behind. And it requires that we work cross-borders, because natural hazards do not respect human-made boundaries. An effective climate risk reduction plan necessitates that every person becomes more socially conscious, less wasteful in their personal activities, more generous in their support for those in need, and more aware of the potentially harmful policies and actions of governments and global corporations.

We are all in this together. And, for the first time in human history, we have the capacity to respond as one global entity to tackle something that concerns everyone.

The issue is clear. The evidence is there. And the solutions are within our reach.

It’s up to us.

Let’s turn the climate crisis into a global opportunity.

This Concerns Everyone - Naomi Klein and and the Climate Generation

Naomi Klein’s stirring call-to-arms on climate action, This Changes Everything, lays out the realities that we face in “decade zero”, the period of time that we currently have left to make significant changes to the way we live in order to prevent a climate catastrophe. In matter-of-fact terms, it lays out the science, details the myriad obstacles that humanity must overcome in order to avert a crisis, and then highlights many of the actions that every one of us can take to change the current trajectory of ecological breakdown and pollution.

Perhaps most interestingly, it details the most pressing concern for climate activists (and those of us who want our planet to remain habitable for generations to come): the absolute necessity of changing the current mentality of neoliberal, de-regulated, growth-at-all-costs capitalism that pervades nearly every culture and country on Earth.

Our economies require permanent growth in order to remain viable. Company share prices are often not based on the current earnings of the product or service they provide, but the potential for the company to grow and earn in the future. Extractive industry players like fossil fuel companies determine their worth not by the amount of oil they are currently pumping, but by the amount of dirty fuel that sits in land they own, waiting to be extracted and refined. Shell and BP are not absurdly wealthy because of the barrels of oil they create today, but because thanks to their reserves they are guaranteed to be able to keep producing for the next thirty or forty years, even with no further discoveries of new oil fields. And still, they're digging. Renewable energies be damned.

So the calls for climate action represent a very real threat to the future of Big Oil, but also the economy as a whole. If we cannot continue to churn out new phones every year, wear cheap clothing made in factories half a world away, buy seasonal foods all year around, or transport goods to our doorsteps via dirty ships and dirtier aeroplanes, it seems as though our whole world will collapse. We are all complicit in the hubris of humanity believing that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, with no consequences.

For those who make a killing on polluting and extractive industries, the words and deeds of climate activists may therefore seem like an existential threat. In reality, ignoring those words and deeds will be the nail in the coffin for our current way of life.

But that won’t stop those who have invested so much in neoliberal capitalism from defending their cause to the grave.

Like a cornered animal, they will snarl and snap back at those that threaten them. Which is why Brexit campaigner Arron Banks sits at home and tweets gleefully about the possibility of an "accident in the Atlantic" that might befall Greta Thunberg on her journey to the UN, or Julia Hartley-Brewer can respond to Thunberg's informed and well-articulated arguments with the sort of petulance you might expect from a schoolchild. The science is accurate. The international community are finally waking up to our new climate reality. And the climate deniers and free-market preachers are absolutely terrified. 

As the elite often do when their power is threatened and they sense their time is drawing to a close, they will double down on the extractive, polluting activities that have made them rich over the previous decades. Much like the European powers’ spiteful slash-and-burn campaign that crippled Africa during decolonisation, the climate deniers will squeeze the system dry while they still can, not just for profit, but also for revenge. Jair Bolsonaro will burn the Amazon to the ground, and ravage the Indigenous people that stood against his heartless pro-business policies. Donald Trump will attack Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" as economically impossible whilst his own policies send the US debt spiralling to new heights. Neoliberal converts will continue to denounce socialist agendas as global austerity continues and inequality continues to widen. 

This is the vicious bite of a dog that doesn't want to admit that it's scared. The ideology that built the modern world is now killing it, and those that benefitted most from the way things are don't know what to do anymore. As Klein puts it, we have a choice; overhaul our entire political and economic system in order to prevent a global climate catastrophe or wait until that catastrophe does it for us. 

Which is the key message in this debate. “Green new deals” and shifts to renewable energy are not revolutionary acts against the status quo. The status quo is going to change. The question is whether we want to do something about it now, as key UN institutions, global governments, and increasing global grassroots movements are urging us to do, or whether we want to stand back and watch the world burn until the flames reach our doorsteps.

People don't like change. Especially change that forces us to reconsider everything we believe in. But change is necessary if we are to avert a world-threatening crisis.

The global dominance of the current free-market Neoliberal thinking since the collapse of the Soviet Union has led many to believe there is no other possible option for healthy, and wealthy, societies. But our economic and political systems change constantly. For a proletariat worker in 1950s Moscow, the possibility of another form of economic or political system in the USSR would be unthinkable. For a medieval Parisian peasant, the feudal system of landowners and serfs was just the natural way of life.

But the Berlin Wall came down. The French revolution overthrew a feudal monarchy and ushered in a modern Republic. Even our comparatively stable western Liberal systems transformed from socialist and Keynesian economic prospects built on Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal and Clement Attlee's Post-World War Two drive for social security (which included the creation of the much-lauded NHS, at the time supported by those on all sides of the political spectrum) into systems of free-market, deregulated hyper-capitalism. Ideologies and economic doctrines came and went, fought wars for supremacy that were supposedly resolved, and the so-called “end of history” never came. 

The drive towards global democracy and liberalism that was promised in the 1990s is now under serious threat, as western countries see the return of authoritarian beliefs and regimes, African and Asian states fail to transition to the European model (as the liberal system expected would happen), and global movements of cooperation such as the EU stumble and falter. History isn't over, and for the first time since the ordinary people of the world decided that they wanted that iron curtain torn down, we are once again gearing up to exercise our will. The climate crisis is the most important issue we face today. And, as Klein expertly outlines, it has the potential to be a rallying cry for a new system that works for everyone, not just the few. 

Change cannot come unless we change everything. That means being more aware of our own habits and changing our behaviours where we know we can do better. But more importantly, that means changing the system so that it is forced to work for us. The political elite and the invisible hand of the market won't drop everything to reduce inequality, limit carbon emissions, or offer workers a fair wage and social security net unless we force them to. The current state of affairs is proof enough of that. 

We are more informed, more connected, and therefore more empowered today than at any other point in human history. We are also at greater risk of disaster than any generation before us.

We are all implicated in the self-mutilation of our only home. But we know how to create an economic and political system that benefits all of us, one that does not fetishize growth at the expense of wellbeing and community. The very things we need to do to stop the destruction of our natural resources and slow pollution, are the things that can benefit those of us who are struggling right now.

Climate change will affect the global rich and poor in vastly different ways, and if you care about those less fortunate than yourselves, you care about this. Neoliberalism built the modern world we stand in today. It made the rich much richer whilst widening inequality across the board. It moulded us into individuals whilst stripping away the community and family ties we once held dear. It allowed humankind to, briefly, play God with the natural environment in the name of economic growth. And now it stands to tear down the very temple it built.

The fight for the climate is not just about scientific fact and an abstract, dystopian future should we not act responsibly. It is about every issue we face in the modern world. Human-made climate change is the result of the way we humans act towards each other and towards the Earth right now, so that is what we have to address.

If you're angry at the destruction of rainforests, coral reefs, and wildlands in the search for more fuels to burn, join the climate fight.

If you're angry at small-scale farmers and fishers around the world losing their jobs to global industrial megaliths with which they cannot compete, join the climate fight.

If you’re angry at the treatment of thousands of economic migrants and refugees trapped in camps in the Mediterranean, at the US border, and across the world, join the climate fight.

If you’re angry at the massive number of homeless people struggling on the streets of your town, join the climate fight.

If you’re angry that CEOs can receive millions of pounds in bonuses when their workers don’t receive a living wage, join the climate fight.

If you don’t want to see Indigenous peoples, refugees, the urban poor, workers, poor youth, and minority groups discriminated against and marginalised, the you must join the climate fight.

The ideological battle for the planet starts now. 

Read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything for an excellent analysis of where we are at in terms of climate change, how we got here, and where we might be going depending on how we respond right now. For examples of individual changes you can make to lower your own environmental impact, see here. To help the change the system to help benefit all of us, follow the lead of Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate and the Extinction Rebellion, make your voice heard and stand up for the planet. Tell your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbours.

The People at the Heart of Change in Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is a Southern Indian state of phenomenal natural beauty and vibrant cultural heritage. From the bustling mega-city of Chennai, where the land meets the turquoise sea of the Bay of Bengal, to the rolling hills that give way to rural in-land villages, you will find people who are welcoming, friendly, and living colourful and interesting lives even in sometimes difficult circumstances.

Me with some of the students at St Antony's.

But Tamil Nadu is also a state that faces many significant challenges. Successive dry monsoon seasons have resulted in a serious drought that has led Chennai, the state’s largest city, to run out of water. The city’s 10 million inhabitants are now dependant on government deliveries of water from neighbouring areas, but across the state the water crisis is deepening, and rural, more sparsely populated areas should not expect the same government response to their need. Widespread corruption and mismanagement, both at the state and national levels, has left vast swathes of Tamil Nadu with little faith that they can count on any support as they struggle to find clean drinking and bathing water, or grow crops and feed livestock, on their parched land. Whilst the state’s economy is rapidly growing, this is at an uneven rate and inequality is rising, leaving many – particularly those in rural areas – behind.

One of Chennai's four main reservoirs - completely drained of water due to several weak monsoon seasons. Photo credit: The Independent.

As the environmental crisis unfolds across the state, community leaders are standing up to educate and advocate for those individuals that the system has forgotten. Ordinary people are making real change at the ground level every day, and through my role as a trustee of The Kanji Project, I was fortunate enough to meet some of these community leaders over the last two weeks as we celebrated the 25^th anniversary of St Antony’s Matriculation School. Founded in 1994 by Maria Rayappan and now run by her nephew Lourdusamy Michael, the school has grown from a two-room building with 3 teachers and 40 students to a campus that now educates over 1,500 students from surrounding villages and employs over 100 local people as teachers, drivers, cooks, groundskeepers, and more. St Antony’s Foundlings (SAF), the charity responsible for the school and for Shanti Lumin Children’s Home, run by Maria and now home to 40 girls, many of whom are orphaned, also provides meals to local villagers who are unable to support themselves, and has taken its mission to educate outside of the school walls and into the streets.

Through St Antony’s Eco Club, over 100 students have planted more than 1,500 trees in the school grounds and in their villages, as well as engaging in recycling education campaigns and taking part in marches to teach local people about water preservation. Following Cyclone Gaja, which tore through southern Tamil Nadu last year, Lourdusamy used his local and school connections to provide immediate humanitarian relief to the worst-affected villages, driving five hours to deliver food and shelter to those that had lost everything. This was viewed not just as a charitable act for those caught in the storm, but an educational opportunity for the students at St Antony’s who saw several of their teachers heading off to help in any way they could, and who helped to stock the relief vehicle. Alongside their usual English, maths, science, and other lessons, the values of compassion and collective action are being instilled in these remarkable students.

Planting trees is one of the best ways to combat the looming climate emergency that grips Tamil Nadu (and many other areas worldwide)

Down the road in Pudupalayam, another village in Thiruvannaamalai district, about 12km from Kanji, stands the campus of Idhaya College, an all-girls university run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (known colloquially as the Rose Sisters). The Rose Sisters also operate the Sunshine Special School from this campus, supported by The Kanji Project. Providing day care and education to 16 physically and mentally disabled children, the Special School gives its students a chance to grow and to develop, learning not just Tamil but English, as well as learning creative activities and skills that will set them up for regular schooling and to cope with life as they grow up. This support for disabled people from the Sisters extends to the surrounding villages, where they advocate for disability rights, aid individuals in achieving government grants for support, and setting up cooperatives to increase community awareness and connectedness.

This theme of empowerment runs through all of the Rose Sisters’ work, particular through their children’s and youth parliaments, where they organise children and young people from the villages to discuss and act on issues affecting them. As with St Antony’s, tackling the environmental crisis and severe water shortage is of key importance, with children learning about the issues and then advocating in their communities for water preservation, appropriate waste disposal and recycling. The young people also lobby local government to make changes to support their neighbours and friends. In addition to this, the Rose Sisters have set up women’s cooperatives and groups to help vulnerable women to manage finance and learn skills that can make them less financially dependant on men, giving greater opportunities to escape abusive relationships and to survive alone in a culture in which it is in many ways still very difficult to be a woman.

Some of the young people from The Rose Sisters' Children's Parliaments

St Antony’s Foundlings and the Rose Sisters are making real change every single day, with very little resources and with very little outside support. We at the Kanji Project, and our partners in Enfants de Kanji in France, provide what we can to keep these programmes running, but with what is frankly very minimal financial backing, these amazing individuals are not only educating young people and advocating for those who need support, but they are changing the lives of thousands of people across the district.

Every student that attends St Antony’s or participates in the village children’s parliaments, every girl that gets a second chance at Shanti Lumin, and every disabled child at the Sunshine School and adult supported by the Rose Sisters is exposed to new possibilities and a brighter future thanks to a handful of inspirational, humble, and hardworking people.

Community-led projects like these are not just helping young and disadvantaged people. They are building the future. Life in Tamil Nadu has its challenges, and some of them are significant. Not least the environmental degradation, water shortages, government corruption and widespread poverty are all serious obstacles for the people of Thiruvannaamalai district to overcome, but with SAF and the Rose Sisters leading the charge to build a new generation of environmentally conscious, politically aware and compassionate citizens and community leaders, the future of the villages looks bright.

I was extremely fortunate to see first-hand the immeasurable impact that just one or two dedicated people can have on an entire community.

To Lourdusamy, Maria, all of the teachers and staff at St Antony’s and Shanti Lumin, the Rose Sisters and their supporting staff at the Sunshine School and in the villages, and to every single student and community member that welcomed me into their neighbourhoods and homes and told me their stories, I want to say thank you.

Henna drawings on the kindergarten children at St Antony's

It is tempting to see the current state of the world and think that positive change is impossible. What difference can one person really make? But one person can inspire many others, and with a little support that inspiration can build a community, and that community can build a movement. And that movement can change lives, change neighbourhoods, and eventually can change the world.

It was an honour to spend time with such incredible and dedicated people. It doesn’t take a million pounds to make a real difference. It takes compassion, it takes time, and it takes humanity.

This short introduction to my experience in Kanji cannot even scratch the surface of the amazing work being done by our fantastic partners in India. They are truly inspirational. We at The Kanji Project are just a tiny cog in the machine that truly changes lives across Tamil Nadu and is driven by local people working in very difficult circumstances. We want to be able to continue to support their projects as best we can, and for that we need your help. Please check out our website, follow us on Facebook, spread the word and if you can spare anything at all view our donations page (94% of all donations go directly to the projects supported in India). Thank you.

We Don't Have Time For This

Donald Trump and his supporters plunged to new depths yesterday in a show of racism in which the crowd targeted Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar with chants of “send her back” in a response to the war of words between Trump and the so-called “Squad” of progressive Democrats challenging his hateful rhetoric. What is chilling is not the ugly discourse that we have grown accustomed to from Trump over the past few years, but the zeal with which a room full of people took up the disgraceful chant.

Further evidence of America’s deadly slide towards fascism comes from reports that Trump’s approval rating rose amongst Republicans after a string of racist Tweets in which he told the “Squad” to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”. Every congresswoman he targeted in this Tweet was born in the US with the exception of Ilhan Omar, who has been a US citizen for 19 years, incidentally longer than Melania Trump. One wonders what could possibly cause Trump to believe that Omar, born in Mogadishu and a practicing Muslim, should leave the US whilst having no concerns about his white, European wife. One might even suspect that his obvious links to the increasingly vocal white supremacist movement in the US might potentially have something to do with it.

But this isn’t about Trump. This is about the fact that whilst many people have stated their support for Ilhan Omar and vehemently condemned the President’s words, many more actively and vocally support them. This is about the population of the most powerful country on Earth proudly embracing racism.

There are already plenty of people talking about the current state of populist politics not just in the US but across the world, and many concerned voices trying to halt the tide of fascism that is currently gripping democracies across the west. The potential catastrophe that such identity-based politics can cause should be clear enough to anyone with any basic knowledge of history. We’ve done this before, a million times.

But this time is different. Not because the hate and the vitriol are any worse than we’ve seen before (though we’re only starting our slide down the slippery slope, so we’ll see what happens), but because whilst humanity appears ready once again to duke it out over whether we really think fascism is bad or not, this time the hamster wheel we’re spinning on is heading towards a cliff edge.

As Trump spews his bile and is applauded for it, and Boris Johnson receives cheers for his bold assertion that “there will be clean water and adequate supplies of glucose” regardless of what kind of Brexit deal is pulled together, we teeter on the brink of a climate disaster from which we will be unlikely to recover.

As the Extinction Rebellion protests ramp up again around the world, and the School Strike for Climate marches continue, we are gently reminded of the IPCC report that gave us just twelve years to drastically overhaul our economies and social systems in order to prevent climate breakdown. After last month was declared the hottest June on record globally, it has now also emerged that July is on track to become the hottest month ever. A further “truly alarming” sign of the exponentially warming climate was discovered in an “unprecedented” lake formed from a melting glacier in the Alps, at an altitude of 11,000 feet. Climate conflict is already a reality, and we can expect it to get worse.

But rather than coming together to really try to fix this mess that we have caused, we’re descending back into playground politics that pits ordinary people against one another. As we strive to build a sustainable and peaceful new world, we are being dragged back down into the mud by a hateful belief system that refuses to die.

We can choose to follow the racist, misogynist, white supremacist President down a path of distraction and infighting until it’s too late to do anything about the biggest threat to humanity of our time. Or we can push back against this with everything we have right now and shut it down so we can get on with what needs to be done to tackle the climate crisis.

We know what the outcome of this is. We know that this abhorrent display puts everyone who participated firmly on the wrong side of history. We know that left unchecked these words will turn to actions, and that people will be hurt and that people will die. We know that we must fight back against this aggression everywhere in order to prevent the worst of our history repeating itself. Those of us who stand with Ilhan Omar know that we are right.

Now more than ever, we need to recognise the humanity and the commonality between each and every one of us, and resolve to leave that which divides us in the past where it belongs.

We don’t have time for this shit.

The Urban Refugee and the Future of Humanitarianism

When you picture a refugee, what do you see?

For those of us fortunate enough to have no first-hand experience of conflict or displacement, it is likely that we imagine a person in a camp, surrounded by white tents emblazoned with UNHCR logos. That camp is probably in a rural area and staffed by international humanitarian aid workers unloading trucks bearing the Red Cross Red Crescent emblem.

These may be the images that most regularly make our television screens, but they are far from representative of the experience of most refugees or internally displaced people (IDPs). In fact, the majority of displaced people move to cities: over 60 per cent of the world’s 19.5 million refugees, and 80 per cent of the 34 million IDPs, live in urban environments rather than in formal camps. This is important because it fundamentally changes the shape of the challenge to be overcome in supporting refugees and host countries at a time when forced displacements have reached a record high globally.

In many ways, the resettlement of forcibly displaced people to cities is a far preferable alternative to the rural camp context. Refugee camps are by definition supposedly temporary settlements, and thus are constructed and managed through the UNHCR’s protection mandate, meaning that they are not designed to facilitate the development of livelihoods for their inhabitants, but rather work through the provision of humanitarian aid. For short term support this may be a reasonable solution, but the reality is that in protracted crises refugees often remain unable to return home for years or even decades. Long-term dependency on aid (not to mention the mental health effects of prolonged uncertainty associated with long-term encampment) can have detrimental effects on an individual’s capacity to recover from trauma.

Resettlement in cities, by contrast, not only offers a second chance for the displaced to rebuild their lives, but can actually benefit the host community with an influx of new skills, an economic boost, and new cultural diversity. However, as we have seen in the ugly discourse surrounding the refugee “crisis” around Europe and the US, urban resettlement also has the potential to inflame intergroup tensions.

These issues have caused serious concern in western countries that have a good capacity to cope with a sudden influx of migrants and refugees, and who have taken in comparatively far fewer people than other, less well-equipped states. At the end of 2017, the UK hosted 127,837 refugees, equalling one quarter of a percent of our population. In comparison, Turkey, which hosts more refugees than any other country, is currently home to 3.7 million Syrian refugees, over 35 times more than the UK and just less than 5% of their population. 95% of those refugees live in urban centres rather than camps, with some towns near the Syrian border now hosting more refugees than Turkish citizens.

Whilst Turkey tops the charts of refugee-hosting countries, Pakistan, Uganda, Sudan, and Germany all support more than 1 million cross-border refugees, as well as many more IDPs. This accounts for a massive number of displaced people moving into new areas, either within or across borders, and trying to find their place in a new home surrounded by host communities who are willing to provide varying levels of support for them. At the state and international levels, these people are less visible and less easily supported, as they work alongside and live with the host community. In Europe, as politicians scramble to develop a coherent strategy to tackle the influx of refugees and migrants, those that have arrived and achieved asylum status are already making their own way – finding work, homes, relationships and hobbies within their new communities, to varying degrees of success.

This makes cities the new frontline of humanitarianism. The refugee camp supported by international aid is becoming obsolete as global humanitarian needs outweigh the capacity of the aid sector to respond. As conflict, economic turmoil, and climate change forces more and more people away from their homes towards bigger cities across the world, the needs of the displaced are becoming more closely associated with the needs of everyone. This blurs the line between humanitarianism and development, and means we need to look differently at how to address the key challenges of poverty, civil unrest, and migration in the 21^st century.

It also means that you do not need to be an aid worker or a diplomat to support those affected by conflict, disasters, or economic privation across the globe. More now than ever, global issues can have local solutions.

People who have been displaced have not just lost their homes and livelihoods, but their communities and support networks. Life in camps is not conducive to developing a home that can facilitate human connection and development. But life in cities absolutely can be. The new urban humanitarianism poses many new challenges and questions to consider in global development, but it also provides many new opportunities to better the lives of not just those affected by disaster, but of those who welcome them to their new homes.

People work best when we work together.

Support housing and fostering of refugees in the UK. Volunteer with any number of organisations who support refugee integration. Raise awareness and share the facts about displacement. There are a million ways you can do your bit to support those in need globally, from wherever you are.

Humanitarianism isn’t just for humanitarians anymore.

The future is urban.

The future is all of us.

ODI are hosting a free event and webinar on the 24th July to discuss the urban future of humanitarian action and what it might mean for the sector. You can register for free to attend or watch online here.

The People and the Powerful in the Age of Climate Apartheid

The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, has warned of a “climate apartheid” if more is not done to mitigate the potentially disastrous effects of climate change. Following the recent IPCC report that stressed the immediacy with which we must act in order to prevent an irreversible global temperature rise, giving just 12 years to avert a global crisis, Alston’s warnings assert that current actions taken by the UN are “patently inadequate” and will lead to a scenario where the rich pay to escape the worst consequences of a changing climate, "while the rest of the world is left to suffer".

The poorest are undoubtedly already suffering the worst consequences of climate change. Small island developing states (SIDS) are facing existential threats from rising sea levels. More than 1.3 billion people globally live in deteriorating agricultural land, leading to year-on-year poverty increases in areas set to suffer the most in the coming decades. In many cases, natural events are even used as a catalyst to further marginalise the poorest in society, as in the government-led enforced exile of families living in informal settlements in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan.

Perhaps the best example of this gulf of consequence between the rich and poor was seen in the Caribbean following Hurricanes Irma and Maria of late 2017. In Puerto Rico, devastated by Maria and “forgotten” by US and international aid agencies, the poverty-stricken population continues its limp towards recovery. Meanwhile, as early as April 2018, just 7 months after the two 1-in-100-year hurricanes, 5-star resorts across the Caribbean were boasting of their newly renovated and upgraded hotels, largely paid for by insurance money following the damage of the hurricane season and attracting more tourist money to line the pockets of their owners.

It may seem obvious that those with the resources to prepare for the worst will weather the storm better than those without. But it would appear that if you collect enough resources and garner enough power, you do not even have to pay to mitigate your own risks. Following Hurricane Harvey, which caused almost unprecedented damage to the state of Texas, big oil firms successfully lobbied for a $3.9 billion grant from the US government’s public funds for three storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities. The total cost of Harvey was estimated at $125 billion, with 13 million people affected and a dramatic rise in Texans claiming unemployment benefit due to job loss following the disaster, as well as the closure of several dozen schools for over a month while they waited for repairs. That same year, Exxon Mobil alone reported profits of $6.2 billion, and Chevron of $4 billion, which begs the question of why public funding was needed to cover the cost of a storm barrier that would not actually protect those living in the Harvey-affected area.

The potential cascade effects of not tackling the climate emergency are equally chilling. Worsening violence between farmer and herder groups in rural Nigeria as a result of land degradation is already sending shockwaves through the country and the wider world, and increasing evidence suggests that worsening climate conditions will increase the likelihood of outbreaks of identity-based violence (IBV) and conflict. Alongside climate vulnerability, those in poverty are also often the most likely to suffer the consequences of IBV. A less predictable climate also has detrimental health effects, leading to increasing droughts (which also disproportionately affect the poor), and greater chance of disease outbreak (which, you’ve guessed it, has a greater impact on poor people).

Income inequality has risen dramatically between 1980 and today, with the top 1% richest individuals in the world capturing twice as much growth as the bottom 50% since 1980. Those top 1% include the board members of Big Oil companies and the owners of luxury hotel chains like those in the Caribbean, who have their disaster risk reduction costs paid for by insurance companies, tourists, and taxpayers. The bottom 50%, numbering nearly 4 billion people, includes the one-third of the global population who live in what the UN terms “slum conditions” and are not only the most likely to face total destruction of their property in the event of an extreme natural event, but are also least-likely to own the land on which their house was built and therefore to be forcibly relocated after the dust settles. Forced migration in the context of economic instability is likely to result in rising identity-based tension that often spills over into violence.

So Big Oil keeps pumping unimpeded, directly contributing to the climate crisis which we all face, and the poor die.

Philip Alston’s report reinforces the growing “No Natural Disasters” movement, which aims to raise awareness of the human-made root causes of disasters. According to their website, “a hazard will only become a disaster should it impact the workings of a society or community”, and thus it is the decisions and make-up of the society that turn a natural hazard event into a disaster. Christian Aid explained the reality of “natural” disasters succinctly in a 2005 report: “In San Francisco, where tall buildings stand on rollers that move with the tremors, the last major earthquake caused the deaths of 62 people. In Turkey, an earthquake of similar magnitude killed 17,000”. Both are tragedies, but which would we qualify as a disaster?

How we plan our communities, how we build our structures, how we educate people on risks and vulnerabilities, how quickly and effectively we respond when a hazard occurs, and how we channel funding for disaster mitigation and response, drastically influences the outcome of any singular event. With the growing threat of climate change making life far more unpredictable and dangerous for every single one of us, we need to examine the role that we play in our own insecurity.

People are increasingly aware of the threat that climate change poses. The global School Strike for Climate movement, the Extinction Rebellion protests, and movements such as #NoNaturalDisasters, all serve to educate and empower ordinary people to make a change.

It was the power of ordinary people that ended apartheid in South Africa after decades of destructive and inhumane leadership that served only the interests of the powerful.

The power of ordinary people can do the same for the climate apartheid.

Oxfam, Amnesty, and a Collective Crisis of Conscience

The recent Charity Commission report into Oxfam’s mismanagement of serious sexual misconduct by its staff in Haiti highlighted a "culture of poor behaviour" in one of the UK’s leading humanitarian organisations. This poor behaviour included covering up allegations of abuse and a failure to adequately investigate claims that Haiti country-director Roland van Hauwermeiren had been using prostitutes as young as 12 years old throughout Oxfam’s response to the 2010 earthquake. In response to the report, the UK government has now given Oxfam three weeks to clean up its act, or to risk losing hundreds of millions of pounds of funding in programmes.

This catastrophic failure of safeguarding procedures calls into question not just Oxfam’s policies and processes, but those of the entire international humanitarian sector. Arriving on the heels of an independent report undertaken into the “toxic” workplace culture of Amnesty International following the suicide of two employees in 2018,  and the Save the Children sexual harassment scandal in which 1 in 5 staff members reported workplace harassment or discrimination in the previous three years, this report added fuel to the fire of a burgeoning distrust of the humanitarian sector more generally. For a system that aims to uphold human rights and international law, such failures do more than damage an individual’s or organisation’s reputation; they threaten the whole system’s capacity to function.

The Overseas Development Institute hosted an event on the 11^th of June 2019, coincidentally the day of the release of the Charity Commission report on Oxfam, in which the future of the humanitarian system was discussed. Representatives from several big players in the humanitarian sphere, including Mercy Corps, Solidarités International, and Christian Aid, were to debate the merits of merging International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) in order to streamline international aid. The conversation quickly transitioned towards the wider issue of legitimacy in the humanitarian sphere.  

As these recent damning reports against massive global organisations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Save the Children highlight, a scandal in one place can severely damage effectiveness across the entire programme. In the wake of the scandal, Oxfam immediately saw a drop of 7,000 regular public donors, whilst Save the Children saw revenues drop from £406m in 2017 to £303m in 2018. But more than any one organisation, this issue weakens trust in the entire system.

Large INGOs are no strangers to controversy, alternately being accused of cultural imperialism and promoting neoliberalism in developing countries, all whilst impeding development in local actors by preventing growth of local economies and skills. Meanwhile, ODA and government-led agencies are contributing to the politicisation of aid, detracting from the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality that supposedly guide the sector. As a result, developing countries are increasingly turning their backs on the international humanitarian system.

But it doesn’t need to be like this.

In large part, the current crisis in the sector has been caused by the hubris of some of the big “celebrity” INGOs, whose focus has drifted away from the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid towards their own reputations. This, they might argue, is out of necessity. Oxfam executives might look to justify ignoring allegations of sexual misconduct if the revelation that they were true would prevent the continuation of the other good work being done in the country. For an organisation that requires access to a community of people in need, a good reputation is everything. But a good reputation cannot come at the cost of the principle of “do no harm”. When humanitarian agencies are covering up the exploitation and abuse of local populations, or managers are pushing workers to breaking point in order to achieve results, we must acknowledge that the ends no longer justify the means.

As Nasra Ismail, Acting Director of a Somalian NGO Consortium, pointed out in the debate at ODI, some of the brightest NGOs, that produce the best results, are largely invisible in the field. She argues that for the most part, this is because effective INGOs work extensively through local networks and smaller NGOs that are already embedded in the communities they serve. These individuals and groups are far better equipped to deal with the unique complications of their own situation, especially when guided by the backing and technical knowledge of an effective global partner.

Localisation of humanitarian action has the dual benefit of improving the actual work itself – by reinforcing local skills, building on local knowledge, and allowing international actors to learn from traditional and local methods – and reducing the power imbalance between international and local people that can breed misconduct. A strong, well-vetted partnership empowers community members to lead their own response and reduces the capacity for international aid workers to exert undue influence over the affected population. Having multiple organisations involved in the process also limits the opportunity to cover up a case of abuse or exploitation, as was the case with Oxfam in Haiti, because partner agencies can provide oversight of each other’s actions.

The humanitarian system must always make sure that humans are put first in its priorities. Competition for funding, positive headlines, and goodwill has led some of the larger NGOs to lose their way in this regard.

As with many issues facing humanitarian crises globally, the answer is local.