WEF proposes 'new vulnerability and protection business model'

From the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Humanitarian Assistance:

The first requirement of this new business model is a comprehensive risk framework. We often find ourselves having to engage in an enterprise of risk management with incomplete information about how things will unfold. Such uncertainties are only being exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. We must plan to be ready for events for which we cannot plan.
The second requirement is to rework the balance between crisis response and the upstream and downstream issues of prevention and recovery. More resources are needed both to reduce risk in the first place, and reduce the risk of relapse after a crisis occurs.

The default mode of the current humanitarian model in general is external assistance; the default mode of a new vulnerability and protection model should be self-reliance. The third requirement of this new model is to enhance the capacities, readiness and resilience of exposed societies so they can better handle extreme events. Ensuring that civil society and local communities are involved will not only make response efforts faster, but more efficient as their involvement will make it possible to identify and meet the diverse needs of various groups in affected communities, groups differentiated, for example, by gender, age, and social class.

The fourth requirement is to engage the private sector more fully, not just as a source of donations but also as a source of key skills and technologies, during and after crises. We commend the World Economic Forum’s initiative on the private sector in humanitarian relief as well as other efforts to incentivise appropriate and beneficial private-sector investments in risky regions.

The fifth requirement of the business model is to link the humanitarian concern to broader development issues, strengthening social safety nets and supporting resilience. This requirement will necessitate unprecedented collaboration between humanitarian and development actors and interests.

Finally, as cross-border challenges will grow, regional organisations backed by the UN will need to be able to mediate and mitigate these problems as they arise.

Download the full report.

Resilient global institutions

A new report, 'Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalisation: Risk, Resilience and International Order', by Alex Evans and David Stevens of Global Dashboard for the Brookings Institute, has been highlighted by the Economist:

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure. How will that change politics?

...what is needed is not merely institutional tinkering but a different frame of mind. Governments, they say, should think more in terms of reducing risk and increasing resilience to shocks than about boosting sovereign power. This is because they think power may not be the best way for states to defend themselves against a new kind of threat: the sort that comes not from other states but networks of states and non-state actors, or from the unintended consequences of global flows of finance, technology and so on.

The report's conclusions are summarised in a blog post by Alex:

Creating new analytical mechanisms for creating shared awareness about shared risks. E.g. the IPCC provides crucial analysis of the problem of climate change – but there’s no equivalent on the solution.

Improving the ‘bandwidth’ of the G20. E.g. by strengthening Sherpa mechanisms, and building links between the G20 and formal institutions, thus improving the range of policy options going to heads.

Setting up a ‘red team’ in the international system that has the job of exploring risks and challenging policymakers on whether enough is being done to manage them – similar to the Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency in the US, which has the job of “preventing surprise”.

Changing how governments organize and deliver foreign policy. We argue that all governments will need to spend more money on managing global risks, and do more to integrate the different elements of foreign policy (aid, diplomacy, military).

Read more on Global Dashboard.

Alertnet: Kenyans insured for herd losses in drought via satellite images

Pastoralists would get automatic payments for losses if satellite images of the region show vegetation fades from green -- shades of brown will gauge the severity of drought.

The use of satellites bypasses the traditional, more costly system under which insurers check reported livestock deaths before making payouts. That is almost impossible to judge in herds that wander over huge areas.

Still, risks include that some herders suffer bigger than predicted losses during droughts. In other cases, some herders might get payments when their animals have all survived.

Read more on Alertnet.

VOICE Out Loud newsletter: DRR and climate change adaptation

From the devastation caused by violent cyclones to displacement as a drought survival mechanism, climate change together with vulnerability severely impacts on people’s survival. Humanitarian actors are the first responders to the growing needs created by natural disasters. These new challenges might bring about a need to change the way they work, engaging more in prevention to mitigate the need for response. From different angles, DRR and CCA both aim at reducing people’s vulnerability to hazards. However, there remains a linkage and coordination gap between the two approaches, including at the European Union level. Humanitarian experience, lessons learnt and best practices in DRR offer a professional perspective on how to bridge that gap. One thing is clear: the people at risk of hazards need to be at the heart of policy and programming decision making processes. We therefore complete our NGO overview of DRR and CCA issues by a unique perspective on DRR at community level in the South by the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Read more on Reliefweb.

Maps: climate injustice and the first humanitarian map to really help aid workers

Here are a few interesting updates from the mapping department:

The Global Dashboard posted two interesting maps offering a view on the world from the perspective of climate change. They show the countries' size according to their fossil-fuel carbon-dioxide emissions and the burden they are carrying due to climate change. Note the startling contrast between 'the West' and Africa-Asia! Both maps come from a recent report of the World Population Fund (UNFPA) on women, population and climate change.

The Aid Worker Daily also posted about the release of the first interactive map that allows everybody to update its contents. This way aid workers have an excellent up to date account of the site they're working in (c.q. Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya). To be expanded soon to other (urban) areas, hopefully!

AlertNet: A humanitarian's guide to Copenhagen

In attendance of next week's COP 15, AlertNet published a list of humanitarian focal points for Copenhagen. Although not party to the actual negotiations, aid agencies will try to influence the negotiations with presentations on the sidelines of the conference. In so doing, they will provide the negotiators with the humanitarian story of climate change.

A few of the points discussed:

• How much money will be available to help communities adapt to an increasingly erratic climate?
• How will money be channelled to affected countries or communities?
• How do you define who is most vulnerable to climate change?
• Will forest-dwelling communities receive benefits from REDD?
• What about the rights of people displaced by increasing and more intense natural disasters?
• Will food security and agriculture get their due?
• Is anyone paying attention to protecting people's health?

FIC + HFP Humanitarian Horizons: tackling future challenges

The Feinstein International Center (FIC) of Tufts University and the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) of King's College London initiated a joint project called Humanitarian Horizons. This project, launched in October 2008, focuses both on HFP's analyses of changing dimensions of future crisis drivers and on making more practical the exploratory futures research of FIC's Ambiguity and Change project. So far four papers by leading experts have been released, which will be incorporated into a "Practitioners' Guide to the Future", to be published in December 2009.

The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector to prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. The first step in this process is the exploration of four futures-related drivers widely expected to have an impact on humanitarian crises and responses to them. These four drivers are:

• climate change;
• globalization;
• major demographic shifts;
• drivers internal to the humanitarian community, e.g. technological advances, the "shrinking" of humanitarian space, new actors, changing financing structures and the like.

Change.org: Climate Change and Conflict

A few weeks back there was a world wide Climate Change Blog Action Day, organised by Change.org. Here are a few links that Change.org's Humanitarian Relief blogger Michael Bear gathered together, all relating to the causal impact of climate change on conflict:

• Conflict in the Age of Climate Change (from the Stop Genocide blog)
• A brief history of climate change and conflict (from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists)
• Climate change and Conflict (International Crisis Group)
• a map of countries most at risk from violence resulting from climate change (International Alert)

Michael notes:

[T]he issue isn't one of surviving an especially fierce rain or harsh winter, but the cumulative effects of many fierce rains and many harsh winters. Next, climate change alone won't cause conflict but, along with other factors, will contribute to and shape it. It's one variable among many others, such as cultural, economic, or demographic factors. Last, unless a society learns to adapt to sustained climate change, its wealth will decline and its social fabric will weaken with each passing year. But even if a society faces these environmental challenges, a trigger--such as an assassination, extreme natural event, or random act of group violence--is usually required to ignite violent conflict.

Guardian: GM crops to save Africa from disaster?

In a new scientific paper, professor Sir Gordon Conway predicts a catastrophic increase of food shortages in Africa, as a result of the devastating impact of climate change on the continent - the Guardian reported. Africa already suffers to a greater extent than the rest of the world from the effects of climate change, such as rising temperature, more droughts, floods and storm surges.

Conway predicts hunger on the continent could increase dramatically in the short term as droughts and desertification increase, and climate change affects water supplies. "Projected reductions in crop yields could be as much as 50% by 2020 and 90% by 2100," the paper says.

"In certain circumstances we will need GM crops because we wont be able to find the gene naturally. GM may be the speediest and most efficient way to increase yields. Drought tolerance is governed by a range of genes. It is a big problem for breeders of [both] GM and ordinary plants."

Sir Gordon argues that more research into climate change needs to be done. Whereas forecasts all predict increasingly extreme weather conditions, their exact manifestation remains uncertain.

CRED Crunch Newsletter Nov 09: major losses in Asia and S-America C

The November 2009 newsletter from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) provides a balanced perspective on disaster data from the first semester of 2009.

Although global disaster impact figures in the first half of the year 2009 appeared relatively low compared to the 1999-2008 yearly average, many countries, mostly in Asia and South America, suffered major losses. [...]

The first half of 2009 underlines societies’ vulnerability to climate-related and geophysical disasters. A long road remains to better protect the vulnerable and developing societies.

Alertnet: Global warming created new (and worse) type of El Niño

Reuters reported on the publication in the most recent issue of Nature of research that assesses the impact of global warming on El Niño in Australia and India:

Global warming may have spawned a new type of El Nino in the central Pacific and this could worsen the droughts in Australia and India, a new study by researchers in South Korea and the United States has found.

While the conventional El Nino is a warm body of water stretching across the tropical Eastern Pacific, this new El Nino is a horseshoe-shaped region of warm ocean in the central Pacific flanked by unusually cooler waters, they wrote in a paper published in the latest issue of Nature.

IRIN: A rough guide to climate change in Africa

The World Economic and Social Survey (WESS), published annually by the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs, has devoted its 2009 issue to climate change. It includes an accessible, if unsettling, guide to some of the major impacts of climate change in various African countries, based on the IPCC's reports. Some headlines after the jump, or read more and download the full report from IRIN.

Some headlines:

Food security

East Africa

Rainfall is expected to increase in some parts of the region. The loss of about 20 percent of plant and animal life in Lake Tanganyika is projected, with a 30 percent decrease in fish yields. In Kenya a one-metre rise in the sea level could affect the production of mangoes, cashew nuts and coconuts, causing losses of almost US$500 million a year. On the plus side, in parts of the Ethiopian highlands a combination of higher temperatures and better rainfall may lengthen the growing season.

Southern Africa

More frequent El Niño conditions - in which sea surface temperatures become warmer across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean - could disrupt rains, bringing a notable drop in maize production. On the other hand, growing seasons may lengthen in parts of Southern Africa, for example Mozambique, owing to a combination of increased temperature and higher rainfall. South Africa: In Africa's major grain producer net revenues from crops could shrink by up to 90 percent by 2100.

Water resources

East and West Africa

Rainfall is likely to increase in these regions, easing droughts in the east of the continent but bringing more frequent floods in the west.

Southern Africa

Large areas of the region are already experiencing water shortages, or are arid and trying to prevent encroaching desertification, so there is likely to be a greater number of people living with water stress by 2055 as rainfall becomes more erratic or declines.

Health

West Africa

Good news! By 2050 and beyond, a large part of the western Sahel will probably become unsuitable for malaria transmission.

East Africa

Based on parasite survey data, the previously malaria-free highland areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi could experience modest incursions of malaria by the 2050s, with conditions for transmission becoming highly suitable by 2080s. In central Somalia, areas that now have low rates of malaria could develop high prevalence of the disease. Rift Valley fever epidemics - evident during the 1997-1998 El Niño event in East Africa and associated with flooding - could become more frequent and widespread as El Niño events increase.

Southern Africa

More areas are likely to become more suitable for malaria, with a southward expansion of the transmission zone into Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Running out of/on water?!

Several messages in the past week have highlighted the various ways in which water is becoming more and more a challenge in the lives of disaster-afflicted populations.
In Kenya, for example, the first climate change refugees have given up their herder life styles to settle down to make charcoal or sell firewood. Droughts in the country have gone up from once every decade up to almost every year. This gives nomades too little time to recover from losses suffered. In addition to the greater scarcity in drinking water, drought-induced hunger is more and more becoming a security concern in the country as well, with higher levels of violence reported.
In a similar vein, Timor Leste President Ramos-Horta warns for land-and-water wars in the near future, unless more attention will be paid to the rural areas that are more and more affected by the disastrous impacts of climate change.
On the other hand, several countries, notably in the Caribbean area, are hit by hurricanes and floods with greater intensity every year, said John Holmes, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. If no drastic reduction in carbon house emissions is negotiated at Copenhagen in December, he warns, these extreme water conditions (both the lack and abundance of it) will lead to unprecedented population movements, with high potential for conflict.
In a response to these threats, Reuters reports,

A 155-nation conference in Geneva agreed on a plan to improve climate information to help people cope with ever more droughts, floods, sandstorms and rising sea levels projected this century. The plan for a "Global Framework for Climate Services" includes the appointment of a task force of high-level, independent advisors within four months.

The panel's report is expected in twelve months, with recommendations on among others disaster risks, human health, transport and tourism, managing water, energy and securing food supplies.

IRIN: UNEP report says HIV/AIDS and climate change should join forces

A new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and UNAIDS, IRIN reports, seeks to join the global activist forces in the fight against climate change and HIV/AIDS. So far, both threats have known separate responses, but climate change may very well have many impacts that could worsen the HIV/AIDS situation in the developing world.

The biggest threat - already present in many parts of the world - is food insecurity caused by more intense and widespread droughts, and other extreme weather events such as flooding.

The authors also speculate that competition for increasingly scarce resources brought on by climate change, such as water and grazing, may heighten the risk of conflict and migration, and deepen gender and social inequities - all factors with the potential to fuel the spread of HIV.

AlertNet: Africa wants $67 bln per year to compensate global warming

As if they were picking up last week's call to invest in developing countries to combat climate change, African leaders will most likely ask at the Copenhagen climate change negotiations this December $67 billion per year from 2020 onwards to compensate for damages that Africa suffers from the developed world's induced climate change -AlertNet reported.

Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked. "This is the time for Africa to aggressively engage to ensure that climate change is effectively addressed," Jean Ping, chairman of the AU Commission, told delegates.

AlertNet: investing in developing world better for climate change than cutting emissions

AlertNet reported about a study commissioned by Bjorn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, that revealed the huge benefits of investing in adaptation to climate change in the developing world. In fact, the study claims that

A total of $10 trillion spent on adaptation, ranging from research into drought-resistant crops to measures to limit a spread of diseases such as malaria, would provide $16 trillion of economic benefits over the coming century.

The effects of investing in climate change adaptation in the developing world would be much higher, economically spoken, than purely cutting carbon emissions. A combination of both, however, would result in the highest benefits. Up for discussion in Copenhagen this December!

AlertNet: Farmers to help combat climate change

A new study from the World Agroforesty Centre in Nairobi revealed that farming and forestry are not mutually exclusive, AlertNet reported. This is very important news in the ligtht of the upcoming climate change negotiations to be held in Copenhagen this December. The report showed that on an area of agricultural land twice the size of the amazon, 10% was covered with trees - which would amount to the definition of a 'forest' used by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation, if it weren't for the fact that it is located on farmland. If farmer's role in combating deforestation would be acknowledged, the report claims that farmers could cover up to 20% of their land with trees.

The report said that farmers keep or plant trees for uses such as production of fruit, nuts, medicines, fuel, building materials, gums or resins. Trees also provide shade for crops, work as windbreaks, boundary markers or to help avert erosion. And trees are often hardier than crops or livestock so can be a backup for farmers on marginal land in hard times.

POSTonline: hurricanes at a 1000 year high

The POSTonline reported on a new independent study from Pennsylvania State University that the last decade has seen more hurricanes than any similar period ever before - that is, up to a 1000 years back.

The research suggests that warmer temperatures produce more storm activity - meaning that coming climate change could increase the frequency and severity of hurricane activity.

There's also a possibility that climate change could alter the frequency of El Niño, which blunts hurricane activity, and counteract the effects of future ocean warming.

IDS Bulletin: Climate change meets urban challenges

A very interesting article appeared in last year's IDS Bulletin on climate change. In this article, David Dodman and David Satterthwaite analyse Institutional Capacity, Climate Change Adaptation and the Urban Poor. The analysis the authors present is highly relevant as it focuses on two key issues of BRC policies - climate change and urbanisation.
Next to the impact climate change can have on the urban poor, the authors discuss mainly how authorities can and should respond to the problem. There are also some specific suggestions for international organisations and NGOs. Humanitarian organisations can

• play important roles in climate change adaptation at the urban scale
• provide appropriate sectoral funding (e.g. for urban infrastructure to reduce climate change vulnerability)
• support the development of necessary technical and regulatory capacity
• support adaptation activities directly

IDS: access knowledge (no, not your own) for free!

The Institute for Development Studies celebrates the 40th birthday of its Bulletin by giving everybody free access to all their issues (for a limited period of 40 days).

Flagging up some interseting issues:

• The September 2009 issue on the impact of the global financial crisis on developing countries
  
• The July 2009 issue on combating chronic malnutrition in India
• The September 2008 issue on climate change adaptation (and the poor)