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.

UPDATED: Tufts/HFP: Humanitarian Horizons - a practitioners guide to the future

UPDATED 18.02.10: IRIN highlights guidance on responding to urban emergencies:
Other than urban earthquake preparedness, humanitarian agencies have not yet focused on emergency response in urban centres. The authors of the guide offer tips to humanitarian agencies in this new environment:

1) Programming has to shift from being rural-focused, so humanitarians will now have to reach out to urban planners for effective urban programming

2) Build a knowledge base identifying the differences between urban and rural programmes

3) Re-identify and reprioritize groups most at risk

4) Use of technologies such as cell phone banking and microcredit to deliver aid in an urban context

5) Ensure the creation of better linkages between city and town authorities, and strengthen delivery systems

The blurb:

The Guide "is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.

The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. Launched in October 2008, the project builds on HFP's analyses of changing dimensions of future crisis drivers, and makes more practical the exploratory futures research conducted under the Feinstein Center's 2004 Ambiguity and Change project.'

Read on! at the Tufts website.

Tufts: Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners’ Guide to the Future

The Guide merges the projections of global change highlighted by four earlier research papers, with the futures perspectives of operational agencies. The result is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.

Download the Guide from the Tufts website.

UPDATED for 2010: Humanitarian trends and futures

The Ministry of Defence's Global Strategic Trends Programme has published their biannual survey. It's pretty pessimistic stuff, but there's a good executive summary.

For completeness, here's last year's list of trend-scanning papers and places that caught our eye:

• The Sigma Scan - 'evidence of the future'
• Outsights on the 21 drivers for the 21st century
• US Global trends report
• Jeffrey Sachs in the Guardian on the water wars
• Humanitarian Futures Project Global Trends Workbook 2008
• Humanitarian trends and dilemmas: Tony Vaux' article in Development in Practice