By Omar H Amach

BANGKOK, 12 December 2019 - In many crisis settings, emergency response has been seen to be in a holding pattern, responding year on-year to the same needs without promoting lasting positive change in people’s lives. Yet humanitarian needs are expected to grow in the coming years as climate change is causing an increase in the intensity and frequency of climate-related hazards.

According to a recent report by Oxfam, climate-fuelled disasters were the number one driver of internal displacement over the last decade. Eighty percent of those displaced live in Asia, which has many cities and megacities in low-lying coastal areas. Just in the last year, 3.5 million people in Bangladesh and India were displaced by Cyclone Fani and 3.8 million were displaced by extreme weather in China.

In light of this, there is a clear need for increased collaboration between humanitarian actors and disaster risk reduction specialists to address underlying vulnerabilities and lay the foundation for sustainable development. Disaster risk reduction straddles both development and humanitarian action.

“If we don’t do better disaster risk management, we will have to invest a lot more in response, recovery and reconstruction,” said Ms Indu Ghimire, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Home Affairs in Nepal.

This need was the rationale for a multi-phase initiative launched by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) to provide direction and identify entry points for enhanced integration of DRR into humanitarian programming in both recurrent and protracted crisis settings.

“UNDRR has brought this discussion at the right time; it is important that we reduce humanitarian crises with some integrated action so that people can cope, build their resilience and live peacefully with the required development prospect for themselves and the next generation to come,” said Mr Mohammad Qaseem Haidari, Deputy Minister of the Ministry for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Affairs in Afghanistan.

To scale up regional experiences to the global level, UNDRR’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific organized today a regional consultative workshop that brought together 46 representatives from government, the UN system, humanitarian agencies, development partners, and non-governmental organizations.