March 31, 2014

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in collaboration with DARA, has launched its 2014 Flagship Policy Report Saving Lives Today and Tomorrow: Managing the Risk of Humanitarian Crises in New York City today. The report calls for aid groups and donors to begin the shift away from responding to crises in a purely reactive manner and to instead adopt an approach that proactively anticipates and prevents crisis through effective risk management.

Overview

Over the past decade, the number of people affected by humanitarian crises has almost doubled. Meanwhile, funding requirements have more than trebled to 12.9 billion a year, an increase of 430% between 2004 and 2013. The rising scale of crises, our collective inability to resolve protracted disasters, and the interplay of new global challenges – such as water scarcity, climate change, food price volatility and rapid urbanisation – have led to a global deficit in the operational and financial capacity of governments and humanitarian organisations to respond. Humanitarian organisations are being asked to respond in more places, for longer periods of time, and at greater cost than ever before. These trends have created an overwhelming need for enhanced investment in risk mitigation and crisis management, but existing mechanisms are not capacitated or structured to respond.

This gap is leaving millions vulnerable to predictable, and in some cases preventable, humanitarian crises.

Key findings

• Funding for disaster risk reduction is woefully inadequate.
• Risk-management and prevention are more cost-effective than response.
• Humanitarian leaders and organizations are ill-equipped to use risk analysis to make decisions.

Why is this report important?

Shifting to a more anticipatory approach could have dramatic results, including a reduction, and in some cases a prevention, of certain crises; greater cost-effectiveness than a purely response driven approach; greater contribution to development outcomes; and empowerment of vulnerable communities through capacity building and social-protection measures.

Why now?

The world is gearing up to create a new global development framework after 2015, a new agreement to replace the Hyogo Framework for Action on Disaster Risk Reduction in 2015 and the World Humanitarian Summit is scheduled for 2016, in which managing risk will be one of the four main themes. The months ahead provide a once in a generation opportunity to shape the international system and to embed disaster risk management in humanitarian response and prevention.

Read Highlights and Overview of the report

Read the full report