Mainstreaming a climate, peace and security approach: Challenges and entry points for humanitarian action
Climate change is a top driver of humanitarian need and human suffering, particularly for the poorest countries. Its impacts threaten to deepen already wide inequalities, resulting in consequences felt by the world at large, including instability, violence and displacement. For humanitarian actors, this translates into a need for increased capacity to understand climate and environmental risks and develop evidence-based solutions at local, national and international levels, to continue delivering on their mandates and operations, while at the same time also contributing to building resilience.
Therefore, humanitarians are confronted with the need for short-term action, while ensuring long-term positive impacts – but how to combine reaction with prevention? Addressing climate and environmental change may hold the key to tackling both short and long-term challenges at once. The Climate, Peace and Security (CPS) agenda has advanced rapidly in recent years, due to growing evidence on how these areas are deeply interconnected, so that one-dimensional interventions fail to bring long-term positive results. There have been significant attempts at integrated CPS approaches in climate, development and peacebuilding work. Now there is an urgent need for humanitarian action to follow through, to increase effectiveness and do no harm, while strengthening prevention efforts. The question is how.
Reflecting the increasing recognition across the humanitarian community of the need to scale up its action and adapt its responses to the impacts of climate change, the Climate Crisis was one of nine areas of Common Concern (AOCC) for inter-network collaboration of the Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week (HNPW) 2024. HNPW provides a unique forum for humanitarian networks and partnerships to meet and address key humanitarian issues. In its latest edition, which took place in Geneva and online from 29 April to 10 May 2024, more than 7,800 registered participants from the United Nations (UN), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Member States, the private sector, the military, academia and beyond gathered to discuss and solve common challenges in humanitarian affairs.
