13 October is International Day for Disaster Reduction. Children and adults around the world will be ‘Stepping Up’ for disaster risk reduction, and we’ll be there with them!
We saw this disaster coming as early as last year. There’s a warning system in place, fed by satellite imagery, rainfall measurements and crop growth figures. Food prices have been rising for years. Save the Children was already trucking in emergency water supplies in February. But the fate of many of the children now malnourished was already sealed. We have a broken humanitarian system based on responding, not preventing.
It’s a collective failure. Aid agencies go to huge lengths to prepare the communities they work with to adapt to droughts and other shocks, but there’s a limit to what they can do to raise money from governments and the UN in the early stages of a crisis. It’s very hard to talk up a situation before it becomes a full-blown emergency.
The crisis in East Africa started months ago for us. In January we issued the first early warning alert. In a region that is often faced with drought it’s difficult to get across that this year is something much, much more critical.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of UNHCR, an organisation that was originally created on a temporary basis. On World Refugee Day, we should redouble our efforts to ensure that that there is no complacency around displacement and that a fundamental respect for human dignity is at the heart of international response.
Children and adults in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are no strangers to the impact nature can have on their lives and livelihoods. As well as more frequent droughts and floods, people’s ordinary way of life is being forced to adapt to existence in a more extreme environment. At some point the everyday challenges of living in this environment can culminate in disaster. Much more focus and action needs to be put on helping children and adults build their own resilience in East Africa. There are lots of options, and we all realise the need to get moving now. So why wait?
Between 8th and 13th May this year, DRR specialists from around the world came together for the third Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, hosted by the United Nations – and Save the Children was there in force, to call for increased engagement with children and children’s rights when working to reduce the risks people face, of landslides, floods, droughts, earthquakes, tsunami and more.
“We are caught in a race against time between the growing size of the humanitarian challenge, and our ability to cope; between humanity and catastrophe. And, at present, this is not a race we are winning.”
So writes Paddy Ashdown in the foreword to the ‘Humanitarian Emergency Response Review’. Tasked by the government to consider Britain’s performance in humanitarian response, Lord Ashdown and his team have valiantly spent the past nine months reviewing, researching, pondering, and talking to just about everyone with a stake in the humanitarian system — from leaders at the UN, to aid workers in the field and people affected by disasters and conflicts.
The Cancun Accord now stands signed and delegates have headed back home. The expectations for Cancun had been set so low that when there was finally an agreement on the green fund, it caught the world’s attention.
It’s been nearly ten days since 20,000 delegates gathered in Cancun along the azure blue Carribean waters to strike a global climate change deal.
It’s a few days to go before the COP16 meeting at Cancun kicks off and the clock is ticking. 192 country representatives gather at the Mexican Caribbean to discuss the future of this planet’s children. After the Copenhagen fiasco, everyone is looking to Cancun to restore a bit of the lost legitimacy and credibility of the global negotiation process and sow some seeds of optimism and trust.
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