The humanitarian community must focus more on preventing and preparing for disasters rather than simply responding to them, if it is to cope with the additional challenges from climate change, top aid officials said on Wednesday.
U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes called for a "new business model" that would enable governments and communities in poor states already suffering the impacts of global warming to stop climate hazards becoming crises.
"We need to focus more of our efforts on financing and more of our concentration on prevention and preparedness, and on building national and international capacity, rather than regarding the international humanitarian community as the fifth cavalry that is always going to ride over the horizon to save communities when they are struck by disasters," he told a meeting at Britain's parliament, organised by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) think-tank.
Holmes said the British government and Red Cross movement had set a good example by spending 10 to 20 percent of their emergency funding on measures to reduce the risk of future disasters, and urged other aid donors to do the same.
Bekele Geleta, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), described disaster prevention as the "first line of defence against the impacts of climate change" and suggested the international community set targets for financing this work.
"Could we not propose that at least 20 to 25 percent of funding for disaster response is spent on risk reduction and risk sharing?" he said.
Both Holmes and Geleta emphasised that aid agencies are already struggling to deal with the rise in natural disasters caused by weather and climate hazards. Geleta cited an estimate that humanitarian costs could rise 16-fold by 2030 because of global warming.
"Never have we been as busy as we are now with weather-related disasters on every continent," said the IFRC head.
The number of floods, droughts and other climate-related disasters has doubled in the past 20 years, from 200 to 400 each year, Holmes noted. And declining water availability and agricultural productivity, coupled with rising seas and population growth would bring longer-term stresses, forcing huge numbers of people from their homes.
"These changes could mean human displacement on an almost unimaginable scale, which will overwhelm our capacity to respond," he said, warning that tens of millions of people could be uprooted in Bangladesh alone, as sea-level rises make coastal areas uninhabitable.
Geleta said people in low-income countries were 20 times more likely to die from natural hazards than those in richer nations.
CLIMATE CHANGE TALKS
Humanitarian actors are increasingly pushing for disaster risk reduction to be included in a new global deal to tackle climate change, which is due to be sealed at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December.
Holmes said a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol should strengthen existing mechanisms such as the Hyogo Framework for Action, which was launched in 2005 and aims to help nations and communities build resilience to disasters.
Measures taken since have been "totally inadequate to deal with the scale of need,Â? Holmes said. He added that the international community should also find new ways of providing insurance for vulnerable people and encourage greater private-sector involvement.
ODI's James Darcy said humanitarian funding alone could not pay for disaster risk reduction work, as it is already under strain from responding to rising emergencies. Donors often find it hard to justify spending money on preventing disasters, and more evidence is needed to convince them and the wider world, he added.
"It's not such an easy sell, but it's critical," he argued.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which Holmes heads, is working on a study with the World Bank to explore the financial benefits of investing in disaster prevention and preparedness.
But Holmes said its findings, due later this year, would not be as clear-cut as hoped in terms of showing the effectiveness of money spent on disaster risk reduction. Nonetheless, he argued that relatively small investments - like spending tens of millions of dollars on improving weather forecasting systems in Africa - could bring big returns.
Rather than relying on government aid, a more promising way to raise cash to help the world's poorest deal with climate change would be automatic revenue-raising mechanisms, such as taxing airline tickets and auctioning permits to emit carbon, Holmes said.
Time is running short for the humanitarian community, he warned, which faces a growing burden from climate change even if a satisfactory deal is reached in Copenhagen.
"If we don't get this right, it will derail development and threaten global security," he said. "The stakes are very high ... and we need to start acting now."
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