Humanitarian system not designed to withstand climate change, WFP says

Climate change is wreaking havoc on the humanitarian aid system, particularly when it comes to food, and the mentality needs to shift from reactive to proactive to prevent the system from buckling, said the World Food Programme’s director of climate and disaster risk reduction.

Speaking at a Devex event Thursday on the sidelines of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Egypt, Gernot Laganda said he has never seen a situation as bad as the one the world currently faces in all his years working in the humanitarian sphere. Chronic hunger has always existed, but today’s levels of acute hunger are unprecedented.

While 828 million people are chronically food insecure, 345 million are at crisis levels or worse, which requires outside food assistance, he said.

He called climate the “meta driver” which is pushing the aid system beyond the point where it can deal with the “runaway train.”

“That runaway train will be fragility. It will be displacement. It will be starvation. And we have about a decade, I think, to build the systems that get us ready to deal with this,” Laganda said. “Because if we do not invest in this now, then in about 10 years from now, when I personally think we will have passed that 1.5 degree warming target, we will see an aid system that is not able to cope.”

He said the humanitarian aid sector must be transformed so it is not only more reactive and responsive — which is more expensive than prevention — but also more “forward looking and anticipatory.”

The international system must be careful that its humanitarian response does not interfere with long-term development, said Ndidi Nwuneli, co-founder and executive chair for agriculture and nutrition at Sahel Consulting.

“[What] we often see is a knee jerk reaction to go into countries and help, which often displaces the local ecosystem and actually distorts the local ecosystem,” Nwuneli said.

She said that in her native Nigeria, a preference for imported stockfish began during the Biafran War in the 1960s when Norway air dropped the fish to feed starving children. But that taste for imported fish became entrenched, and today “you've essentially killed the local fishing industry and built a loyal customer for life,” Nwuneli said.

“We have to do development differently. This is a crisis. We cannot afford to make the same mistakes with food aid, with how we invest in the fertilizer or seed industry — where we're coming in and taking over,” Nwuneli said. “We have to work within the local ecosystem. And that is the same with the climate agenda, with adaptation and mitigation.”

She stressed that only talking about access to food is not enough — nutrition must be central to the conversation. The climate crisis has forced people to “downgrade” their diets, she said, because nutritious food has become unavailable or unaffordable.

Laganda said that WFP is following the loss and damage agenda at COP 27 “very closely” because the humanitarian sector is not built or financed to absorb climate “shocks of such a scale or magnitude” that are hitting economies around the world.

“So we believe that we need to invest much more financing to avert, minimize loss and damage before it happens — that humanitarian aid is really the last resort,” Laganda said. “It's always a failure when our trucks are rolling, when our air drops are coming. It's a failure to predict. It's a failure to protect. It's a failure to prepare.”