Humanitarian and climate policy are converging as crises overlap in a rapidly warming world. The pivotal COP29 climate summit offers a glimpse of the bumpy and bureaucratic road ahead.
Amid a summit clouded by political turmoil, COP29 hosts Azerbaijan dedicated an entire day for sideline discussions on core humanitarian issues – from displacement and emergency response to peacebuilding and prevention. The 15 November Peace, Relief, and Recovery day ran parallel to the official COP29 climate negotiations, which are focused on hammering out a new finance target called the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG).
More geared towards exchanging ideas than striking deals or big announcements, the day saw numerous humanitarian events across the sprawling pavilion city in the accredited “Blue Zone” of the Baku Stadium.
The discussions reveal a messy landscape: Humanitarians are trying to carve out a role for their expertise within the larger climate movement. Vulnerable countries and campaigners worry about hard-won but fragile victories being consumed by other interests. All say they want to keep the spotlight on the frontline communities hardest hit by climate disasters. But some also worry that the jargon-heavy policy talk and negotiations happening at COP summits or in capital cities feel a long way from the urgency of today’s spiralling crises.
“There is less work on the ground, and more policy-level orientation than an actual implementation,” said Nisreen Elsaim, a Sudanese academic focused on climate and peace, reflecting on the event’s discussions.
The sideline talks displayed an emerging web of humanitarian ideas that are increasingly interconnected with the climate policy world: funding displacement programmes through a new climate fund, for example, or leveraging humanitarian skills to bring climate programming to conflict-hit areas.
Experts billed it as a complex but necessary approach to deal with an era of compounding and overlapping crises, to which humanitarians have been struggling to respond: Emergency needs are both caused by and exacerbated by climate change, and relief budgets are already stretched to the limit. This underscores the need to better anticipate, prepare for, and reduce risks in crisis zones – and to find new funding.
It’s clear that many humanitarians see potential in climate finance. This green funding – expected in vast quantities when compared to shrinking humanitarian budgets – will be funnelled through climate institutions like the Green Climate Fund and multilateral development banks that have seen major political momentum driving reform efforts in recent years.
How that plan works will partly depend on the outcome of the COP29 talks, which are scheduled to wrap on 22 November, and if an NCQG can be agreed that both satisfies the needs of Global South countries and politicians in high-income countries. The future direction of global climate policy will also depend on the geopolitical landscape, which is preparing for the return of a Donald Trump administration to the United States in January.
Here are some of the main takeaways for humanitarians from COP29 so far:
Eyeing climate cash
As humanitarians try to better define their role in responding to the climate crisis, they also have an eye on new funding.
Climate policymakers today seem more open to the prospect of working with humanitarians in certain areas than in previous years, when there was more scepticism about whether humanitarian intentions were primarily motivated by money.
Humanitarians say they have much to offer. Some supporters of the climate and conflict agenda, which aims to get more green funding to war zones and fragile countries, want a dedicated proportion of the climate finance target to be settled on as part of the NCQG. Humanitarians often see their expertise in sensitive contexts as making them the best placed to run programmes focused on adapting to climate impacts, such as for displaced people. However, some Global South negotiators worry that competing messages could divide their cause in lobbying for as much climate finance as possible.
Similarly, many humanitarians believe they’re well positioned to deliver responses resourced by the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) – the newest and still the most contentious aspect of climate finance. The fund was created last year to address the impacts of climate disasters, after decades of campaigning by activists and Global South countries.
For example, both the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, and its migration agency, IOM, are eyeing funding and working through the FRLD. Both agencies have made a big advocacy push at COP29. The IOM highlighted the prospect of planned relocations of entire communities because of climate impacts. UNHCR, meanwhile, launched a report that stressed the complexity of overlapping crises faced by refugees. The panel launching this report was introduced by Grace Dorong, a South Sudanese refugee and executive director of the Roots of Generation NGO. But there were no refugees involved in the discussion, even though the report’s authors called for their participation in decision-making.
During COP29’s sideline discussions, humanitarian agencies like the World Food Programme have pushed for the FRLD to finance early warning systems and anticipatory action programmes to help “avert and minimise" loss and damage.
Humanitarians also discussed working with national governments on their climate plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and resilience blueprints, called National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). Both are critical to the COP process, and to the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – and both would further carve out a clearer role for humanitarians in the climate space.
The same old silos
While humanitarian policymakers mostly agree with each other about the need to work in new ways to meet the climate challenge, the practical barriers and problems remain.
For one, it still takes far too long for money to reach the ground, say many leaders whose communities are on the front lines of climate change.
“We need the money when the flooding is coming.”
“What we are facing is that [when] their [donor] money actually comes, there’s no one in the village – the village is swamped by a flood or something like that,” Mohamed Ibrahim Nor of Somalia’s department for rural development told The New Humanitarian. He said climate finance seems to be disbursed based on a donor’s accounting year rather than humanitarian needs. “We need the money when the flooding is coming,” he said.
The international aid sector’s arbitrary walls or siloes – which keep short-term humanitarian work in separate categories from longer-term development, or from climate action, for example – continue to be a barrier.
This problem applies to governments, too. “I still go to meetings with the minister of environment, and have to push to meet the minister of finance or defence,” Reena Ghelani, the UN’s climate crisis coordinator for the El Niño / La Niña Response, said on a panel. “It is interrelated. There will be no change as long as we work like that.”
She also bemoaned the elite nature of the conference, telling the panel it was “striking” the extent to which “political discussions are so disconnected” from COP29’s various events.
While many humanitarians are well aware of the new loss and damage fund, there seems to be little coherence yet around how the fund – or humanitarian climate work more broadly – can be resourced by the wider international finance reform agenda. This includes the push for green taxes called “Solidarity Levies” – which is how some, including influential economist Avinash Persaud, think the FRLD should be financed – and the Bridgetown Initiative, which is focused on righting historical imbalances and squeezing more cash from multilateral development banks.
“The dollars just aren’t there” for all the ambitious programming humanitarian policymakers are proposing, a senior US government official told The New Humanitarian. The official asked not to be named as they were forbidden from speaking to the press.
Questions of how much climate finance will be available mirror the humanitarian sector’s annual money woes: The funding gap for crisis response is massive each year and shows no sign of meaningfully narrowing, as donors chip away at their aid budgets. The steady promotion of so-called anticipatory action programmes has continued at COP29, but only 1.1% of total crisis financing provided by donors was spent on pre-arranged financing in 2022, according to research from the Centre for Disaster Protection.
And some aid groups say humanitarian needs aren’t always top of mind at COP summits. The “big picture, global picture” of climate policy is heavily focused on reducing carbon emissions and transforming energy systems, usually in middle-income countries, said Ken Sofer, director of public advocacy at the International Rescue Committee. This is “essential but insufficient without dealing with the human security consequences of the climate crisis”, he said.
There’s still room for (a bit of) optimism
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Among some aid workers attending the COP29 climate summit, hope can be found, albeit in small and heavily caveated doses.
For Robert Piper, the UN’s special adviser on internal displacement, this was more around climate-related disasters where politics is less of an issue. “We have so much knowledge and experience in terms of mitigation, preparedness, adaptation,” he said on a panel.
“I’m more optimistic that in this sector we can show results,” Piper said, adding that, if successful, this would “hopefully take some pressure” off humanitarians dealing with conflict, on which he admitted his “despair” at international prevention efforts.
Other humanitarians saw pathways through the byzantine policy discussions towards pushing their systems into seriously embracing the prospect of moving beyond reactive emergency responses, towards new ways of working to tackle complex overlapping crises.
“I think there’s lots of reasons to be optimistic,” said Jonathan Stone, who manages the Climate, Environment, and Resilience Unit at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
As disasters have worsened, now “the policy is aligned to such an extent that we are forced into thinking a little bit more radically” – such as working with local governments, rather than doing everything solely through humanitarian agencies, he said. “This gives us a critical window in which to change and transform.”
Edited by Irwin Loy.
