A daily income of less than $2 per person is the internationally recognized threshold for extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, roughly 1 in 10 people worldwide live below this threshold, and 85% of them are concentrated in the top 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change.
Climate-related hazards are posing additional difficulties to these countries and to the humanitarian organizations that work to save and protect the millions of people in need. The University of Exeter estimates that a rise in global temperatures of 4°C would affect the lives of more than 1.8 billion people, causing devastating effects due to flash floods, droughts and higher exposure to natural disasters.
Although environmental degradation is not a new issue in humanitarian contexts, climate change is worsening the already devastating impacts of conflicts, poverty and disasters around the world.
The current humanitarian architecture already includes climate change coping strategies as a core aspect to address, particularly in peace building and humanitarian actions. In fact, an increasing number of actors are focusing on the multiple benefits economic, environmental and humanitarian of shifting paradigms, from a reactive climate and disaster response, to a proactive mitigation and risk reduction approach. Demonstrating the economic, social and environmental return of such resilience building activities is key to attract investments and thus protect and improve people’s livelihoods.
On average, every euro spent for resilience building activities saves between 4 and 7 that would have been spent in response to disasters. However, according to the United Nations system for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) only 3.8% of the Official Development Assistance directly supports disaster preparedness. The only way to reduce the effect of environmental disasters is to be prepared before a disaster happens.
2019 World Economic Forum