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Reconnecting emergency responses to long-term adaptation needs

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By Eleonora Milazzo,

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This outcome paper presents the recommendations elaborated during two warm-up consultations held in February 2023 on the effects of climate change co-organised by the Egmont Royal Institute for International Affairs and DG ECHO in the lead-up to the 2023 European Humanitarian Forum.

 

Reconnecting emergency responses to long-term adaptation needs

This outcome paper presents the recommendations elaborated during two warm-up consultations held in February 2023 on the effects of climate change co-organised by the Egmont Royal Institute for International Affairs and DG ECHO in the lead-up to the 2023 European Humanitarian Forum.

Specifically, this paper reflects the discussion during the public session on “Climate-Induced Crises: Taking Stock of Current Risks and Responses,” which involved the Federal Government of Somalia, Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS), the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre, FAO, and over 160 online participants. In addition, the recommendations below summarise the conclusions of the hybrid expert roundtable on “Exploring the Climate Finance Ecosystem,” gathering over 10 organisations, including UN OCHA, the UN Climate Secretariat, ICRC, Groupe URD, Development Initiatives, Climate Action Accelerator, EIB, ODI, ECDPM, MPI, and EPC.

The following recommendations are directed at policy makers in the EU and its Member States, humanitarian and development organisations, and multilateral financial institutions and climate funds. Overall, the results of the consultations highlight the urgency to reconnect emergency humanitarian responses with long-term adaptation needs, and to do so by optimising the existing complementarity between mandates, funding instruments, and implementation capacities across the humanitarian and development sectors.

 

Joint recommendations to the EHF
  1. Mobilise additional climate finance. Given the risk levels inherent to climate adaptation and resilience, particularly in fragile settings, public sources and grant mechanisms will and should continue to represent a large portion of the resources to be mobilised. At the same time, private sources and public-private partnership have an untapped potential which should be explored further. More broadly, funding anticipatory action through humanitarian funding is not sufficient nor sustainable. Instead, funds should come from complementary sources through enhanced cross-sectoral synergies (see point 3).
  2. Channel existing and newly mobilised finance more effectively. In addition to increasing the volume of climate finance, it is important to ensure that the latter reaches local communities in conflict, post-conflict, and fragile settings through tailored adaptation projects. To this end, climate finance should be delivered via flexible instruments including appropriate risk indicators, institutional risk assessment procedures, and risk mitigation programmes.
  3. Optimise complementary resources and capacities across the humanitarian and development sectors. To build resilience in the face of multidimensional climate-related risks, it is crucial to overcome the current siloed approach to humanitarian and development programming. The largely untapped potential for collaboration between these two sectors should be optimised through the following actions at the EU and Member State level:
  • Political mandate to implement the Humanitarian-Peace-Development (HDP) nexus, starting from both the delivery of humanitarian aid and investments in long-term resilience to climate shocks, including in conflict and post-conflict settings.
  • Governance: development and humanitarian donors should work hand in hand from the initial planning to the final implementation stage through country-focused, context-specific inter-institutional actions. Specifically, the latter should involve cross-departmental/ministerial/DG collaboration and happen on the basis of a clear allocation of tasks. In this sense, a common language and proactive communication on opportunities for collaboration, constraints, and challenges are essential. Still, they are not sufficient on their own. Instead, we need appropriate governance structures leading to collaborative – and not only collective – outcomes for long-term adaptation and resilience building. In this respect, the mapping initiated by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) on how HDP nexus approaches are implemented at country level represents a potential milestone.
  • Funding: strengthen coordination between donors to make sure that humanitarian funding is in line with long-term development interventions. At the same time, long-term resilience investments should be embedded in humanitarian action given the global context of cascading crises.
  • Awareness: promote a common understanding of multidimensional climate risks across sectors and by all HPD, climate, and finance actors by clarifying how the humanitarian and development budgets can be complementary.
  1. Invest in local capacity to improve impact and effectiveness: local actors should be empowered to own and steward their own resilience-building process. This can be achieved by mobilising not only large-scale climate finance, but also small grants that can be used to fund local groups and civil society organisations. In this respect, community, diaspora, and private sector funding can contribute to building capacity locally and improve impact at a local scale. Additionally, localisation and partnerships with local actors should be embedded in all stages of adaptation and resilience-building actions. In the long term, in fact, adaptation interventions should have the goal of empowering local leadership and communities, and not only enhancing their resilience through top-down interventions.

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This paper may not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission, the Swedish Presidency of the Council, and the organisations which took part in the events.

 

Also published on the European Humanitarian Forum website.

 

(Photo credit: Tumisu from Pixabay)

 

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