One year on from the UK Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR), the Humanitarian Futures Programme is to review how anticipation - the first among seven key components accepted by the British Government - has impacted on more strategic 'whole of government' efforts to promote resilience...

"Taking an anticipatory perspective is 'the glue' that brings together the other capacities that the Department for International Development (DFID) accepted as essential for dealing with longer-term humanitarian threats," says Randolph Kent, Director of HFP.

A scoping study of the response in Kenya and Somalia

Summary

By Dr. Randolph Kent, Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) at King’s College, London,

Some of the most favoured words in the humanitarian lexicon reflect potential stagnation in creative thinking and mind-closure to the greater threats of the future. I would stigmatise ‘practical’ and ‘academic’ as foul words for the future which threaten the efforts of those who recognise that saving lives by mitigating future threats will require new thinking and greater sensitivity to global transformations.

The famine in East Africa is the perfect testing ground for the UK government’s recent commitment to reform its humanitarian response by anticipating and preparing more strategically for new and more frequent types of future hazards of greater dimensions and dynamics.

The challenge comes from the Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) at King’s College, London.

He says the tragedy unfolding in the Horn of Africa today must be the impetus for a new approach to dealing with humanitarian crises.

"The capacity for mitigating the impact of events such as the multiple crises in Japan is increasing dramatically, but governments and the UN system are failing to take the right course of action," says the Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College, London, Dr. Randolph Kent.

He believes the abiding lesson globally of Japan's present agony is that so many of the risks that the world will