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Further Integrating the Environment and Humanitarian Action: A discussion paper

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Inspired by the Environment in Emergencies Forum 2015 in Oslo a discussion has emerged on how to better embed the environment into humanitarian action. While policy and logic demand this, practice has been slow in evolving, to the detriment of disaster survivors. A 2014 report produced by UNEP/OCHA clearly and explicitly discusses the impact of what a reduced focus on environmental issues has on effective and quality humanitarian programming and offers concise, deliverable and targeted recommendations that would help to resolve this issue.

However it is not clear if these recommendations are being acted upon and furthermore co-ordinated environmental representation still remains largely absent from any integration into humanitarian responses.

This discussion paper has been developed in order to gauge the opinion of practitioners in the humanitarian and development community and to develop a response to three action points:

  • To develop action on a more formalised environmental representation in order to embed environmental expertise within the formal humanitarian architecture. Accomplishing this requires extensive and broad cross-sector discussions. But the core approach would be to take a page from the Global Protection Cluster and learn from the experiences of that cluster. Formalised environmental representation would operate both as a unifying cross-cutting focal point for environmental issues but also focus on environment-humanitarian-development issues across all clusters in ways which support specific-cluster results.
  • To advocate the OCHA/UNEP ‘Joint Environment Unit’ (JEU) to take ownership of this issue and lead the development of a strategy to improve humanitarian-environment integration with the active engagement of the EHA (Environment in Humanitarian Action) Reference Group, and to move these points forward in a time-bound and focused manner. The World Humanitarian Summit in June 2016 represents an effective position for engagement.
  • To proactively engage key donors (e.g., UK, Norway, EU, US, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Qatar) on the importance of environmental issues critical to reducing risk and vulnerability, in support of this initiative and for a more clear and consistent application of donor requirements to consider environment as key to effectively responding to critical humanitarian needs.