High-level Panel: Drowning While Running: Addressing the Exponential Rise in Humanitarian Needs

CONCEPT NOTE – HIGH-LEVEL PANEL

Thursday, 8 December 2022

**OVERVIEW: **

The international humanitarian system faces an exponential rise in humanitarian needs, with the last decade seeing a three-fold increase in the number of people requiring humanitarian assistance. Between 2011 and 2020, the number of people targeted for assistance rose by 59 million. Over the past two years alone, that number grew by 74 million. Humanitarian needs are driven by a cascade of overlapping and recurring shocks, such as COVID-19 and other health emergencies, geopolitical conflicts, and climate-related disasters, leaving little time for people to recover between one shock and the next.

Countries and people with limited coping capacities – especially marginalized groups and communities and those affected by humanitarian emergencies – suffer the most.
Over the coming decade, humanitarian needs will escalate as the operating environment grows increasingly complex. While climate change, conflict, economic crises, inequality and pandemics are not new, these drivers of need are intensifying, in part exponentially. They are also interacting and compounding in unpredictable ways and growing increasingly irreversible. A fragmented and competitive geopolitical landscape exacerbates these challenges, weakening multilateral efforts to address them. At the same time, the international humanitarian system is buckling under its resource constraints. Needs are on track to outpace resources, leaving an inundated humanitarian system struggling to meet a fraction of needs.

Guided by a session moderator, the high-level panellists will share their perspectives on the state of the world and intersecting global challenges like the climate crisis, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, growing inequalities and the risks of, and fallout from, rising geopolitical tensions and conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine. This discussion will help relay a realistic picture and understanding of the global humanitarian landscape ahead in 2023, and the critical steps humanitarian actors, donors, and their partners can take to be address the exponential rise in humanitarian needs.