IFRC Press conference World Disasters Report 16 November 2020

OK.

Thank you very much everyone for joining us here today for the launch of the 2020 world disaster **** or **** Water.

It's a really important report.

Think it adds a great deal to the ongoing discussion and we hope it adds real urgency to address some of the structural issues that that we see playing out every day around the world.

Just a reminder that all under embargo until tomorrow morning, 6:00 Central European time or so we have two speakers for you today.

One first of all, my name, my name is Matthew, head of media.

That's 54 IFRCL moderating more importantly with with again Chappa game, who's the secretary General, the International Federation of IDs and Miss Kirsten Hagen, who is the lead author of the world disaster support.

So without further ado, let me hand.

I lost you, Matt, towards the end.

We lost you.

You were just handing over to me or Kirsten.

OK, OK, OK.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon and thank you so much for for joining, joining us today.

And as Matt mentioned, I think we have a very, very, very important report today we wanted to share with you.

And as he mentioned, it's embargoed until until tomorrow.

And the report we are talking about today is I just have this here.

I just wanted to show you.

So we will launch this, we'll launch this permanently tomorrow.

I think the, I understand a number of you had a chance to pick through the, pick through the reports.

So you see the, the key messages we are trying to highlight on, on, on that report.

The, the, the main emphasis of this report is to look into how we are responding to the humanitarian impact of the climate change and maybe in many places, how we are actually failing to respond to the humanitarian impact of the, of the climate change on, on population.

Of course, one of the questions that could be in your mind is that there are already so many reports on climate.

So why one more report and why this report might look different than than the, than the other reports?

As I mentioned earlier, this report primarily focuses on the humanity and impact of the climate change on people.

So it's really a report which highlights impact on, on living population.

It's so it's very, very people centric approach.

We are trying to, we are trying to highlight here.

It also recognises the fact that the, you know, to some extent climate change has already happened.

The climate change is not for the future.

Of course things can get worse in the future, but it has already happened.

And we can see that from of course, the, the, the number of statistics and we are experiencing this almost on a daily basis.

Some of the statistics you will see in in the report is, you know, just last year in 2019, there were more than 308 disasters that that were recorded affecting almost 100 million people and resulting in a death of more than 24,000 people.

And out of those 308 disasters, 77% of them were climate or weather related disasters.

So it just shows the degree of impact the climate change is already having on the, on, on the human lives.

We also have some more statistics.

If you look at it, you know, since 1990 there has been 35% increase in the number of disasters and the the the time spanned between 1990 and now 83% of those disasters were caused by extreme weather events.

So this is to highlight that the climate change is not for the future.

It's already happening and it's already having a severe impact.

And that's what this report aims to, aims to highlight.

You know, in, in, in, in seven chapters, you, you, you can look at it.

So the focus here, So within the, of course, the, the, the people who are affected by climate change, the focus of this report is the most exposed and the most vulnerable population, the countries and the, and the populations the report look into like, you know, the 8 most exposed countries.

And what we found was out of those 8, the five countries were receiving less than $1.00 per person on the, as the investment on the climate change adaptation.

It, it just shows, you know, the very limited investment that's happening to address the, the impact of the climate change and on the, on the, on the climate change adaptation issue.

And when you look at it, and if we look at the, of course, the 308 reported disasters, but of course the population in the communities are dealing with many, many smaller disasters on a very, very regular basis.

So, so if we count those, that those number of disasters could be much, much higher.

So the communities are really doing their best to adapt to the climate change, but are we doing enough?

Are we doing enough to support those communities, accompany those community and make investment on those communities?

And these are some of the the, you know, the very challenging questions the report aims to highlight here.

Of course, we are in the middle of the COVID-19.

So, you know, that could be another question that, you know, why you came with the report of climate in the middle of COVID-19.

Of course, this was decided already.

It's a two years worth of research.

So we started this work long before we knew that the COVID would hit us this year.

But it's quite an interesting debate going around the world.

Of course the COVID is there, it's in front of us, it's affecting our families, our friends, our relatives, and we see it's impact all around.

And and it's a very, very serious crisis the old is facing currently.

But it would not be smart to think that the climate change is less of an issue actually in, in our view, climate change would have more significant medium and long term impact on the, on the, on the human life and, and, and on the earth.

And if we are lucky, we will be getting a vaccine for COVID or the next year.

And if all goes well, in a couple of years time, we should be able to, to manage the impact of COVID-19.

But unfortunately, therefore, there is no vaccine for climate change and it will require much, much sustained action and investment to really protect the, the, the human lives in this earth from the long term impact, medium and long term impact of the, of the climate change.

The report also makes a very clear recommendation.

It makes a very clear recommendation to the, to the government and the donors.

It makes a recommendation to humanitarian organisations.

And it also makes recommendation to of course, everyone involved on the issue of the climate change and, and of course, focusing very much on the climate change adaptation issues.

Some of the, some of the messages from the from the report said, you know, we must get climate smart, we must get the priorities right, the priorities right.

Meaning that is the investment going to the right countries, you know, the countries most exposed and most vulnerable and within those countries is it going to the most exposed communities and most vulnerable communities.

That's one aspect of for the investment.

The other aspect of investment is of course, how we are investing on our development work, on our humanitarian work and, and making those investment climates smart is the way to go instead of trying to find different pockets of funding for everything, everything we do.

And the third element is of course, integrating and localising their pros.

Of course, you know, there are many, many policy initiatives globally and sometimes, you know, if you are living in a community, it could be very confusing.

But at the end of the day, all these policy initiatives are trying to really save lives and, and, and livelihoods.

So having that integrated approach at the policy level and integrated approach at the action level would be extremely important.

And when we move to the action level, you know, we, we, we emphasise the need to localise the action because the, the effect is at the local level and the action to, to, to, to, to respond to the effect also has to happen at the local level.

And the local, local actors and the communities are the best place to, to respond to this situation.

Within that, of course, there are recommendations around using the better use of the scientific data that is, that is available investment and early early warning and early action and investment on the anticipatory financing is, is, is one of the strong recommendation made by the report.

And, and, and of course, you know, the, the importance of having a proper legal framework to, to address some of the, some of the climate, climate change issues becomes very, very important as I ever see.

Of course, we are very committed to, to supporting the communities most at risk.

That's sort of our mandate and that's what we prioritise.

What everybody else calls light last mile is our first mile.

And that's how we like to operate with our community presence and with the presence of our 14,000,000 volunteers around the world.

But when we do that, a very important aspect is, you know, we, we are very conscious of ensuring that the solutions we find today don't create the problems tomorrow.

You know, I did somewhere that, you know, the today's problems came from the yesterday's solutions that the solutions we chose in the past has resulted in the type of crisis we are facing in the, in the climate field.

So we are very conscious to the fact that the solutions we find today should not be the problem.

Our party model.

We are also emphasising that the climate risk management has to be across all programmes irrespective of the the nature of the programme.

We do and we support, we promote and practise the early warning and anticipated financing.

As you know, we have expanded our footprint on anticipated financing to more than 30 countries now and working with other organisations, we have now, we have now reached 60 countries, but we have to further scale up the, the, the anticipated financing.

And of course, internally ourselves, you know, we are, we have developed what we call the green response framework, whose objective is, you know, greening the red.

You know, we, we, we want to consciously ensure that the actions we are taking and our behaviour actually doesn't contribute to the, to the, to the climate crisis, rather tries to help address this issue.

So these are some of the highlights of the report and of course we have Kirsten, our colleague who is the lead author and of course he has a much in depth understanding of what is there in the report and we'll be very happy to engage with you in conversation for the next 14 minutes or so.

Over to you now.

Thank you very much, Jagan.

We'll just now quickly go to Kirsten, who is going to add, as Jagan said, some of the more technical details of the report.

So Kirsten, over to you.

Thank you.

Sure, and hoping that you can hear me clearly without my headphones and mic.

OK, So thanks a lot for this opportunity.

It's been a really fascinating last year, we've spent a Goodyear compiling and analysing the data of disaster since the 1960, and then from that pulling out the numbers of people affected, the types of hazards affecting them, and looking in particular at how this has changed over time.

Now the IPCC has been describing the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events for some time.

And when we looked into the data, it really supported what the IPCC has been saying for a long time, but with some really concrete statistics.

So for example, the proportion of disaster attributable to climate and extreme weather events has been increasing significantly over.

So Jagan mentioned that it's risen 35% the number of climate and weather related to buses since the 60s, but the percentage of all disasters has also increased.

And so in the 2000s, seventy, 6% of all disasters were climate and weather related.

And then we look at the past decade and it was all the way up to 83%.

If we look at the last decade, we've seen 410,000 lives lost due to climate and weather related disasters and another 1.7 billion people affected by climate and weather related disasters in the past decade alone.

Now, the severity of this climate crisis is also dramatically shown by what's happened just in this last year.

And if we look at when the epidemic was announced in March, the following six months when we were dealing with the COVID epidemic, which obviously has still not finished, we had over 100 disasters.

We had 93% of those disasters were climate, weather related and 50 million people were affected.

So the statistics are definitely supporting what we, our national societies all around the world are seeing.

And we have experiences of what happened with dealing with those specific disasters in the time of COVID.

From Bangladesh, from India, from Uganda and East Africa, where they were hit with floods at the same time as locusts, the same time as trying to manage of it.

And it's these compounding risks that are really creating the challenges not only for people's survival and their resilience, but also for the humanitarian community to be able to respond.

Now, in terms of the financial data that Jagan was talking about before, we looked at a couple of different indexes.

Now, the definition of vulnerability is challenging for a lot of people.

We looked at the ND game index, which is one that looks specifically at climate vulnerability and is looked is used by a lot of people engaged in the climate adaptation sector for identifying which countries are the most vulnerable.

We also looked at the inform index, which is what's used by most humanitarians, people working in Disaster Risk Reduction, because it looks at disaster but much more of the short term risks, while the while the ND game focuses a lot on the longer term risks.

And we put these two together but only using the climate and weather related disasters.

From the informing from that, we came up with a list of what we considered the most highly vulnerable countries and then the very vulnerable countries, moderately vulnerable, less vulnerable and so on.

We found that the per capita funding averaged only 19 centimes $0.90 per person in the highly vulnerable countries and it was 1.8 per person in the **** VOM.

So the highest, the very **** vulnerability were half the amount of the **** vulnerability.

Somalia, which is the country characterised as the most vulnerable, ranked 71st for per person.

I mean, while Afghanistan came in at 82nd for climate adaptation.

And then if we look at 38 **** vulnerability countries and there were 60 in total, and there are five of the very **** vulnerability countries, right, in total that all receive less than $1.00 per person in climate adapting.

So what we're seeing is a situation where there is a certain amount of climate adaptation funding out there.

It is really needed and is needed in a lot of countries, but there are some particular companies that are particularly vulnerable, many of which are fragile and they're getting left.

And so I think one of the things we would like to see happen with this report is to really push for an an increased investment in those countries that are currently left behind so that they too can be helped.

Build back to you, Matt.

Thanks.

Thank you very much, Kirsten.

Now we've got time now to take some questions.

So Christiane from from DPAI see you.

You have a question, over to you.

Hi, Matthew, say thank you for taking my question.

It's to Christine.

You mentioned Somalia as one of the countries that hasn't received much of the adaptation funds.

Could you tell us which the five countries or which the top countries are that have received adaptation funds but don't need them as urgently as other countries?

Thank you.

I wouldn't say that we've identified the countries that don't need them as urgently as others.

We've identified the ones that really do need them urgently.

And so if we look at the list of the top, I think it's the top eight countries that we found with the highest vulnerability.

For those they include Haiti, Chad, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and those are the ones that are not receiving the level of funding that they really need.

But I, I'm not sure if I quite understood your question.

Is that what you were asking?

We thank you.

Which are the top ones?

No, I, I, yes, you, you know, I, that's what I did want to know.

But I also wanted to know if you say the five top receivers of adaptation fund monies are not in the most vulnerable category.

I guess you know them and I wonder whether you could name them.

Thank you.

That's a good question.

I don't have the list of the highest receivers of funding in front of me.

I can look that up quite easily.

But I would say that even the ones that are receiving a lot of funding aren't necessarily not needing that funding and some of the highest recipients happen to be on a per capita basis.

This is not a per country basis.

On a per capita basis, some of the small island developing state and those absolutely also need investment and climate adaptation.

It's not a 0 sum gain here.

The issue is not we should stop investing in some of the ones that are somewhat vulnerable but not the most urgent in the next 5 years, but that we really need to scale up the investment in the ones that are incredibly urgent and are currently missing out.

And that means we need to start thinking a little bit differently about how we do funding.

And donors have some really valid challenges here in terms of these being countries that are often fragile, that may have challenges around governance, that may have challenges in absorption of large amounts of money.

And that means that there needs to be a change of the ways of doing things that the cookie cutter approach of one-size-fits-all for funding and being able to apply for funding won't work because it's not reaching the most vulnerable.

So we need to find other ways.

And as we know, it is possible to work in these countries.

And some of the solutions are definitely what Jagan was mentioning before about working with local organisations to try and get the funding in to enable the adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction to start.

Thank you very much, Kirsten.

Let's go now to Emma from Reuters.

Over to you, Emma.

Hi, good afternoon.

I had a couple of questions if that's allowed.

I'm not sure it is, but the first one, can you just say why you think donors are getting this wrong?

That's the first one.

And and the second one, which country would you highlight as as having been a place that has experienced one of these disasters recently, maybe in 2019, where the mismatch between the needs and the funding is, is particularly apparent?

What would you highlight as a, as the most kind of poignant case study for this?

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Emma.

Jagan, I I believe your best place on on both those over to you.

Thank you, Emma.

I think it's probably not the issue of donors getting it wrong, but it's probably you know how how some of the funding decisions get get taken a lot of times.

Of course, the donors also have, I mean their their own priority countries, the priority areas they want to they want to focus on.

And of course, there is always a political considerations, even when the funding is to be is to go for humanitarian cause or or or climate adaptation cause.

But where I think the the the issue, it's costen also described before.

A lot of times what happens is because some of these most exposed and most vulnerable countries have the type of governance that the donors expect to, to, to invest and, and, and the, and the standards of reporting and, and accountability that is expected.

These countries simply cannot, cannot assure that.

And when they cannot assure that, I think there is a reluctance from the, from the, from the government to, to put funding in those countries.

And here, of course, it's, it's, it's a big, big challenge.

So, so of course the objective for the investment here should be around really saving lives.

But the, the donors do come under pressure of accountability back home from their constituencies.

So sometimes there is a reluctance to, to, to, to invest on those countries.

So here there are a couple of suggestions made in the report.

The one of the suggestions made in the report is when things like that happens, is is best to use the local actors in the, at the community level.

You know, getting the, the investment at the community level, at the local level sort of ensure some of the governance challenges some of these countries are facing.

Of course, many of, you know, the whole discussion around the grand bargain and localizations, the progress hasn't been at the level all of us wanted it to be.

But as COVID-19 response, response shows that actually the local actors are capable of responding to crisis in a very, very difficult situation.

So I think there are a number of reasons, definitely the political considerations, definitely some of the priorities the donor countries have identified.

And 3rd is, you know, the donors requirement, which are at times quite demanding, very, very demanding.

And it's very difficult for these countries to meet those requirements.

So, so, so the funding don't, don't go there.

And that's where I think this approach needs to change.

On your second part of the questions on trying to sort of name a country, of course, it's, it's, it's very difficult.

You know, you always find good examples everywhere and not so good examples, but one country I, I, the experience I want to share with you was because I managed to visit the country last month.

That's Sudan.

You know, they had the locust infestation beginning of the year and they had to respond to COVID-19 and then suddenly they got this massive flooding along the Niles River.

And when I visited there, more than 800,000 people were still not getting much of humanitarian support coming there.

And, and it's, it's quite an interesting example of, of, of a country, you know, we've heard some of some of the political considerations.

I think they could not get the type of support they needed.

But at the same time, a long period of underinvestment on the disaster reduction and the resilience building in the, in the country number of regions, many of them we all know.

And then a country which is in a political transition but facing multiple crises at the same time have resulted situations where, you know, 800,000 people are living in a really, really difficult situation in in Sudan.

So that's one example I saw eyewitness.

So I'm sharing with you.

But there I'm sure there are others in in a similar situation.

Thank you.

Thanks very much, Jagan.

Megan Rowling from Reuters Foundation.

Over to you.

Hi.

I was interested to hear a little bit more about what the report says on greening the red as as you put it, Jagan, what is the contribution?

What are the problems in the humanitarian sector when it comes to causing climate and environmental damage and what are some of the specific things that are being done or or can be done to to rectify that?

Thanks.

Thanks, Megan.

You know, this is a probably, you know, if we calculate the total contribution of the humanitarians, it may not be that significant.

I don't know, Kirsten, whether we have that statistic, but it may not be, it may not be very big, but it's so important that organisers like ourselves has to lead by example.

Even if our contributions to the climate crisis may not be that big, but we have to, we have to lead by examples.

And that's why we developed this, this, this framework for, for the, for the Red Cross Circus family, because we felt that it was very important that we also start changing our behaviour and our own practises.

So, so before we start preaching the others, we also need to start changing our own behaviour and our own practises.

Here few, few examples.

You know, some of the issues, because a lot of time the humanitarian organisers like, like ourselves are we're pounded to with the aim to respond to the crisis rapidly and, and, and, and the objective has always been to move very, very rapidly so we can save lives.

And when we did that, we don't didn't always think that there might have been the consequences of trying to move rapidly.

And, and this could be, you know, flying, people are flying the goods 10,000 miles.

The way we are packaging our our goods, You know, the packaging is one of the, one of the huge contributor, the way we we package or not, it's a huge contributor.

And also when we actually go and distribute the goods.

And many of you probably have seen in disaster scenes where there is so much litter, you know, the humanitarians come and do the distribution and leave the litters behind.

You know, during the Nepal earthquake, I managed to visit some of the remote area as the country I come from.

And going there was you, you could easily see which humanitarian organisation was there because all the boxes and packaging were labelled with their names and the logos and, and, and organising didn't think of cleaning that up before they left the, they left the village.

So this is of course, 1 aspect of, of, of, of contributions and, and that can easily be easily be addressed.

The second thing also also the type of humanitarian support we provide.

And, and as you know, in the last few years, we have really invested on moving more towards the cash based assistance.

And, and I think that really, really contributes to, to, to reducing some of the impact on the, on the, on the climate.

And even when we have to of course, mobilise the goods, mobilise the goods as local as possible.

And you know, in many, many situations now it is possible to mobilise the goods locally, which is cheaper, faster and more climate friendly.

So that's, that's another area where, where, where we could make a difference.

And I think the, the, the third element is, you know, the overall, overall practise, Let me put it, you know, individual, individual behaviour of our own staff, the way our offices are run and also the way we are running our meetings and, and workshops and, and, and conferences.

I think this, this is another area where we could make a big difference.

You know, a very small example that happened in the in the Federation office I share with you, it looks very, very small, but how it changes people's behaviour.

You know, we removed all the dustbins, you know, individual, individual staff used to have their individual dustbin to, to collect the.

And when we removed that, and in my case also we removed that, I figured out that within a period of six months or so, your habit totally changed.

So you stopped, you stopped throwing the papers, you stopped tearing up the papers, you start, you stopped producing because if you did that, you had to stand up and carry your paper and I have to walk, I don't know, 50 metres or so.

It just changed your behaviour and that I saw happening to myself.

And we stopped actually putting those bins for individual stuff.

So by introducing very simple measures like that actually changes, of course, it, it sort of reduces the reduces the sort of the, the, the West, but also it helps change our individual behaviours.

So these are some of the things I think we are, we are pushing ourselves in the, in the, in the organisation.

And I hope that we can also influence others in the same direction.

Thank you very much.

Second now, I don't see any more our hands up for questions.

Does anyone have another question at this time?

I think we have a hard finish in about 5 to 10 minutes on our side.

But if there are any questions we have time for a couple more maybe Matt, when the questions coming.

The one example I wanted to give, I didn't give was the use of cars.

As you see, the humanitarian organisations, mostly including ourselves, have been driving around, you know, the cars, which was not necessarily climate friendly.

And that's one area we are now working to change.

I think, you know, we don't need a Land Cruiser in a city like Kuala Lumpur, for example.

We might need it in, I don't know, in, in remote areas in Afghanistan, but in many places we don't.

And if we just calculate the number of vehicles used by the international organisations globally, these are in thousands.

And and many of these cars are actually quite the big polluters.

So even changing just the type of cars we use will make a huge difference.

Thanks, Jagan.

It's a, it's an excellent point.

Emma from Reuters, you had a follow up.

Yes, it's a bit of a technical question for Kristen, please.

I was just wondering where in the report I could find the table showing the funding disbursement per person, the ranking by country.

Where is that please?

There we go.

I've managed to unmute.

Sorry, that was a bit complicated.

We haven't included the table of the person funding disbursements.

What we have in the back of report in the data index is the table where we've identified the vulnerability rankings, but we didn't include what was a very long table with all of the per person and per country rankings.

But if you've had theories about very happy looking up and send that way.

Maybe also to add to your earlier question around the mission, one of the challenges in identifying what the the environmental footprint or particularly the carbon footprint of the humanitarian sector is that all humanitarian organisations use completely different reporting boundaries and reporting metric around that issue, if they report at all.

There are completely different capacities and priorities across the humanitarian sector.

So it makes that comparison very different.

However, if you want a very crude number to put to that, if you look at the estimated cost of humanitarian assistance globally at getting close to $30 billion U.S.

dollars of adoption stats for 20/19, and at the same time we had a global GDP a bit over 87 or 88 trillion U.S.

dollars, then you could, and again, this is a very, very crude estimate, say that the humanitarian sector is responsible for up to 0.03% of emission.

Now, it's not nothing, it's definitely a sign that we should be doing better, but I think it's also important to remember that that cannot be our only contribution to addressing climate change.

We really need to do more on the other side of adapt, adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction.

A very core component of adaptation is where we as a humanitarian sector can really leverage our expertise to make a big difference.

So we really need to do both, but we can't just do 1.

Very well said.

Thank you very much, Kirsten.

So I don't see any additional hands up.

We've probably got time for one more question if anyone has a question.

Otherwise we can give you all back 25 minutes of of your afternoon.

I'm sure everyone's got plenty to do.

OK, thank you very much everyone.

We really appreciate the time that you've taken out of your afternoon and, and over the last couple of days really getting into the report.

You have my contact details, you have Allison's contact details, Rebecca's and Natalie's contact details as well.

If you have any follow up questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us and we will.

We will do what we can.

And just one last reminder, the embargo lifts tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM.

Thanks very much to Jagan and to Kirsten for your time and we hope to see all of you very soon.

Thank you very much.