Building Resilience Amid Growing Humanitarian Needs

As I write this, Hurricane Milton is hurtling towards Tampa, Florida. With no time to catch their breath after Hurricane Helene, those in the path of the storm find themselves in a trap laid by climate change—unable to recover from one extreme weather event before the next one hits. Despite massive mobilization of US military and federal personnel, extensive relief efforts, and significant resource distribution by FEMA and other agencies, the US—the world's richest country—is struggling to keep pace with the escalating frequency and intensity of these extreme weather events. 

But the storm clouds over Florida are just the tip of the iceberg. Across the globe, climate change is not only intensifying weather patterns but is also fueling conflicts in vulnerable countries. Through a vicious cycle, armed conflict erodes communities' ability to withstand climate stressors like drought and flooding, while climate-induced resource scarcity and economic instability fuels tensions and creates fertile ground for armed groups to recruit desperate individuals. The International Rescue Committee's Emergency Watchlist paints a grim picture: 14 out of 20 countries on their radar are battling both climate disasters and armed conflicts. These nations, which house a mere 9% of the world's population, shoulder a staggering 69% of global humanitarian needs. 

What do these mounting pressures mean for the future of humanitarian assistance? I asked Dr. Syed Imran Ali, an experienced aid worker and engineering researcher who leads the Humanitarian Water Lab at York University’s Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. With a blend of systems thinking and real-world experience, Dr. Ali tackles the tough questions head-on: How can aid systems adapt to this new reality? What role can innovation and technology play? How can we bridge the gap between immediate relief and long-term development in protracted crises?

As climate change reshapes our world, Dr. Ali's interview serves as a clarion call for policymakers, aid workers, and donors, reminding us that in the face of unprecedented challenges, our greatest assets may be human ingenuity, collaboration, and the untapped potential of local communities. 

—Lauren Herzer Risi

Lauren Herzer Risi: How can humanitarian assistance adapt to meet today’s needs and those challenges we see on the horizon—particularly in the context of climate change and protracted conflict?

Syed Imran Ali: Today, climate chaos and conflict are driving an unprecedented global humanitarian crisis. More than 310 million people today need urgent humanitarian assistance and more than 120 million people (over 1.5% of the world’s population) are forcibly displaced—the highest levels ever recorded. In the face of such overwhelming numbers, it becomes easy to lose sight of the human reality. We need to remember that each one of these numbers is a person with stories of loss, struggle, and resilience. We need to remember that people only leave their homes when there is no other choice, when to stay means they may not survive.

In the face of the scale and widening reach of this crisis, the standard centralized model of humanitarian response is increasingly unfit for purpose.

The places that people flee to then are, necessarily, on the edges of survivability—a unit of geographic distance between living and not living. Today, the margins of survivability are being pushed into ever greater swathes of the global population as more and more people are forced into precarious situations by mounting pressures of climate change, conflict, and social and economic dislocation.

In the face of the scale and widening reach of this crisis, the standard centralized model of humanitarian response—driven by international institutions, donors, and organizations based in the minority world—is increasingly unfit for purpose. To address the growing frequency and distribution of emergencies, we need a humanitarian system that is equally well distributed with strong local standing capacities.

Localization has been on the agenda since the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, yet entrenched structures continue to prevent local humanitarians from building the readiness and capacity needed to lead responses in their own communities. A fundamental barrier is the reluctance of traditional donors and institutions to decentralize funding and decision-making, which ultimately undermines local partners’ autonomy and ability to respond effectively to crises. An evaluation of national Red Cross/Red Crescent development efforts in five countries revealed a persistent pattern of fragmented, short-term support that prioritizes the short-term goals of donors and existing institutions over the long-term organizational development and sustainability of local responders.

The future of humanitarian assistance amidst accelerating climate change and growing conflict lies in cultivating a highly distributed and ready humanitarian network—one that empowers local actors and fosters mutual support among neighboring countries to face the widening progression and reach of the contemporary global humanitarian crisis.

Lauren Herzer Risi: How can we balance the need to reform traditional systems and approaches to humanitarian assistance with innovation and the deployment of new tools/technologies?

Syed Imran Ali: I don’t think there necessarily has to be a tension between humanitarian reform and investing in innovation. In fact, innovation in tools, technologies, and approaches can enhance local capacities if it is guided by the principles of localization and integrated thoughtfully into broader reforms.

Technology cannot solve the structural challenges facing the humanitarian sector, so it must complement broader reforms—not replace them.

One way this can happen is by empowering local responders to develop solutions to the challenges they face daily. Local responders are closest to the issues, with deep knowledge of the context and what potential solutions could look like. By providing them with the necessary support—financial, technical, and otherwise—for research and development and response planning, their capabilities can be enhanced while generating solutions that are tailored to local conditions and highly fit for purpose.

Technology can also play a transformative role in generating operational insights from existing monitoring and reporting processes. Anyone who has worked in the humanitarian sector knows how much data is collected for reporting to headquarters or donors. This data contains potentially life-saving information—on how well things are working, where the problems lie, and how operations could be improved—much of which remains hidden and underutilized.

If we can figure out how to unlock this life-saving information from the data, we can close the loop between monitoring and operations—helping both international and local humanitarian responders get the maximum value out of the programs and the monitoring data they already spend considerable time and resources implementing and collecting.

Technology cannot solve the structural challenges facing the humanitarian sector, so it must complement broader reforms—not replace them. Investing in new technologies is only effective when combined with efforts to decentralize decision-making, secure long-term resources for local organizations, and strengthen local capacities, including on R&D and response planning.

Lauren Herzer Risi: Share an example that illustrates where you see a need/opportunity for innovative approaches—what is working and where?

Syed Imran Ali: There are some outstanding initiatives empowering local responders to develop solutions to the challenges they face. One example is Creating Hope in Conflict, a funding platform that has supported more than 70 life-saving innovations aimed at reaching the most vulnerable populations in conflict settings—many of them developed by local organizations. Many large international humanitarian organizations have also launched innovation labs (such as Doctors Without Borders' Transformational Investment Capacity and the UN Refugee Agency’s Refugee-Led Innovation Fund), aimed at enabling local communities and field staff to develop solutions that address immediate, context-specific challenges. These initiatives all aim to unlock the creativity of those closest to crises.

One of the harder things to do in humanitarian response is meaningfully engage and center crisis-affected communities in the design and implementation of responses to health crises.

One significant unmet need in the humanitarian sector is the effective use of data for decision-making. While tools like KoboToolbox have revolutionized quantitative data collection; qualitative data, which captures richer, contextual insights, remains underutilized due to the time-intensive nature of its collection and analysis. Innovations in natural language processing, such as Kobo’s efforts to incorporate speech-to-text transcription, machine translation, and large language models are beginning to address this gap, making qualitative data more accessible and actionable at scale.

In humanitarian crises, access to clean water is one of the most critical public health needs. The Safe Water Optimization Tool, developed by my research lab, addresses this by using machine learning to optimize water chlorination and ensure that water remains safe to drink at the household level—where it matters most for public health. This tool transforms routine water quality data into actionable insights, helping humanitarian responders maintain safe water supplies for vulnerable populations.

One of the harder things to do in humanitarian response is meaningfully engage and center crisis-affected communities in the design and implementation of responses to health crises. An organization doing remarkably innovative work in this domain is SeeChange, whose CommunityFirst Framework enables the co-design of humanitarian response strategies to health crises by affected communities and humanitarian organizations. SeeChange has worked with Doctors Without Borders to demonstrate their community co-design approach in Peru, Sierra Leone, and Venezuela. It is through this kind of innovative path-breaking work that progress on the localization agenda can be accelerated.

Ultimately, innovations like these—whether through data-driven insights, surfacing local solutions, or community-based co-design frameworks—demonstrate the critical role that affected communities and frontline responders have in advancing humanitarian response. By continuing to invest in locally-driven solutions that can reach everyone in need, the humanitarian sector can become more fit for purpose and respond more effectively to contemporary crises.

Lauren Herzer Risi: How can cooperation be strengthened among humanitarian, development, and peace and security actors, recognizing the protracted nature of many of today’s disasters, weather or conflict-related?

Syed Imran Ali: Protracted crises, whether driven by conflict or increasingly, climate-related disasters, pose a significant threat to the long-term resilience of both built infrastructure and human systems. A good example of this is the gradual degradation of urban water supply systems in protracted conflicts. Over time, repeated shocks erode system resilience, turning once-functioning water infrastructure into potential sources of public health risks. This erosion can extend beyond physical systems to human systems—degrading social cohesion and community stability, further undermining the functioning of socio-technical systems.

Humanitarian responders need to actively engage with development and peace-building professionals to mitigate these cumulative effects and ensure essential services—such as water and sanitation infrastructure and healthcare systems—can withstand future shocks. This is well understood in the humanitarian sector, and there are considerable efforts underway to ensure that disasters are anticipated, and risks reduced. But the ability of the humanitarian sector to quickly respond to acute crises should not be deprioritized in favor of long-term developmental thinking—a risk that has been borne out in several emergencies in the past decade. Focusing on building long-term resilience is important to do at the right moment, when the acute needs have been met, excess loss of life and disease have been brought under control, and the situation has been stabilized enough.

Lauren Herzer Risi is the director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. Syed Imran Ali, PhD, is a global health and humanitarianism research fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he directs the Humanitarian Water Engineering Lab.

Cover photo: A woman with a child on her back walks past a house which had collapsed due to flooding in the Nakhu river caused by heavy rains in Lalitpur, Nepal, on Tuesday, October 1, 2024. AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha.