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This article was first published in The New Humanitarian. 

“As global leaders creatively recycle terms to underscore the importance of seizing the “last chance” for action at the COP26 climate summit, hundreds of thousands of poor families living on parched hills above Peru’s capital are already on the dark side of the climate tipping point.” 

“Andean glaciers are in sharp decline – Peru’s glacial area shrank by nearly a third from 2000 to 2016, experts estimate – and it’s expected that resulting water shortages will affect millions in the coming decades in and around Lima, the world’s second most populous desert city.” 

“For two weeks from 31 October, delegates from 197 countries meeting in Glasgow, Scotland will have a hefty agenda of unfinished work left over from the last climate conference in Madrid in December 2019, but they may not be thinking enough about people like Sulcapoma.”

“The headline items will be emission cuts, climate finance for poorer nations, and defining rules for carbon markets. But while the aid sector will certainly be looking out for stronger and more detailed commitments from the world’s biggest polluters to cut their emissions by 2030 and stave off further global warming, it will also be looking for more urgent action right now to help with the growing humanitarian needs already being created by the climate crisis.”

“In 2019, according to the Global Network Against Food Crises, which includes WFP, climate extremes were the main driver of acute food insecurity in 25 countries, while more than 30 million people have been internally displaced due to climate change this year alone.”

“Another major issue going into this year’s talks is finance. At the 2015 Paris talks, it was agreed that all parties, rich and poor, would play their part in reducing emissions. But the target of deploying $100 billion per year by 2020 to help developing countries cope with climate change has already been missed.” 

“Building resilience is key. For the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), that has meant convincing their own donors to invest early and at the local level where communities are on the front line of climate change.” 

“In the poor neighbourhoods above the Peruvian capital, any assistance to avoid a climate calamity, would certainly be welcome, but it is not expected. “They don’t think of investing in poor people who lack water,” said Sulcapoma. “The government forgets us. They never see the necessities of the poor.” “

This article was written by Paula Dupraz-Dobias. 

This article was first published by Forest News. 

“Tree planting in Ethiopia presents opportunities, but also poses unique challenges for local communities. Limited opportunities to influence decisions about reforestation and difficulties securing long term rights to and benefits from trees hinder efforts. Yet with support, the country will be able to meet its tree planting targets, researchers say.” 

“Ethiopia has committed to rehabilitate 15 million hectares under the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100), which is 15 percent of the continental target of reforesting almost 100 million hectares by 2030.” 

“For Ethiopia to effectively meet its goals, it needs to address issues of land tenure, and implement socially inclusive, participatory planning and objective setting, and performance-based monitoring, according to an article published in a special issue of the journal of Forest Ecology and Management.”

“Reforestation policies should take into consideration the lack of historical land-use data, which heightens the risk that an area targeted for reforestation may not have previously been forested, increasing the potential for negative environmental consequences if afforestation is implemented.”

“Current tree-planting targets are based on the belief that forests covered 40 percent of the country’s land area and that they were depleted throughout the 20th century, but we don’t know that for a fact,” said Habtemariam Kassa, a principal scientist with the Center for International Forestry (CIFOR) Research and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and one of the authors of the paper, explaining that the earliest national survey of forest cover in 2000 indicated that only 12 percent of the country was forested or covered in woodland. “We don’t have national-level data before that”.”

“About half of land in Ethiopia is used for pastoral and agropastoral activities and scientists are concerned that afforestation, wrongly identified as reforestation, could impinge on these areas. Currently, these areas are under threat from exotic and indigenous invasive woody species, which could be misidentified as natural regeneration.” 

“Further complicating matters, the scientists learned that there is also a perception that local communities in Ethiopia cause forest loss because they are poor and as a result, out of need, put undue pressure on resources. Yet the relationship between poverty and deforestation is not that simple, said Stibniati Atmadja, a scientist at CIFOR-ICRAF, and a co-author on the paper. “The rich and powerful have more means to do more harm to forests.” ” 

This article was written by Jullie Mollins. The research results form part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry.

This article was first published by The New Humanitarian. 

This brief was first published by the Center for Global Development.

“This brief summarises three years of research under the project “Rethinking Humanitarian Reform” led by Jeremy Konyndyk, Patrick Saez, and Rose Worden, and funded by the aid departments of the United Kingdom and Australia. The project aimed to understand the incentives behind the humanitarian system and shift them to better prioritise the needs of affected populations.”

“Changes sought to pull the disparate components of the sector towards a more unified approach to leadership, coordination, financing, and accountability. They usefully established a more predictable international humanitarian coordination structures and a new contingency fund (CERF), under the leadership of the UN.”

“Following the fragmented response to the Syria crisis and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, a fresh set of reforms was launched via the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit—notably a package of comprehensive commitments between donors and aid agencies to efficiency and effectiveness, known as the Grand Bargain. In it, participants committed to improve humanitarian financing by increasing direct support to local and national responders, reducing earmarking, and including people receiving aid in making decisions which affect their lives.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis of truly global scale and it will place enormous constraints on traditional humanitarian operations: models accustomed to surging support toward geographically delimited crises must now tackle a geographically unlimited crisis and huge obstacles to surging personnel and resources…Humanitarians will have to rethink the way the response is planned, coordinated and financed…All this should press traditional humanitarian actors toward a deeper and more equitable partnership with, host governments and local actors – both because local leadership in this crisis is critical to success, and because it is an operational inevitability.”

“The fact that COVID-19 prompted a pivot back to habitual practices—rather than accelerating a shift toward reform commitments—is a signal that the Grand Bargain reforms, like those before them, have not been transformative. Worse, they might have entrenched power imbalances, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability to people in crises. Every major disaster is a test of how far the humanitarian system has changed. Earlier crises forced a reckoning of the shortcomings of previous reforms; now, the humanitarian sector must learn from its response to COVID-19.”

“Ultimately, it is a political and philosophical choice. Are humanitarian actors committed to building a system in which affected people will set the tone, rather than big institutions? Are those big institutions, the leaders who run and oversee them and the donors who fund them, willing to redefine their role and share their power? Will they support a sector in which institutions measure their impact in terms of partnerships and outcomes, rather than revenue? Can international institutions evolve toward enabling others’ success, rather than emphasising their own delivery and flag-planting? Can global humanitarianism adapt to elevate the views of affected people, rather than the mandates of global institutions, as the organising principles for humanitarian action?” 

“We proposed several major changes to the humanitarian architecture to facilitate such an evolution. Importantly, these shifts would span four levels of the humanitarian landscape: adopting independent accountability mechanisms to enable a people-driven response, using area-based models of frontline coordination, remaking the financial business model to resource the humanitarian system as a public good provider and adapting the sector’s governance to more effectively steer its humanitarian impact.”

This article was written by researchers Patrick Saez, Jeremy Konyndyk and Rose Worden.

This article is a Q&A with Steve Schifferes, Honorary Research Fellow, University of London. 

This article was first published by Organisation & Society.

“Control and management can be what builds trust.”

“With this article we wish to encourage reflection on different conditions and consequences surrounding trust based management. New Public Management (NPM) and the reforms that relate to NPM have been increasingly criticised in the past few years. In response to the criticism, the government in 2016 appointed the Trustdelegation with the mission to develop so called trust based management for the public sector. In the popular debate, trust tends to be understood as an alternative to formal governance, measurements and control. It has been assumed that a reduction of this kind of governance will improve the prospects of trust. But this is not given.”

“Formal governance, measurements and control do not always diminish trust. Our research show that it can actually be the other way around. In a study of governance and trust within development cooperation we recently discovered that formal governance with traditional NPM qualities was seen as a crucial source of trust, particularly for inter-organizational relationships at a distance. We argue for the fact that this can explain why NPM still lingers on.”

Read more about the key takeaways from the research behind this article in the full version.

This article is written by Susanna Alexius, Associate Professor at SU, and Janet Vähämäki, Team Lead & Senior Researcher at SEI.

This review was first published by SvD.

David Nilsson, researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, shares his opinion on the new book “A dizzy task: Sweden and aid 1945-1975” (En svindlande uppgift: Sverige och biståndet 1945-1975) by Annika Berg and Mattias Tydén.

“A well-organised development in the third world was considered to be a wise investment during the childhood of international aid work in the 1940s and 50s. Despite humanitarian reasons, the fear of hordes of poor people seems to have been the heaviest motivation, according to the new book “A dizzy task”.

This article was first published by The Conversation. 

Nick Bernards, Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, discusses the role of the global economy in relation to sustainability and climate action. 

“The world absolutely needs to reduce or eliminate emissions, and fast. But while many of the problems inhibiting effective climate action are political, they aren’t really about politicians failing to do anything. There has actually been plenty of climate action over the last couple of decades. So far, however, it’s largely failed.”

“We live in a world marked by severe disparities of wealth and power within and between countries, many of which are rooted in longer histories of colonialism and exploitation. These disparities have often allowed powerful companies in sectors like finance and energy to dictate the course of climate action. This has made it very difficult to pursue measures that might threaten their interests, but which would dramatically reduce emissions – like banning fossil fuel exploration.”