I try to keep up to date on developments and trends on a variety of international development topics – my ties to the Pacific mean that I spend a significant amount of time exploring ideas and opportunities around climate resilience. So there’s a backlog of articles on the topic bookmarked on my computer. This morning …
The World Humanitarian Summit was held last week, the culmination of over two years of work by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and based on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, there was a lot to say about it. Now, I’m not always a fan of ‘summits’; I feel they are …
Previously on this site, we’ve discussed the refugee crisis in Europe; the international conventions that dictate and guide responses to refugee flows, in turn a response to the post World War 2 ‘never again’ moral affirmation. We have also discussed the refugees of the future – climate migrants – and the need, if we are …
Continue reading ‘The Absence of Policy AND Practice: the Refugee Crisis in SEA’ »
In a follow-up to our post last week on ‘Never Again,’ let’s talk about climate migration. Currently, there are climate migrants, but as climate change intensifies, the trickle of migrants will turn into a flood of refugees, particularly from the countries and regions most vulnerable to climate change. These are not necessarily regions prone to …
Continue reading ‘Climate Migration – Prepare Now or React Later?’ »
In a recent article, I highlighted an issue that I feel needs more discussion and examination. I was writing about development jargon and the topic of resilience came up. In the article, I noted that I had recently learned that the concept of resilience was understood differently at the community level in a country which …
Continue reading ‘Resilience: Locally Owned or Locally Grown?’ »
If you haven’t yet read the Guardian’s ‘Secret Aid Worker: Two Years After Haiyan, the Aid Economy is Flourishing,’ you really should here. We agreed with nearly every word on the page, particularly the main arguement: ‘Economic development (during disaster recovery) is not a direct result of NGO projects or government initiatives. It’s been a …
Continue reading ‘Beware the Recovery Economy? There’s A Lot to Learn from Aceh’ »
We have been reading headlines on the number of refugees and displaced people (33 million worldwide) for months now, and many updates and commentaries on the process and progress of the World Humanitarian Summit, tasked with idenitfying, through global consultation, how to ‘fix’ an overwhelmed humanitarian and emergency response system. Beyond the fact that it …
Continue reading ‘Addressing Global Crises with ‘Blinders’ On’ »
We felt that this opinion piece (http://gndr.org/news/blogs/item/1436-drr-and-climate-change-adaptation-the-marriage-that-never-happened.html) was too important not to publish immediately: ‘It is a well-known fact that communities perceive and address climate change, disasters and poverty issues in a holistic way and do not approach the threats they face through a fragmented silo approach. Civil society organisations, whose main aim is to …
Continue reading ‘Good Idea, Failed Practice: The ‘Marriage’ of DRR and CCA’ »
Denika Blacklock Karim Cyclone Pam tore through the Pacific in March 2015, the second largest cyclone to make land fall in recorded history. The cyclone affected four countries, lefts dozens of thousands homeless, destroyed infrastructure including hospitals and schools and resulted in severe flooding in some areas. And yet only 10 people died, which is …
Continue reading ‘Disaster Resilience: Why We’re Not Reaching the Most Vulnerable’ »
Lesley Wright with Faisal Ridwan and Tim Walsh Large-scale debris clean-up in a disaster zone is only the start of the process towards recovery – but it’s the first step that leads to the next and the next. It is early recovery demonstrated in a complex but complete nutshell. Aceh was the first and the …
