20th May 2010

While the uncertainties of climate change would appear to preoccupy scientific and humanitarian minds at present, human kind faces the certainty of new hazards and greater, simultaneous crises in the future, which heighten the vulnerability of rich and poor societies alike.

The Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College London says radio-active leakages and cybernetic collapse are just two examples of new entries on an expanding list of threats, or, crisis drivers, while acknowledged natural hazards such as sub-glacial volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods, as well as complex emergencies, are responsible for an increasing toll of crisis affected communities.

It is abundantly clear that the humanitarian community of 2010 – and that means all those with responsibility for and commited to humanitarian aims – must fundamentally reconsider the ways that crisis prevention and preparedness as well as response are undertaken. Without a major transformation of the ways that we do business, millions of lives will be put at risk.

Of critical importance is the development of a two-way dialogue which enables humanitarian policy makers to engage effectively with scientists to ensure that emerging threats and possible solutions identified by the scientists are incorporated into humanitarian planning.  In turn an effective dialogue will ensure that humanitarian concerns inform the focus of scientific research.

Bringing together a wide range of natural and social scientists and technical experts with humanitarian policy makers and practitioners is the thrust of the Humanitarian Futures Programme.  We employ a Futures Group approach in our work with both UK and international partners, focussing on building understanding of how humanitarian organizations deal with scientific uncertainty.  We are developing a series of tools to support organisations’ capacity to take on evolving scientific learning.  Efforts to strengthen two-way, science-humanitarian dialogue need to address differences in language, time-frame and approach. The dilemma is that scientists need to know what humanitarian organizations want to know about future vulnerability, how much they already know about emerging science in these areas, and how they want this information conveyed to them.  But this, in turn, requires that humanitarian organizations understand enough about relevant areas of science to ask appropriate questions.

There is increasing emphasis on scientists to be able to demonstrate the ‘impact’ and relevance of their work, while humanitarian organizations need to demonstrate the scientific basis for their approach. Enabling scientific understanding to more fully inform humanitarian planning has enormous potential impact for tackling current, emerging and future vulnerabilities.

To help those organisations with humanitarian responsibilities meet the challenges of the future, we work with a range of organisations to foster futures-oriented strategic planning capacities. There are five such capacities which we identify as anticipation, adaptation, collaboration, innovation and strategic leadership. 

Organisational development of these capacities needs to spread more quickly if we are to meet the challenges now and in the near future. The dimensions and dynamics of humanitarian crisis threats are changing exponentially. The reach of such threats is increasingly global, exposing the vulnerability of the poor in more and more places around the world. So, too, the dynamics of crisis threats are intensifying.  Major crises will increasingly occur simultaneously, severely testing the capacity of humanitarian responders. Future humanitarian crisis drivers will trigger a cascade of other crisis drivers, each draining the resilience of affected societies. Synchronous failures, or, systems collapse will also be more evident, as global interconnectedness increases the vulnerability of essential services.      

This is not a doomsday prediction.  Although the humanitarian community of today would not be able to cope with these anticipated scenarios, there is every reason to be optimistic.  Human kind is remarkably inventive, imaginative and innovative.  We have great scientists, technologists, social scientists and experts in humanitarian aid who together can develop strategies which will mitigate the effects of more complex and widespread disasters of the future.    
 Humanitarian practitioners need to understand and embrace innovative science and technology which offer a growing number of new ideas to mitigate today’s threats and the future’s threats. Both the natural and social sciences will contribute a range of ‘tools’ and approaches that can save the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people over the next decade. The key is for those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities to be able to identify, prioritise and implement such innovations.

Priority must be given to long-term perspective planning. Futures thinking must become inherent in organisational planning.  Governments, multilaterals, commercial corporations, the military and non-governmental organisations must invest strategic time in creative thinking about what might be. This must be the mindset and indeed the shift has begun and long-standing views of how disasters play out are being challenged.

It is increasingly recognized, for example, that  humanitarian activities can no longer be limited to a modicum of preparedness and immediate response.  A “new humanitarianism” is called for – one which looks towards dealing with the spectre of long-term threats by preparing now, one which recognizes that the threats of the future will require capacities well beyond those offered by the traditional humanitarian sector. It is a future that more and more will depend upon a dialogue between the sciences and humanitarian policy-makers to identify and prioritise potential threats and opportunities to reduce them.

The Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London, has anabiding objective to help those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities to planfrom the future, to be prepared to meet the challenges of the 21^st century and, in so doing, to become more anticipatory and adaptive, in order  to provide the enabling environment for strategic leadership and to know how to engage in a whole new paradigm of collaboration.