A far greater crisis than Haiti is looming right now according to a leading UK analyst on prevention and planning for solutions to future humanitarian disasters.

“The 1.3 billion people of The Third Pole are today facing cataclysmic threats of earthquake, contaminated water, flooding and disease and policy-makers must wake up to this crisis which is here and now,” says Dr. Randolph Kent, Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College London .

“Let’s get over the political flak about Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 and focus on an actual crisis staring at us today.  The people of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region are living on the precipice of survival, facing certain starvation if just one of a host of cataclysmic threats is triggered. That’s one fifth of the world’s population who’re vulnerable right now to devastating risks,” says Dr. Kent.

He emphasises his message is not one of doom but of opportunity.

“We can mitigate a great deal of human misery if we take action nowto develop new approaches and attitudes towards disaster prevention, preparedness and response. We have new technologies, new humanitarian ‘actors’ and partners and we need integrated action to alleviate the ever-increasing dimensions and dynamics of crisis drivers of the future.  Make no mistake, the crisis drivers of the future will in so many ways be exponentially different from the past and the humanitarian sector needs to learn to ‘plan from the future’ rather than from assumptions and approaches overly wedded to the past.

“We need a new mindset.  The new instincts of policy-makers, humanitarian bodies and military planners must be, to ‘plan from the future’.”

The Third Pole scenario is an immediate crisis point described by Dr. Kent: “As waters become impounded behind the massive dams in the Brahmaputra River over earthquake-prone fault-lines, the sheer volume and weight could cause these faults to rupture at any time, which in turn may cause earthquakes and severe damage to the dams, unless we do something about it.  Think of the devastation to millions of people in that area of the Himalayas. We can release these waters or find new mechanisms to conserve water but given the situation now, this scenario is a high probability. Who’s looking at that and doing something about that to avoid the unbelievable consequences?  As human beings we’re more comfortable with our short term gains rather than dealing with long-term consequences.  The sad thing about all political systems is that real change and real pain can only be endured in the midst of crises. It’s hard to convince the body politic that a crisis has to be handled now for the future.

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NOTE:

1. Dr. Randolph Kent established the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College London in 2006. He has more than 25 years' practical and policy engagement in emergency assistance, serving with the United Nations in natural disaster and conflict areas.
2. The Third Pole is the Hindu-Kush-Himalays (HKH) region stretching from Afghanistan in the west, through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh to China in the east.
3. The HFP can provide an ‘on-the-ground’ spokesperson from ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) in Katmandu to support Dr. Kent’s warnings about the immediacy of the crisis. ICIMOD is a regional learning centre serving the 8 member countries of the HKH region and has direct knowledge of the vulnerability of mountain people to the fragile mountain ecosystems of the area.