‘There can be no human life without other life. This resets the core humanitarian challenge.’
Composite image using Mikhail Nilov/Pexels
Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford. His new book is Humanitarianism 2.0 – New Ethics for the Climate Emergency
Humanitarian action is not just for humans.
The world will soon be swerving full speed toward a universal climate emergency. Better described as an Earth emergency, the potential devastation of humans and nature makes it blindingly obvious that there can be no human life without other life. This resets the core humanitarian challenge: How do we find life-saving harmony between humanity and nature?
Simply put, saving humans is not enough; humanitarian purpose needs to change. This calls for major top-line changes in humanitarian principles and purpose to get our moral compass pointing in the right direction for an Earth systems crisis that will last for decades. We also need radical changes to humanitarian practice and the rapid merger of humanitarian and ecological agencies.
Updating humanitarianism’s ethics, operations, and institutions requires four big changes to our purpose and practice, to create a Humanitarianism 2.0 that is fit for the long Earth emergency of the 21st century.
Renewing humanitarianism: The core principles
First, we need a new doctrine of humanity that recognises humans as part of a wider Earth community.
In this all-life emergency, it will not do to work with humanitarian principles devised in 1965, largely for war, and just bolt on extra environmental principles as subsidiary policies.
A great achievement of the last 250 years has been to recognise humanity as a single moral community across the world in which every human matters. However, this single-species focus has ethically detached humanity from other life, and imagined that our particular superspecies floats free from nature.
But humanity does not exist in isolation, as every humanitarian worker struggling to connect suffering people to life-giving aspects of nature – water, food, shelter, cooling, and good health – knows. We are earthlings, and it is self-defeating to prioritise humanity alone. We can only live as humans because of other life and the environment that sustains it.
Survival is a joint project between humanity and nature. Each helps the other in forms of interspecies mutual aid. The principle of humanity must be revised to reflect this truth.
A new version might read: “To alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found in the Earth emergency by protecting and adapting human life in harmony with nature.” This signals a deepening of our humanitarian purpose to respect all life and protect the life-giving mutualism between humanity and nature.
The principle of impartiality should also be revised to take nature’s needs seriously and fairly alongside human needs in the allocation of humanitarian aid.
Caring for the future: Precautionary ethics
As a long emergency, the Earth emergency demands that humanitarians take more account of the future in our work. Focusing only on saving life in the present is not enough, when we know that conditions will worsen over time. This knowledge means the future becomes part of the emergency of the present.
Planning from the future, rather than the past, needs to become the norm in humanitarian action if aid is to be timely and relevant to communities struggling to cope and adapt.
This temporal shift in humanitarian perspective is well underway in humanitarian aid’s new emphasis on precautionary ethics. New progress in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Anticipatory Action sees humanitarians spending money forward to protect people and nature from things that have not yet happened.
Anticipatory aid, informed by early warning and impact forecasting, operates days, weeks, and months ahead. Much DRR is focused on longer-term adaptation. This sees humanitarians rightly investing in new infrastructure, ecosystem protection, and nature-based solutions that may take years to build, and which target the protection of life in the next generation that is not yet born.
Planning from the future, rather than the past, needs to become the norm in humanitarian action if aid is to be timely and relevant to communities struggling to cope and adapt. This will see humanitarians more involved in people’s spontaneous adaptation, like cooling and livelihood changes, and formal government adaptation, like energy transition and planned relocation.
A landscape approach: Beyond people in need
Operationally, this new humanitarian purpose – which includes humans, nature, and the future – demands significant changes in humanitarian assessment and response. Instead of focusing solely on human lives and assessing humanitarian need by counting millions of individual people in need, humanitarians need to assess the needs of nature, and anticipate future needs as well.
This means shifting the humanitarian unit of analysis from the individual human to a landscape approach. The humanitarian gaze must look at the integrated needs and capability of humans and nature together across a geography at risk of drought or floods, or suffering in the wake of wildfire, storm, or war. The needs of animals, plants, and ecosystems must be seen alongside the needs of humans, and drive a landscape-based response.
In the drought-affected Horn of Africa, for example, this might mean single humanitarian appeals for all life and ecosystems with estimates of the suffering, need, and necessary response for oceans, rivers, lakes, vegetation, animal life, and human life.
“But this is massive!” I hear humanitarians say as they feel their institutions already at breaking point with human needs alone. They are right, which is why we need the fourth big change.
Change the system: New mandates and new agencies
Humanitarian agencies need to break open their institutions and merge with ecological organisations. Together, these new combined human-and-nature agencies need to scrap their siloed mandates that work in parallel on humans and nature, and commit to new integrated human-and-nature mandates that match the challenge of the Earth emergency.
Like today’s humanitarian principles, our institutions were designed for earlier problems.
We urgently need this shake-up of international mandates and institutions to create a new set of agencies for the Earth emergency.
Like today’s humanitarian principles, our institutions were designed for earlier problems. In his important analysis, Long Problems, Thomas Hale talks about “institutional lag”, when society faces new challenges with institutions bogged down in old practices. We must avoid this, and build new international organisations with 21st century mandates.
For example, if an organisation like Médecins Sans Frontières really wants to work beyond borders, they should work beyond human health and adopt a “one health” approach to the Earth emergency. MSF could merge with animal and plant health agencies to care for all life in a landscape. A key part of this would be to reduce the climate-related spread of diseases like dengue fever, and to stop zoonotic diseases crossing from animals to humans and vice versa.
Such integrated human-and-nature agencies will offer much better value for money for the governments and individuals who pay for them. More rationalised and streamlined agencies would score the win-win of ecological and human goals that is so hard to find in parallel programming, which also duplicates so much bureaucracy in the process.
New integrated ecological and humanitarian agencies also fit the geopolitical moment. The rigorously individualistic humanitarian ethics of the West have never chimed convincingly with the more collective development policies championed by China, India, and other BRICS powers. These major powers may find common cause in updating multilateral institutions towards a Humanitarianism 2.0 focused on finding harmony between humanity and nature.
If we want to live through the Earth emergency, we must show humanity to other life around us.
We must build new ethics, operations, and international institutions that emphasise the mutualism between humans and nature.
We must build toward a new humanitarian purpose: to protect the life of humans and nature simultaneously.
Humanitarian action is not just for humans.
The world will soon be swerving full speed toward a universal climate emergency. Better described as an Earth emergency, the potential devastation of humans and nature makes it blindingly obvious that there can be no human life without other life. This resets the core humanitarian challenge: How do we find life-saving harmony between humanity and nature?
Simply put, saving humans is not enough; humanitarian purpose needs to change. This calls for major top-line changes in humanitarian principles and purpose to get our moral compass pointing in the right direction for an Earth systems crisis that will last for decades. We also need radical changes to humanitarian practice and the rapid merger of humanitarian and ecological agencies.
Updating humanitarianism’s ethics, operations, and institutions requires four big changes to our purpose and practice, to create a Humanitarianism 2.0 that is fit for the long Earth emergency of the 21st century.
Renewing humanitarianism: The core principles
First, we need a new doctrine of humanity that recognises humans as part of a wider Earth community.
In this all-life emergency, it will not do to work with humanitarian principles devised in 1965, largely for war, and just bolt on extra environmental principles as subsidiary policies.
A great achievement of the last 250 years has been to recognise humanity as a single moral community across the world in which every human matters. However, this single-species focus has ethically detached humanity from other life, and imagined that our particular superspecies floats free from nature.
But humanity does not exist in isolation, as every humanitarian worker struggling to connect suffering people to life-giving aspects of nature – water, food, shelter, cooling, and good health – knows. We are earthlings, and it is self-defeating to prioritise humanity alone. We can only live as humans because of other life and the environment that sustains it.
Survival is a joint project between humanity and nature. Each helps the other in forms of interspecies mutual aid. The principle of humanity must be revised to reflect this truth.
A new version might read: “To alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found in the Earth emergency by protecting and adapting human life in harmony with nature.” This signals a deepening of our humanitarian purpose to respect all life and protect the life-giving mutualism between humanity and nature.
The principle of impartiality should also be revised to take nature’s needs seriously and fairly alongside human needs in the allocation of humanitarian aid.
Caring for the future: Precautionary ethics
As a long emergency, the Earth emergency demands that humanitarians take more account of the future in our work. Focusing only on saving life in the present is not enough, when we know that conditions will worsen over time. This knowledge means the future becomes part of the emergency of the present.
Planning from the future, rather than the past, needs to become the norm in humanitarian action if aid is to be timely and relevant to communities struggling to cope and adapt.
This temporal shift in humanitarian perspective is well underway in humanitarian aid’s new emphasis on precautionary ethics. New progress in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Anticipatory Action sees humanitarians spending money forward to protect people and nature from things that have not yet happened.
Anticipatory aid, informed by early warning and impact forecasting, operates days, weeks, and months ahead. Much DRR is focused on longer-term adaptation. This sees humanitarians rightly investing in new infrastructure, ecosystem protection, and nature-based solutions that may take years to build, and which target the protection of life in the next generation that is not yet born.
Planning from the future, rather than the past, needs to become the norm in humanitarian action if aid is to be timely and relevant to communities struggling to cope and adapt. This will see humanitarians more involved in people’s spontaneous adaptation, like cooling and livelihood changes, and formal government adaptation, like energy transition and planned relocation.
A landscape approach: Beyond people in need
Operationally, this new humanitarian purpose – which includes humans, nature, and the future – demands significant changes in humanitarian assessment and response. Instead of focusing solely on human lives and assessing humanitarian need by counting millions of individual people in need, humanitarians need to assess the needs of nature, and anticipate future needs as well.
This means shifting the humanitarian unit of analysis from the individual human to a landscape approach. The humanitarian gaze must look at the integrated needs and capability of humans and nature together across a geography at risk of drought or floods, or suffering in the wake of wildfire, storm, or war. The needs of animals, plants, and ecosystems must be seen alongside the needs of humans, and drive a landscape-based response.
In the drought-affected Horn of Africa, for example, this might mean single humanitarian appeals for all life and ecosystems with estimates of the suffering, need, and necessary response for oceans, rivers, lakes, vegetation, animal life, and human life.
“But this is massive!” I hear humanitarians say as they feel their institutions already at breaking point with human needs alone. They are right, which is why we need the fourth big change.
Change the system: New mandates and new agencies
Humanitarian agencies need to break open their institutions and merge with ecological organisations. Together, these new combined human-and-nature agencies need to scrap their siloed mandates that work in parallel on humans and nature, and commit to new integrated human-and-nature mandates that match the challenge of the Earth emergency.
Like today’s humanitarian principles, our institutions were designed for earlier problems.
We urgently need this shake-up of international mandates and institutions to create a new set of agencies for the Earth emergency.
Like today’s humanitarian principles, our institutions were designed for earlier problems. In his important analysis, Long Problems, Thomas Hale talks about “institutional lag”, when society faces new challenges with institutions bogged down in old practices. We must avoid this, and build new international organisations with 21st century mandates.
For example, if an organisation like Médecins Sans Frontières really wants to work beyond borders, they should work beyond human health and adopt a “one health” approach to the Earth emergency. MSF could merge with animal and plant health agencies to care for all life in a landscape. A key part of this would be to reduce the climate-related spread of diseases like dengue fever, and to stop zoonotic diseases crossing from animals to humans and vice versa.
Such integrated human-and-nature agencies will offer much better value for money for the governments and individuals who pay for them. More rationalised and streamlined agencies would score the win-win of ecological and human goals that is so hard to find in parallel programming, which also duplicates so much bureaucracy in the process.
New integrated ecological and humanitarian agencies also fit the geopolitical moment. The rigorously individualistic humanitarian ethics of the West have never chimed convincingly with the more collective development policies championed by China, India, and other BRICS powers. These major powers may find common cause in updating multilateral institutions towards a Humanitarianism 2.0 focused on finding harmony between humanity and nature.
If we want to live through the Earth emergency, we must show humanity to other life around us.
We must build new ethics, operations, and international institutions that emphasise the mutualism between humans and nature.
We must build toward a new humanitarian purpose: to protect the life of humans and nature simultaneously.
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