Spotlight: Collaboration, innovation key to address humanitarian challenges

The complexity in modern world's humanitarian course calls for multilateral collaboration and practical innovation to overcome the weakness in old-fashioned aid method.

Experts from renowned global rescue organizations have agreed upon the idea at a side event named "Jointly Addressing Humanitarian Challenges" of the ongoing World Humanitarian Summit, highlighting their wishes to enhance the efficiency of humanitarian work.

Traditional and non-traditional humanitarian crises coexist and interconnect in the modern world, and all the people should gather together for a better future, said Zhao Baige, Vice Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee of China's National People's Congress.

"Humanitarian crisis tend to develop in diversified forms, including long-standing armed conflicts and natural disasters, as well as modern challenges of climate change, energy crisis and terrorism," Zhao said.

She believes the intricate factors have changed humanitarian work into an all-round issue that is closely related to various security issues of water, energy, environment and health care, which ultimately links to the level of social and economic development.

Zhao urges all sides to coordinate humanitarian actions, deepen international collaboration and establish new mechanism that integrates resources from government, society, and private sectors.

Yves Daccord, Director-General of the International Committee of the Red Cross, agrees that facing new challenges, the existing system of humanitarian work needs to be updated.

He stressed that the so-called system is no longer helpful because the difficulties in meeting the growing needs, the lack of funding and investment, and the weakness in disaster prevention and management all revealed the disadvantages of the outdated mechanism.

"The modern world is connected but fragmented, short of international convergence amid higher risks than ever before," he said. "Besides the lower quality and efficiency, we also need to realize it's harder for those in need to get access to proper humanitarian helps."

"A new concept of changing from being 'competitive' to 'collaborative' is crucial," Daccord said, believing there goes the time when a country can cope with the crisis only by its own, and all the humanitarian organizations, as service providers, shall ensure their aids to be delivered to the exact people instead of to the area just around.

Xavier Castellanos, Asia Pacific Director of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, also mentioned the harder access to the humanitarian aids due to lack of coordination.

"Our work is entangled with too many independent systems, based on which different organizations carry out different actions, which in fact hinder the process of delivering helps and solve real problems," he explained.

Meanwhile, Castellanos noted that natural disasters are not just "natural," of which the management needs thoughts and decisions by human beings.

"This is why big data helps, not only in facilitating the humanitarian work, but also in making rational decisions," he added.

Another German expert Christoph Beier pointed out two obstacles in delivering help -- "silence" that prevents being realized and "different standards" that slows down work steps.

"It's difficult to overcome the shortcomings immediately," he said. "But a leadership, local preparation, innovations and more attention will help boost multilateral collaboration, which is the key to push the humanitarian work to the right future," he said.

During the summit, Zhao highlighted China's the Belt and Road Initiative, brought up by Chinese President Xi Jinping. It provides an opportunity and a platform for countries involved to establish collaboration in humanitarian work and realize hand-in-hand development.

"Highly compatible with the UN principles of peace, equality, cooperation and coordination, the initiative will promote economic cooperation among different countries of the world spanning from Asia, Europe to Africa, and bring together all the powers and their think tanks with different background to realize collaboration in humanitarian work," Zhao added.

The first World Humanitarian Summit opened in Istanbul on Monday, with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calling for improving the global humanitarian system.

The event gathered 5,200 participants, including 65 heads of state and government, representatives from crises-affected communities, NGOs, private sectors and UN agencies.

The United Nations estimates that more than 130 million people across the world are currently in need of assistance and protection. Due to an increase of conflicts in the past two decades and various natural disasters taking place in the period, the need for humanitarian funding is unprecedented, with UN-led appeals having grown six-fold from 3.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2003 to nearly 21 billion dollars at present. Endit