Contribution by Bekele Geleta, IFRC Secretary General, to the Ambassadors at the Humanitarian Liaison Working Group, in Geneva
It is both an honour and a privilege to speak today at the HLWG, especially as a member of a panel including Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes and Deputy Secretary General Hong Yan of WMO.
The humanitarian community is a relative newcomer at these big international conferences of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
For many years climate change was seen as a future problem that could be solved by investing in sufficient reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
And indeed if this approach had been retained, we would not be in Poznan in two weeks from now and in Copenhagen next year.
That approach did not take enough account of the views of scientists, and the global community did not appreciate the sense of urgency which is clear from the Framework Convention itself, and was in the minds of the signatories on that day in May 1992.
So now, we can see with our own eyes that climate change is happening, today.
We can see that the 1992 determination “to protect the climate system for present and future generations” is a promise not yet fulfilled.
Humanitarians find themselves in the first line of defence against the impacts of climate change.
We are confronted with extreme or unusual weather related events that we have never seen before in living memory.
We are confronted with disaster at places where people were safe before.
Humanitarians may be new-comers to the UN negotiations on climate change, but we come with a great deal of practical experience.
As you know from our presentations in various UN meetings in recent years, we have learned in the past that the causes of climate-related disasters are not just extreme natural events.
A major contributor is the lack of means of people to protect themselves against these hazards when they strike.
We have come a long way in improving the humanitarian systems which save lives. We have done much to strengthen capacities, in particular at community level, which empower and protect people and save livelihoods as well.
However the statistics show that we have not been able to stabilise let alone reduce the numbers of people affected by disasters.
Climate change tells us that we will need to invest more in disaster risk reduction, a great deal more.
There is no question that in the coming decades the risks of more extreme weather will further accelerate.
Apart from reducing greenhouse emissions today to avoid future catastrophes, we must now invest in adaptation to the climate changes that can no longer be avoided. This is acknowledged in the Bali Action Plan.
Seven years ago, the Red Cross Red Crescent began to address the risks of climate change and strengthen the capacities of national societies in particular in developing countries in this context.
We found that in addition to the known and knowledgeable scientific climate experts, there is another group of experts: local people who have lived in the same area for generations. They see the weather changing. They see how their traditional knowledge about the weather patterns - knowledge that is often one of the few assets the poor farmer has - has become unreliable.
The Red Cross Red Crescent is in a position to learn from their knowledge and experience because we are present in almost every community in the world.
We have an unrivalled network of volunteers, a high-impact community-based grass-roots approach, and are engaged in development work as well as disaster response.
And the volunteers who are called upon to carry out Red Cross Red Crescent disaster preparedness and risk reduction programmes – including those focused on climate change mitigation – live and work within the affected communities. They are there before, during and after a crisis. Nobody has a greater interest or investment in the success of our climate change mitigation efforts.
With the help of these local experts, the Red Cross Red Crescent works to reduce vulnerability. And with their support, we develop many small and smart solutions to mitigate the impacts of weather related hazards.
With a single project, the Red Cross Red Crescent has planted ten thousand trees in Guatemala to protect communities against the risks of landslides. In Samoa, we introduced water catchment systems to protect against drought. We improve the capacity of local early warning systems all over the world. These solutions do not require massive investment for them to succeed.
This cost-effective community-based approach has been distilled by our Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, which is based in The Hague, and from which an excellent web-based guidance note is available to help National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and others undertake their preparedness and adaptation planning.
In addition our Climate Centre has produced a Climate Guide, which – I say with all modesty – has been acclaimed as an essential tool for communities looking for the most appropriate ways to address climate change in their situations.
All the actions they propose will look very familiar to people engaged with ‘normal’ disaster risk reduction programmes and of course they are. What we are changing is not so much the output, but the input.
Because of climate change we establish contacts with climate change knowledge centres at global, regional and national level. We inform ourselves on a permanent basis about the climate change related risks that are coming. We improve the use of seasonal forecasts tools for early warning-early action.
And what we are also adjusting is our cooperation with governments and intergovernmental organizations.
At the 30th International Red Cross and Red Crescent Conference in 2007, governments and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement acknowledged jointly that the humanitarian consequences of climate change are beyond the capability of any one government or organization, and that they must be addressed by all, together.
The conference slogan, “together for humanity”, applies perfectly to this situation.
This is why the IFRC proposed that IASC members should become more engaged in the climate change negotiations; this is why, when the IASC taskforce on climate change was established, we immediately contacted ISDR to work together on this. We have also included the network working on the role of insurance, the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, in our preparations.
This is why there will be a coordinated inter-Agency vision at Poznan.
But Poznan is a first stop for us all.
What will need to happen between Poznan and Copenhagen is increased dialogue at national level and at interagency level to ensure that climate risks are well understood at the national level, that risk reduction and management is well integrated in the national disaster risk management and development policies, and that the humanitarian consequences of climate change are central to the agenda of national climate change planning.
These points were all accepted, by governments as well as National Societies, in the outcome document adopted at the 30th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
But there is at least some good news: the urgency of the task to address climate change risks is already helping us too overcome the institutional gaps between disaster response, disaster risk reduction and sustainable development. The IASC Task Force and our work with partners including ISDR and OCHA is already bearing fruit, and I am confident that in and after Poznan we will have a strong and well-linked set of inter-Agency positions.
Our objective will be to ensure that the disparate and sometimes disconnected elements of Governmental and other systems properly appreciate the high priority which must be accorded to humanitarian consequences.
Within that, they will appreciate that the greatest priority of all is for the most vulnerable people, those who have contributed the least, but will be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change.