In a world in which multiple crises overlap, climate change presents new challenges to the work of the humanitarian sector in terms of the scale and speed of responses needed from a sector already under massive pressure. What can humanitarians do when confronted with this reality, and what moral dilemmas will they have to face?

Achim Wennmann, Professor of Practice in the Interdisciplinary Programme, Nagulendran Chair in Peace Mediation, and Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Geneva Graduate Institute, opened the event, emphasising the urgency of worldwide climate action and the pioneering role the Institute must take in addressing the global issues. 

This emergency is universal. It’s everywhere. Everyone will be touched by it. We see it as bad in parts of California and Oregon, as we see in Pakistan and Poland, and parts of Australia. It is everywhere, and the next point is that it will go on being everywhere.

Hugo Slim

In his keynote speech, Hugo Slim discussed the challenges of climate humanitarianism and the need to establish new ethics to face a changing field that affects not just humans in some parts of the world, but the entirety of the planet. 
 

We are earthlings. [...] We are of the earth, and we need to recover that sense of being not just a single species community, but being part of a much wider earth community. There is no human life without other life.

Hugo Slim

To address the issue, Hugo Slim shared the arguments of his new book, Humanitarianism 2.0: New Ethics for the Climate Emergency which hopes to establish a “new framework for humanitarian aid in the long emergency of climate change”. Humanitarianism 2.0 suggests the establishment of four big changes: a new doctrine of humanity; a new sense of impartiality and fairness; new ways to work on the ground; and new organisations that live up to the new purpose.

New humanitarianism, according to Slim, needs to consider not just current crises but the future, the long term. Indeed, he insisted on the idea that all climate and humanitarian decisions need to take into account what he considers to be the three “I”s: the Intergenerational, Intragenerational, and Interspecies. 

Slim also insisted that “Nature needs to be at the table” for all decision making and “represent Nature in humanitarian policy making”. For this, he made the suggestion that the rights of Nature  be legally recognised, as is already beginning to be done in places like the Human Rights Council and the Ecuadorian constitution. 

A high-level panel discussion followed with Hugo Slim, featuring Aida Mengistu, Deputy Head and Senior Humanitarian Affairs Officer at the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Peer-2-Peer support, and Sandeep Sengupta, Global Policy Lead for Climate Change at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Visiting Lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute. The panel was moderated by Jenifer Vaughan, Spokesperson, UN Special Envoy for Syria and former Journalist, CNN and Al Jazeera.