Together We Stand

[ 8 ] One Humanity, Shared Responsibility Mr. Stephen O’Brien, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator T ogether W e S tand T he world is at a critical juncture. We are witness- ing the highest level of humanitarian needs since the Second World War. Humanitarian action has never reached so many people in so many places; but despite delivering life-saving assistance to millions of men, women and children, the humanitarian system is under strain. This is why, for the first time in the 70-year history of the United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has convened the World Humanitarian Summit, scheduled to take place in Istanbul on 23-24 May 2016. At the beginning of 2016, 125 million people require humani- tarian assistance. If that were a country, it would be the 11th largest in the world — comparable to the population of Japan. 60 million people have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict or violence. 30 million of them are children. The brutality of today’s armed conflicts and the lack of respect for the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law threaten to unravel 150 years of achievements, and plunge us into an era of wars without limits. The scale and frequency of natural disasters is growing, and climate change is increas- ing humanitarian stress. In the last two decades, 218 million people each year were affected by disasters; at an annual cost to the global economy that now exceeds US$300 billion. The cost of delivering humanitarian assistance and protection has increased by 600 per cent over the past decade. Image: UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein Children play in the newly established Sosmaqala Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Camp in northern Afghanistan. The camp is comprised of recently returned Afghans following many years as refugees in neighbouring Iran