New research and awareness about humanitarian response supports recent calls for a fundamental shift in the way that humanitarian organizations operate. OCHA is leading policy efforts to move away from a reflexive response posture and adopt a more anticipatory approach to humanitarian response and preparedness. Global trends like climate change, population growth and urbanization and water scarcity pose increasing challenges to the humanitarian system.
To meet these emerging challenges, the humanitarian community must integrate risk management into planning and response cycles, and work with other development and governmental actors to develop programming to address these risks. Risk management an essential building block in developing resilience approach.
Purpose
Current tools for integrating risk management into your programming are two-fold:
- Index for Risk Management – InfoRM is a tool to for risk analysis and humanitarian preparedness. The tool identifies where crises requiring international assistance could possibly occur and analyzes this risk to enhance humanitarian preparedness. Consider using this approach down the district level of your operating environment as a preparedness and risk assessment exercise.
- District Profiling – A more direct and related version of risk mapping involves assembling profiles down to admin level 2 or lower or baseline information across the operational area. Analysts can use this type of information for hazard and risk mapping, preparedness, and dialogue with host government authorities. While no single tool for district profiling exists, the examples included will help guide the development of your context-specific tool. These risk and profile systems become powerful when overlaid with new data from emergencies and ongoing response to create sophisticated analytical pieces.
District Profile Examples