• Responding to natural disasters

Responding to natural disasters

The scale, frequency and severity of rapid onset humanitarian disasters will continue to grow in the coming years, due to a number of factors - including rapid population growth, especially in disaster prone areas, and changes in sea levels, in global rainfall and stormpatterns. This Independent review of the UK Government's humanitarian response systems argues that the UK, alongside the international community, must devise new ways to respond to disasters.

This document sets out 40 recommendations to DFID based around seven principals, including:

• anticipation: improve anticipation methods of both natural and conflict-related disasters, including a global risk register
  
• resilience: ensure that building resilience is part of the core DFID programme in at risk countries, and promote national response capacities of governments and civil society
• leadership: build coalitions to drive humanitarian reform based on improving leadership, skills improvement within DFID
  
• innovation: nurture innovation, invest in key, emerging and cutting-edge technologies
• accountability: support mechanisms to give recipients of aid a greater voice; create standards to assess beneficiary accountability
  
• partnership: new partnerships with new donor partners (including China, India, Brazil and the Gulf States); maintain its default position that humanitarian response is multilateral; give consideration to where private sector expertise can improve humanitarian response effectiveness
  
• humanitarian space: re-assert the premise that humanitarian action should be based on need, reaffirming the key principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality in the new DFID humanitarian policy; ensure funding is made available for security and risk management for humanitarian
  workers

But in order to deliver the changes in humanitarian assistance responses, DFID will have to make major changes.  The most radical change involves seeing humanitarian concerns as a core part of DFID programming, rather than something that needs to be responded to when it happens. In order to acheive this, it is recommended that DFID:

• develops a new humanitarian policy setting out why the UK responds, where, when and how
• design fast and flexible funding models for emergency responses, to achieve greater preparedness, pre-crisis arrangements, capacity, performance and coherence
• develop and deploy niche capabilities in a more focused way concentrating on those areas where DFID or the UK are able to add value
• build up a library of results, costs of inputs, outputs and outcomes from different countries and regions and different types of disasters in order to be able to carry out effective unit cost analysis and enable fast evidence based decision-making
• prioritise communications as a key factor in the UK’s emergency response

The report calls on the International Development Select Committee to scrutinise progress on the implementation of these findings one year on from the launch of this report.

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