The increasingly frequent and brutal armed conflicts together with climate disasters aggravated by global warming will cause, although the UN recognizes that with the international financing it believes possible to achieve, it will only be able to come to the aid of 190 million.
The organization presented this Wednesday its global humanitarian assistance plan for next year, aimed at providing assistance to 190 million people in extreme need, for which it will require 47 billion dollars, despite the fact that with one month left until the end of 2024, managed to raise less than half of the money it needed for this year (50,000 million).
So far, the concrete consequences of this deficit have been reductions in the food assistance on which millions of people depend, as has occurred in Syria (before the current resurgence of the armed conflict).
It has also had to cut aid for drinking water and sanitation services in Yemen in order to avoid a new cholera epidemic, among other situations.
When presenting the UN humanitarian plan for 2025, the UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, the British Tom Fletcher, acknowledged that it has been formulated based on the understanding that it will not be possible to offer the same level of aid to all people. vulnerable.
“We have to be cynical and realistic” about what is possible and what is not within the organization’s reach, he acknowledged.
Humanitarian funding has been declining more and more in recent years, while needs have grown at an alarming rate, so Fletcher announced that one of his priorities will be to convince donor countries – not only traditional ones, but also to others with the capacity to provide more funds – that “responding to these crises in a practical way and with adequate resources is the most effective way to confront them.”
Of the current crises, the new humanitarian official indicated that this year there were fourteen crises on the map to which it was planned to allocate more than 1,000 million dollars each, among which the most expensive was that of , with a total of 4,200 million dollars.
It has been followed by , where more than 25 million people require life-saving assistance, as well as Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Yemen, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Venezuela and Burma, all of them with higher humanitarian requirements to 1 billion dollars during 2024.
The humanitarian plan responds to the most vital needs that, in many cases, are the difference between life and death, and seeks to finance not only the operations of United Nations agencies, but also of 1,500 international and local humanitarian partners with whom It collaborates on the ground in 32 countries and nine refugee-receiving regions.
This aid network has managed to assist almost 116 million people with food, shelter, medical care and education throughout this year.
