Making a bad situation much much worse: when disaster meets conflict

[Music] Why is it that similar disasters affect some places in a much more severe way than others? And what happens when a country is living through a conflict, and all of a sudden it's faced with a disaster? [Music] And we're not just talking about sudden disasters in the middle of high intensity conflicts. For example, the 2018 Flash floods in Afghanistan that occurred during the height of a civil war. We're also talking about disasters that happen in places that have been in a less intense conflict for several decades. When it comes to disasters in conflict situations, everything becomes thousands of times more complicated. [Music] If you ever sat and wondered how disasters like floods and earthquakes intersect with conflicts, or how climate change will influence the disasters and responses of tomorrow. [Music] Humanitarianism is often thought to be about heroes and victims, but really it's about people just like you and I, living through and dealing with extreme situations in their own ways. [Music] But the humanitarian system is itself a patchwork of people and organizations. And like all systems, the people who work within it can make mistakes or bad decisions that have severe repercussions. In the Good Humanitarian, we'll delve into all of this and more with experts from the Hague Humanitarian Study Center. [Music] Welcome to the Good Humanitarian. I'm Tom. And I'm Sarah. In today's episode, the fourth of this series, we'll be speaking to Dr. Rodrigo Manor, Deputy Director at the HSC, and one of the leads of the research project when disaster meets conflict, which ran from 2015 to 2020. Since then, he's worked on several other projects, all of them addressing anticipating crisis, reducing the effects of disaster, and preparedness for the future. We'll talk about how societies can prepare for crises, why some societies are much more affected by disasters than others, and what happens when a disaster takes place in the middle of a conflict. Welcome, Rod. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So, Rod, to begin, what is defined as a disaster, and why is it that some disasters affect a country or play much more than others? Well, that's a really interesting question, and I think it starts the second part with the first one. What is a disaster? And maybe I would like to bring here a perspective that many people is not yet aware of, and it's a concept and idea that is called that disasters are not natural. Are you aware of this idea? Interesting, because I've always separated the memory into natural and man-made. So, is it all of it man-made? Well, I would say human-made, or human-related. Basically, yeah. In reality, that's a main issue. This is something that we know for a long period of time. So, if I can give you maybe a brief example before I explain it a bit more, please do. I'm originally from Chile. And in Chile, we have a lot of disasters, earthquake, flood, floods, and so on. But in Chile, when you. I mean, if it is an earthquake, you keep drinking coffee, and it's really strong, maybe you run away. In reality, in Chile, when it's a normal medium, you know, tremor, who is the one running? Are the tourists? That's how you spot who is not a Chilean, really. But when I'm in the power, when I'm in Haiti, where am I in other countries, the same earthquake of 7.5 will create a lot of disaster. Where a lot of people will be affected, building will fall. Is it the movement of the tectonic plate that creates a distraction? Oh, is it how the society were prepared for it? How buildings were built? How the society's prepared world investment goes? And in that sense, I think we can all agree, it's much more about the society than the movement of the tectonic plate. Therefore, it's much more about the social aspect, the political aspect that decisions made or not made by societies, rather than the natural asset or the natural phenomenon, as the movement of the tectonic plate, for example. Well, let's jump in there because I heard some technical terminology that I'm going to have to ask you to explain. So let's start with you said hazard. Why didn't you say something else? Well, technically a hazard, it's something that have the potentiality. It potentially can harm you or others. And that says, the movement of tectonic plate can produce harm, if you're not prepared for it. A lot of rain, I mean, we are now in a rainy day in the Netherlands. And the same amount of water that is raining here, I mean, nothing happens, we are prepared for it, a module gets wet, but that's okay. But the same water in another country, another place that is not prepared for it, might turn into a big, big flooding. So rain itself has the potentiality to create harm, to affect people, to have a huge impact. But it's not only that rain, that rain needs to meet, it needs to encounter, need to happen in places that are vulnerable, and that's another term. It's vulnerable, I mean, that people is susceptible to be affected by it. So it's not the movement of tectonic plate, it's not the amount of rain, or the lack of rain, you know, that create drought, floods. It's much more about how societies are prepared for it. And when you're talking about hazards, are you just talking about extreme weather, or are you talking about other things? Well, technically, by definition, if you take the UN and disaster risk reduction offices and other definitions, a disaster and hazards can be not only natural or weather-related if you want to call it, or technological, geological earthquakes or so. It can also be conflict, it can also be weapons, it can be also some people call it technological or technical-related disasters, like the case of Fukudima, or what happens in Ukraine, in the reactor of. Zaporicia, Chernobyl. Oh, Chernobyl, sorry, bye bye. So, yeah, I mean, there are many factors that can affect people. But my research and my focus point is what it would call natural hazards related disasters. So earthquake, flash floods, fire, not so much based on technological failure, or directly violence. Well, I think if we say vulnerability, most people have an idea of sort of what we're getting at. But vulnerability is how prepared a society is. Maybe it's not just a society, but let's stick with society, if the East is safe. So, what are some of the ways that a society can prepare so that a hazard doesn't become a disaster? Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. We have a whole framework and approach it to these, and the technical term is disaster risk reduction, or we're going to be using the acronym, the RR. And historically, people focus on the RR mostly on the hazard part. So, how do we prevent this hazard, this natural event, sort of, to say, to reach people or to affect people? So, typical approaches are, for example, building builds, building, you know, constructions that they are earthquake proof, more to build like a contention wall on a river basin, so the river does an overflow, and so on and so forth. But you're focusing on that the hazard really manifests. But the other way is to make people less prone to be affected, to reduce people's vulnerability. And that's really complex because that comes with a lot of societal effects. But it comes to be where people live. A good example on this is the issue of IDPs, interlinders place, people in places under conflict. But also in most countries, who are the ones living in places more affected by disasters? Who are the ones living at, for example, the slopes of a big hill? There are two options. People reach enough to build there in a safe way, to have really nice houses that they will, you know, even if there is a big, you know, like landslide, the house won't go down, and if they go down, they don't care because they have a good insurance in place, or people that don't have any other place to live. And they need to go to the outskirts of the city. And that's why we're talking about vulnerability. It's all these social conditions that make some people be more at risk more at proximity, sort of to say, or they are more susceptible to be affected. If something, out of the ordinary, something that is too extreme or too strong, might reach them or what they are. You mentioned there are physical ways of reducing vulnerability. So say you spend loads of money on your house, structure, or building, or skyscraper, whatever, is incredibly well built and it's well engineered so that it can resist earthquakes. For example, so that's like a physical thing. I think most people will be able to picture a well-designed building is going to flex in an earthquake, not collapse. What are some of the non-physical things? So what are some of the like. When the answer is not just build the building better, what are some of the social aspects of vulnerability that maybe affect how society is prepared for disaster? Well, there are many. Why don't they have to be, of course, with resources? So how much money do you have, but also networks? You know, people know it. I know it's a really important one. Do you know that you are in a place that you are at the risk of something to happen? And if something happens, do you have the knowledge to act on time who is informing you that something's happened so you at least can run or you can do something in advance? But also do you have capacity to say recover on time? If something affects you, how much you can recover properly? So all these kind of things are more like socially embedded processes that it might or create vulnerability. But vulnerability actually goes much, much deeper. It's only been historical, you know, historically. Why some cities have been built in certain places? And what is understandable, I mean, we understand that people always have live around rivers in front of river, next to rivers of water. The question is, do we still need to do it? And even if people need to live next to the river, can they live in a way where maybe the houses are built in a particular way that if something happened, they can or prevent that from happening or act on time to be less affected and if they are affected we go with properly. I'm going to tee you up for another technical term here. How can we predict how likely, say, a river is to flood? And then how do we weigh up the cost it's going to be to rebuild a load of houses, for example, versus how likely is the river will flood or a landslide will happen or earthquake will happen? Well, in more technical terms, we can develop a Sastorese assessment. What we can assess, how much or which of the probability of a place to be affected by a particular disaster and which are the possible impacts of it. However, this is many times or most of the time not such a quantifiable number. It's much more an narrative, it's much more an understanding of how much people can be affected or not. So we have definitely a lot of tools or techniques or methods to do it. I was just curious because based off of your the different experiences that you've had, I'm just curious if you have examples of how countries manage disaster. And you also talked about how there's certain tools humanitarians use such as the disaster risk. How are other tools, perhaps from different stakeholders filter into a tool like that as well. So I'm just, I'm, yeah, I'm curious how this comes about. Well, depends first we need to understand to what people is at risk of. And that's the most important tool that we have. And that's something that we don't we cannot take for or give in sort to say, particularly in place affected by conflict. Everyone is focusing on the conflict on the violence on the bullets. So to say, and unfortunately there is not yet enough understanding or acceptance that people is also the risk of other things. But people in this place are also affected by flash floods earthquakes and that the capacity to recover is much lower in this place. But also the capacity to respond by any authority in the places lower. So if in normal places when people is affected by a disaster, there is ambulances and there are normal emergency services in many countries, that's not possible. And even in country that they are better off, so to say, people is leaving these lands. I don't like the term, but to explain in really poor areas, are they good access for fire trucks to come in? You know, how do you know how much people is living there? Maybe people is leaving, you know, a lot of people in one small house. So it's not the same when you have five people living in a big house, when you have 15 people in a small house. So something happened that how you have much more people affected. So in that sense, there are a lot of factors coming in to understand how complex is to really trying to address disasters. All right, so now that we've been through vulnerability and we've been through risk and we've been through hazards, let's go back to where we started. We know that disasters affect other places, places differently from others due to a wide range of factors. What happens then in a conflict? So what is it about a conflict that makes a disaster so destructive or so out of the ordinary or so, you know, difficult to respond to? Yeah, definitely. I mean, conflict is part of society, but here I guess we're talking particular place affected by violence conflict and to give a good image to people, place affected by the so-called civil war or high level of unrest. And in this places, there are a lot of things happening that actually can create conditions for more disasters to happen, but also prevent action that we can do to address them. For example, one of them is that conflict creates a lot of social vulnerability. People is much more poor or sometimes the mechanism that they have to respond to disasters is reduced. I was, for example, in South Sudan in places affected by drought and they will have seasonal drought from time to time. And they know what to do. They can sell the surplus in the market later on. They can deal with it. However, since the conflict came seen, many of the men have forced to join armed groups, but also the market will disrupt it. And the route to the market are really dangerous at the moment. So something that it was, the drought was not a disaster. The drought was just a natural phenomenon that they were responding to it normally, but now that it's a big conflict, all those coping mechanisms that the proper trend that we have are being affected. You cannot go to the market. There is no functional market. So now you cannot deal anymore with something that was normal to you. So that's one of the ways. But the other is also conflict is really expensive. And there is no much money flow into this place for this kind of things. Donors won't reininvest in a contention wall that they know they might be destroyed by conflict or people might be utilizing in the future. So there's a lot of infrastructure and a lot of funding that are not going to this place because of conflict, but also conflict prevent the building or the building else setting up of these solutions. Another effect is that conflict many times result in forced displacement. People need to move on play to another. And that's how they move to place over there, as I said, at risk of a disson disaster. They don't know that maybe they're settling in a play that they're going to be flooded in the future, but also they don't have their houses. They don't have their resources. So they're much more vulnerable. So as I said, in a normal situation maybe they can deal with it, but now that I'm in this place, maybe not. And also they sometimes, you know, settle in displacement camps that create another kind of risk, you know, to infections and so on. But also conflict lead a lot of destruction and affectation to the environment. So we know that conflict and war create a lot of deforestation, for example. And if you deforestation, you clear a whole landslide, sorry, a slope of a hill, for example. Next season, that rain won't be captured by the roots that will be a flood. You know, war and conflict create a lot of destruction to the environment, sometimes to the river, the impact river flowing patterns. And so sometimes also can distract affect the environment, creating conditions for disasters. And of course, when disaster happens, or even if we want to work to prevent them from happening, who can do that in a safely way? It's difficult to do it. It's challenging. It's unsafe. It's extremely expensive and politicized. So all the effort that in other countries we put to prevent disasters are being kind of affected here. And finally, it's a different level, but it's an instrumentalization and politicization of aid and disasters. In place affected by conflict, a lot of people will see that these measures come with money. These measures come with things that many people will try to instrumentalize or use it to their own purpose, for another purpose that I know the purpose of aid. I have been in countries where, for example, the disaster, and it is not only for disasters, you know, but humanitarian actors are coming in with boxes to support people or whatever. But the authority in place, yes, say, okay, you can only deliver this if we go together. And I put my extra stamp on the box. And now they come to the community, to the villages. I don't like the concept community, but they go to the people and say, hey, I'm bringing these people to support you. And that creates a lot of issues for humanitarian actors. Because I start thinking, well, do I want to be, you know, embedded or working together with this political actor that maybe has also been the perpetrator of a lot of human rights and others suffering? Maybe not. But if I don't do it, I don't have access to these places. So can I withdraw and not support people affected by crisis or disasters? Can I compromise my neutrality or other concept that maybe you have talked in the podcast before? So that's a really challenging aspect. So conflicts in our recent situations create a lot of even more variables, even more too many of them making much more complex to prevent, to respond and definitely to recover. Yeah. And I know that you said that you don't like the word communities in this sense. And I hope you don't mind me using it. No, we can just. But, um, yeah, are they involved in this sort of intervention process at any point in time? Or is it just that, you know, here, here you go, here's aid and that's it. Because we've spoken about in other episodes, we've spoken about making aid more local. And I guess that if you have a conflict situation and you need to do some sort of humanitarian aid roll out, it's going to be even harder to make it localized. I mean, there are different languages that we can take. Technically, aid and support is always local. I mean, the first people supporting each other are the same people affected. So it's already localized. Yeah. It's the same. And even if you talk about the international individuals, most of the staff providing support assistance to people are also local actors. So when we talk about localization, what are we talking about? Are we talking about word decision making or what decision I've been made about? It's about where the money comes from or which log is the way of your parade of. So the main question is about, I probably use Pogodis in another one is, who is the local? What is localization? How that works. But in case of disasters in conflict, definitely, there's no other way of doing it that involves in people affected. However, as you well pointed out Sarah, it's not always the case. Many times there is a lot of top-down approaches where you just, you know, go to people and say, hey, this is what we're going to be doing. And this actually, I have seen is a lot in the concept of around the idea of the RR, this is at the risk reduction we spoke before. That sometimes, this is quite interesting because donors or the international community, now we've claimed a change also, they say, hey, that particular place is at risk of being flooded or is at risk of heat wave. We need to do something about it. And they put money and funds for that kind of particular project. And they invite organizations to put, you know, proposals to go and do something. We thought even talking with people that live there. And then you go to these people say, hey, we have all this money and we have all this amazing project to be implemented to prevent flooding from happening. And I have been in these situations many times when I have seen this happening on the ground. And people say, well, I mean, it's not harming me. It's nice to have this money into this happening. However, what I have done sometimes is ask them if instead of being offered this particular project only for floods, someone who would have asked you in advance, which are your most important needs. What do you need today? Interesting enough, people usually goes to what is called everyday life. people said, "Yeah, flat might destroy my house next winter, but I don't have electricity tonight. Or I cannot go to the school hospital tomorrow because the routes are not in good shape." So yeah, I like to prevent the flood, but I also want to live tonight in a more decent or better way. So the question is, how do we involve communities at early stages where we don't have a one-housard approach? This is something really important and we start building up a multi-housard approach, understanding that livelihoods are, and because we are not focusing on the hazard, we said disasters are much more about vulnerability. How do we work with people with vulnerabilities? Be John, the vulnerability to a particular hazard, the everyday vulnerabilities. How do we can develop? How set are they not only more as Tom was saying, "You know, more assistance to earthquake, but also provide people a better way of living." And you can start combining findings. You can start combining projects in this way. Some people are pushing for something called trip and neck, so that's not a complete other discussion. But definitely we can do a more integrated approach. And for this, we need to include definitely talking with people affected or people at risk, ideally not affected. I mean, that's a point. We need to. Yeah, preferably you would do something to make sure they don't become affected. I mean, technically we can do it and that's the issue. I mean, we need to understand, and I'm going to say something that can be problematic for a lot of people, but probably we can prevent 88 or more or more of all disasters happening in the planet. And that's not something, you know, too simple to say. The amount of million of people affected every year by disasters, and all of a sudden we know that we can do something to prevent them. That will prevent a lot of suffering in the planet. Also we reduce a lot of the costs of this. There is a lot of research showing that I haven't seen any piece of research or practice example that doesn't show that preventing disaster is cheaper, more efficient than responding to it. But it's not only about monetary cost. There is no way to valorize how much is the cost of one human life, or livelihood deterioration, or keep not going to school for one year. The impact, you know, the butterfly effect later on. So technically we should start moving into preventing disasters. But this is the thing that we are not yet doing it, as particularly in place of effect by conflicts. Can I ask you a rather provocative question? Yes, of course. Is there incentive to not prepare? Is there something to gain from it from different actors or stakeholders? Well, I don't know if it's incentive. Some people is incentive, I like to do it, definitely. Another provocative thought. Why do we still have the concept of natural disaster? And it becomes some people benefit of it, particularly people in power. Also for politicians, authorities, it's better to blame all these disasters, it's, you know, gods or it's karma, you need something external coming to us. Instead of saying no, it's how we are developing our societies. It's where we put in this measurement. It's about regulations, it's about corruption, it's about social injustice, it's our decisions. But it's better to blame external factors coming to us rather than take responsibility from it. But other actors really, monetarily, they benefit out of it. And there's companies to name one, but there are many others. So there are a lot of people benefiting out of disasters, also in conflict zones. But there's also a lot of myth about disaster reduction in conflict places. A lot of people think there is not possible. A lot of people think that it's going to be wasting money because they're comfortable destroyed in the, you know, later on. So we need to start really focusing on the idea that it's possible, but it's going to be different. It's possible by why limitations. It's possible, particularly as we said before, if you move away from one hazard and you start connecting with people from a living, living people life. I wanted to pick up on something that you mentioned earlier. So you said that when there is, when there is research done to talk to people about what the most kind of pressing or immediate issue is for them, often they'll talk about what is in their daily lives as opposed to what could happen at some point in the future. When you ask that question in a conflict zone, does that become even more kind of like pointy people will say, obviously, the biggest problem I've got is there's a conflict going on. It's not about the chance of an earthquake in 10 years. It's like, there is a conflict happening five kilometers from my house. And how does that affect how you might prepare for a disaster if you know that the thing that could maybe not most improve people's lives, but the most immediately improved people's lives would be an end to a conflict, especially because I guess in many places, you're not going to really be able to change the conflict. So that's exactly the point in places affected by conflict, as we spoke before, probably there is no much or our own capacity to do something about, you know, to stop the conflict by on its it's really limited, but our capacity to prevent the start of from happening is actually quite high. And if both are connected and both are interrelated and both are affecting people, we can put much more focus on what we can do rather than we cannot do. And we can definitely work on reducing the risk of disasters in place affected by conflict, not only in disaster risk reduction, but also everyday more is strongly the idea of anticipatory action. To at least, you know, not in advance that something will happen and how we can act earlier or on time. But in scent, it's not there. I mean, some people in the audience might be aware of something called the Sendai Framework. Is this kind of these global meetings, you know, an agreement between countries or how do we address pressing topics? We'll put it in the show. Okay, and the Sendai Framework is about disasters. How do we approach disasters? So in the 90s, the approach was how do we prevent people, reduce the number of people dying from? So it was really on their response. But now there is a focus is on, well, let's not even focus on the response. Let's even prevent it from happening, trying to avoid it from happening. And all that sounds good. But you know how many times conflict is mentioned in the Sendai Framework? Do you want to guess, sir? No. Zero. Yeah. Okay. And not only in the Sendai Framework, in many of these documents conflict, violence and these kind of things are not there. And we can have a whole episode on why this is happening. We probably do. But the reality is that most people don't even foresee how much disasters and conflict relate. In fact, we have now statistics showing that in some years up to 90% of places affected by conflict are also affected by a disaster. Is because conflict and disasters are highly related. Because as I said before, there are many things that conflict create or conditions that makes disasters happening while affecting people that in other places wouldn't be. And not only disasters and conflict are co-occurring, but also the impact of disasters is much higher. Statistically, more than 50% of everyone who died out of a disaster is happening only in places affected by conflict. Do I have a delay? Yes, sir. I mean, this is statistics for more than 50 years. I mean, some papers that we wrote about it, so people can go find the numbers and the modeling behind. But it's a big national, international agreements on this are not to get about this. If donors are afraid of the where, because many of them are moving, so I also need to be positive as people, this has been changing. But historically, we have not been approaching disasters and conflict zones. Everyone is too focused on the conflict and too afraid of acting on it. That means we are living behind first a huge amount of people affected. Even there are more affected than others, people that can recover less, that is less capacity to respond. So we are living behind too much people. In places where actually this is the only place, or one of the few things that we can really do, I mean, how you can stop our work is difficult, but you can still act on this if you want. And we have the capacity and the knowledge, the question that we have the willingness. Yeah, and where do you think that comes from? Like, why is it that it's, because you said this has been like a stable statistic for the last 50 years. Yes. But why do you think there hasn't been proper thinking into this? Well, in part it's because it's still quietly embedded in societies that disaster is something that has happened to people and not something that we are creating, that our social environment creates, you know, vulnerability conflict. So it's something that's turned us off. So what can we do about it? So first is because people is not aware that we can do something about it. We can prevent disaster from happening. Maybe not 100% of them, but quite a lot of them. Because people is really afraid of conflict zones or places on the high level of complexity, because I think that it's not possible, not sustainable. It's unbiased, it's not, you know, viable. But in reality, we are showing that it's possible. It's complicated, definitely. It's extremely difficult. And we have been implementing projects recently. It has its own limitation, but I mean that it's impossible. And literally, I think we are quite behind in how to do it. Like how they know how we are still building up in place affected by conflict environments. So actually the goal is we need more people, investing, thinking, learning about how to do it. But experience so far in, I have worked on conflict places. I have, for my mind, I have done disaster reduction in at least seven conflict zones, countries or regions. In all of them, there was possible to do something. Not perfect, but something. And when we're talking about people at that level of vulnerability, people at that risk, that something means a lot. Also, I want to pick up on something that we've mentioned donors and money and financing quite a lot here. And I'm starting to get the idea that these risk reduction activities are quite expensive. We've mentioned retaining walls. We've mentioned rebuilding buildings. You know, we've mentioned even moving whole groups of people or villages or towns, whatever. This all sounds pretty costly. And I agree with you that it's definitely worth doing. Is it always going to be an expensive process to reduce risk or are there some steps that can be taken in place? As you said, it's always worth doing something. Yes. In reality, I mean, two things. It's not always expensive. Actually, Tom, yourself, a coin to term. in a blog post, I think recently they've frugal. Yeah, I've already sent myself up for this one. Are you going to frugal? Well, kind of a frugal, but frugal, the other. The other cast, not me. But the reality is, yeah, there is, there is a lot of solutions that they are really, really low cost. And actually, to be honest, a lot of these solutions come from the same people affecting the communities because they are the first one who know their environments and they have developed over the centuries or decades ways of understanding their environments and how to address, you know, and believe in there. So definitely it's not always expensive. However, even if we become expensive or require some level of funding, it will always be cheaper, not only financially but also emotionally and many other terms, than responding to it. And especially in places like the conflict of this level of vulnerability, where the impact is much higher. But definitely doesn't need to be expensive. And that's, it's the amount of really simple solutions out there. It's impressive. Yeah. Do you want to give an example? I've got, I'm going to set you up one that I happen to know that you know about. So we, Sarah mentioned early warning and we've spoken about flooding. And we know that there are ways of predicting rainfall and we know that there are ways of predicting to some degree of accuracy when how a flood is going to occur. But often they're pretty expensive. I happen to know that you've also worked on a much cheaper way of predicting these things. Well, definitely we can develop and there are a lot of modeling satellite images and, you know, and riverbusting and studies to know, you know, how much water the river can hold in the future. And this amount of rain will create a flood at the blah, blah, blah. But a lot of these things, they don't calculate or it's impossible to model how people interact with the river, how people modify the river. Are we cleaning the canals? Are they cleaning another one off? Is because of the world we are open a new branch of it. Is people settled in which part? So there's a lot that we can, especially in places under conflict, we don't have this information. And a lot of these models also develop or they build up on missions on the ground, you know, like you really need to be on the river to measure, you know, how high the water goes or not. But again, many places at this information is not there. Or it was there, but it was destroyed because part of warfare sometimes due to destroying information of others to manage properly. But something that I know people and I have seen it in many places doing, people place in river basins or in more canals as more water goes, gouch, how do you pronounce it? Gouch, but I don't even know what this is. What does that even do? So it's a little cap. Technically, we all let a cone. Okay. That's it's out there. So every time the rain water comes in this pipe on this cone, it's glass. And it has some marks of, you know, one, two, three, four, five. So if it rains a lot, that glass will quickly reach number five. It doesn't, you know, so it's an easy way of calculate how much water is coming in, how much is raining. And people in many places, historically, they know that every time that it rains more than three, let's say millimeters, the river or the canal or whatever they have at home, it will overflow because they know that there's no capacity, you know, it's certain capacity of water that they can hold. So people already know, okay, it's getting to 2.5. There's a lot of rain. Okay, probably this will overflow. And some people do something, you know, they close sometimes some meeting dams that they have or they open dams, you know, the open solution, they manage or they move things away or when it's getting close to the threshold that's more technical concept, they start, for example, putting some duff and some bags at the border of. So there's a lot of things that people can do when they know in advance of something might happen. The important thing is that in these places, a lot of technologies lost or people, you know, they don't even know because they have been displaced, as we say. But also we have, I mean, climate change now, there is changing sometimes the frequency and intensity. And although if we keep talking about no natural disasters, climate change is only affecting weather patterns, they don't need necessarily to turn into a disaster if people is not vulnerable to it. So it's not a direct causation. Yeah, the important thing that sometimes all these measures might create other conflicts. Many disaster reduction projects can also create new harms of things and not done properly. So that's also something that we need to be aware of. So going off of that, like you're saying, how do governments and international organizations, local actors, and such, how do they coordinate these sort of things and scenarios of conflict like this? Yeah, that's a really interesting one. In places that have really high level of conflict, one of the main issues that we have is lack of governance or not lack of a governor, but fractured governance or fragile governance. So normal governance system in place or they're not able to operate everywhere. They have the capacity to do it or they have to have the legitimate legitimacy by different, in different regions by different people. So it's a big question, who coordinate this? And then you have the humanitarian sector either, locally embedded, internationally supported or both. But many times they work much more on the humanitarian aspect rather than in the disaster aspect. So they work on responding, not necessarily in preventing. This is changing, of course, but so far the focus is responding. So when you come with disaster, one of the main issues that we have in place of effective by conflict is the difficulty to coordinate. There's some other one to say, but the problem with disaster is that disaster is really across the spectrum of people's life. So when it comes to prepare and reduce the risk of, it's actually much more developmental work, not humanity that work. You know, these people lively hot. Yeah, yeah. But how many development actors are working there? But when it comes to respond to the thing that happened, it's much more humanitarian. But then when it comes to reconstruct and rehabilitate, it's a mix of both, depending on when it can be human, it can be development. So we're not only talking about a topic or something that is across the whole spectrum of people's life and cycles. And that means that you don't only need to coordinate internally, but you also need to coordinate between humanitarian actors and donors and funding and structures and systems with developmental ones. And on top of that, you need to bring peace, peace, building actors and local infrastructure, local. So it's governance. That's why our work is a lot on governance and coordination. So how do we make this happen? And it's not always easy. And the solution many times is again, as you said, going back to the communities. Yeah. Can I just ask a question about this? When it comes to peace builders, we actually haven't even touched on that. Like peace builders in this sense, like we're talking about conflict and disaster. What are they prepared for? Do they have a sense of preparedness that's different from humanitarian actors? Peace is a difficult topic in this. It's because they're talking about places under conflict. So peace is an important topic. And peace and peace build, there are actually different type of actions and people. They are different. They are the complex solution. As I mean, what is peace builder doing? What humanitarian actors of peace builders are doing to solve the macro conflict or the big conflict at the scale of the region or the country? But there is also a lot that you can do at the meso-middle level, you know? And a lot that you can do at the micro-small, really local people level. And definitely something that we do when we do the RR in place affected by conflict is to do a really good conflict sensitivity approach. So we don't only map, as we were asking before, hazards in the sense of floods and others, we also map risk of conflict and how our actions can trigger, exacerbate or create new conflict. So maybe again, we are not maybe able to work on the big conflict, you know, between factions of the country or international bodies or international countries fighting. But we can definitely do and we can do a lot to at least prevent to exacerbate or make worse conflicts or problems at the ground level between people. And this is really important in these places. So yeah, we can be I was talking about peace this building and it's a challenging one, but it's something that we always need to consider in this place. How do we know make it worse? I mean, an important principle in our work is the principle of "do no harm." At least we try not to make things more difficult than you are already. And it's really easy to do it if you're not conscious and aware of it. How are you map a conflict and how can you predict what your intervention is going to do? That is so much. I mean, you cannot map absolutely everything or analyze absolutely everything, but you can do a lot. And as we have this as the risk assessment to understand which are the risk of people of different hazards, you can also do conflict risk assessment and you can do conflict mapping and stay hold and mapping. So I can just throw in names of different, you know, you can do mess mapping. So there are many kind of tools out there that we can do and we use it to really understand first the conflict scenario that we are operating. Second, how our projects or whatever we are going to be implementing kind of affect those dynamics. And third, which new dynamics come in. And with all this information, we plan first in preventing new risk from happening or preventing new harm to be happening. But we also need to learn things what it's called mediation. What happened if something end up happening? How do we reduce that impact? So it's really comprehensive the approach. And I also wanted to just to start to round out the conversation to speak to you about personal experiences, what it's actually like working in these places. Because I know that you've not just been a research, you've also worked for agencies and you also know lots of people that work in conflict situations that are trying to reduce risks and stuff. One, what's it like just on a basic personal term? Like genuinely what is it like? And the second one is how can we try and make sure that people can carry out these activities safely without making the conflict worse for the people around them without having any horrible unintended side effects or consequences? I really like the question of how you're phrasing it because Most people think that places on the conflict are always under fire. You know, everything is collapsing. When reality, most of these places, yes, conflict is horrible. And I don't want to minimize this suffering and how difficult are these places for people living there. We are the privileged ones that come in and out and can live. But in reality, in everyday life, people is also living their own life. They want to send kids to school or provide them in kind of a schooling possible at hands. They want to open their business. They're trying to also find, you know. So people are also trying to build their own life. And that's important thing. Or people that are not aware or are not living in this place, so even if you understand that it's not always the conflict. The conflict is always there. It's always will be a big cloud and it will affect your daily life sometimes more, sometimes less. But when it's less or in places in region, in more technical terms, what we use is pocket of peace, of pocket of development, there are places where more normal day life just happened. And you also need to embrace that. You also need to embrace the, it's difficult to talk about the beauty of normal day life in places so complicated, you know. But both our hunting hands is no one or the other. And if we don't understand that, we will never really, you know, be able to connect and do the work that we want to do. So for me, it's both. It's to understand that, yeah, it's difficult places, but also beautiful places with normal people, extremely capable people also. I mean, as you were asking before Sarah and others, you know, like, there is so much that they are already doing. You know, that we need to do it. It's really about how we can support the initiative, how we can share and exchange different knowledge. They have knowledge that we don't know. We might have insight that they don't know. And the question is, how do we work forward trying to make at least a part of their suffering, well, part of these conditions better? Yeah, very much like that you say this, because like, just drawing on, you know, stories from my own family, my family being from Kenya, I mean, like, even in times of where there was conflict and, you know, even periods of drought or whatever have you. But I mean, people never really overreacted. Right now, like, it's fine. We have to continue and we have to also remain strong and continue to help each other in that sense. So I feel like that's something that's always good to remember that their people whose lives are in the balance and they continue to support each other. But in saying that also, I kind of want to draw back to what Tom asked is that how do, you know, when we're talking about humanitarian aid workers, how do they ensure that they are their own safety when we're in these contentious settings? Well, the question, I mean, we were talking about localization before, I mean, but the question is who is the humanitarian? Because when we talk about safety security, we usually think on the people traveling in the white Toyota's, you know, the international actors and so on and so forth. The logo, yeah. And in reality, most of the humanitarian actors are people from the same places. By the end of the shift, you know, you don't sleep in the, in the compound sort of say, you know, this idea of the safe house. Most of them they go back home or they stay, you know, in accommodations, you know, they are, you know, so it's so a lot of people, this is their everyday life. I wish I need to think that many human Italians, it's not like this idea, like, you know, some people like, oh, I want to be a humanitarian to help others, you know, a lot of people they grew up in this environment. I mean, protect the Christ they have in there forever. So for a lot of people, it's like, I grew up, what can I work on? Well, there's a lot of jobs with these NGOs. It's a stable job, sometimes paying dollars or in other, you know, it's a good job to do it. I'm not saying I'm not trying to minimize the good willing, yeah. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not the idea that everyone, you know, want to be a humanitarian because sometimes it's just a good business, a good job. And on top of that, come with a beautiful motivation to help your own people to support others, you know, so I'm not trying to, you know, minimize the good heart that is out there. But how to keep them safely, it's, it's a big issue because something you keep them safely from their own family, they don't remember their own community, their own spaces. And on the other hand, it's true that humanitarian actors in the past used to be much more safe. So in the past people, I mean, this came from the times of the beginning of the humanitarian action, you know, when you go into, I mean, the really the people going to the middle of the battle zone, you know that you're a humanitarian and you have the Red Cross on Chess or whatever or the Red Crescent. And no one will touch you. And over the century from this, it happened the same. You have the logo and you were safe. And it was also my experience, you know, my first time doing this, you know, with different NGOs and agencies. But now they have been a logo means that you have money, that you are well connected. And for many people, it means that you are a good target to being kidnapped or it's also politicized. As I said before, I mean, are you delivering these? Are you okay with the government? And so maybe if I attack you, I'm also sending a message. And also humanitarian action is becoming increasingly unsafe, insecure and problematic. And sometimes not only the big act of criminality, I mean, we still have a lot, I mean, there is a lot of research by NGOs working on these and other actors. Sometimes what really affects humanitarian actors is unsafe conditions in their labor every day life. You're not like everything goes back to a drive life, you know, a vehicle, a car accident or an infection or not having enough or not mental health. I mean, working on these, you see a lot of really tough things. And they don't disappear when you close your eye tonight. Honestly, it does make me think about Gaza. Absolutely. Like, we're talking about Palestine. This is exactly what you're saying. It reminds me of some of the stories we hear coming out of Palestine from humanitarian workers who unfortunately have been killed. Or in this case, like also when we're talking about environmental degradation, they're only available sources as, you know, water that's been infected. Yeah, I think more and more, especially as we're seeing issues related to climate change. And we're also seeing more contentious conflicts sparing up around the world. I mean, this is going to become a more important issue to tackle. Yeah. I mean, I'm starting now with colleagues. We are putting together a whole, a working group or something to say. Because they have been a lot of discussion in the sector in the humanitarian aid system sector on mental health and how we can advance in providing mental health support to people affected by crisis. You know, how this can go into the package, the IDP camp, different camps and so on and refugees as well. But this working group is focusing on mental health of humanitarian actors. And most of the time, what you have is like, yeah, you go back to your country wherever you're at the heat and you have the headquarters and then you have a psychology that you can call on. But what happened with the everyday humanitarian actor, you know, that it's from the places affected. They never leave. And it's a big question. I mean, many NGOs are moving to also supporting them and giving, you know, some all-comment, the health support. But what many colleagues of mine are telling me like, again, it's everyday life. So are they, you know, they need us, I colleges, I need support or spirit of counseling or any kind of counseling because of their activities as human characters, just because they are living in a complicated situation. Can you divide one or the other? Maybe not. Do you need to separate both waters to support people? Maybe not. But this becomes quite again in these kind of scenarios, a lot of the idea that we have become much more complicated in that sense because, but yeah, mental health is one of the aspect of the security. Yeah. But also, I mean, to be honest, in some places that I have work on, I mean, you don't, you don't have even a scheme to act that you are providing, you know, food delivery, something you don't have enough food, you know, so, but of course, nothing is that important compared with because, again, you will live. But yeah, it's a difficult call, definitely. Yeah, yeah, and I think it's more important to drive back to people living within these contexts as well. Yeah, but for them, it's also complicated. I have a lot of colleagues that they say, I mean, how can I, I mean, I grew up here. Well, I grew up to be like, you know, on the other region. When I'm the person affected, I'm one family affected, and when I'm the humanitarian director, or when I'm home, you know, and it's kind of identity crisis and these kind of difficult decisions are something that I think we still need to talk much more about it. Does it fair to say that people are people and they're living their lives and they're adapting to the situations and then they don't want to make it sound so simple, but when they put on the vest with the logo on it, that is when they become the humanitarian. Well, I also know a lot of humanitarian without the logo. Yeah, I mean, definitely, I mean, what is to be a humanitarian is really a characterization, I would say. But that's another maybe episode that you can record, you know, the good humanitarian, who is a good humanitarian? Many of that really good humanitarian that I know, they don't even know that they are humanitarian, they don't even use the concepts. I mean, we are doing with some colleagues who are researching other countries where actually we are, we have been talking and there is a work of, for example, people like Gabriel Yassis and others, you know, that they are really talking with people that they don't even want to be called humanitarian because also have a big, it's highly loaded. But if you see what people are doing, are much more humanitarian than many others. And I think that's one of the most beautiful things that I've learned throughout the course of this podcast is that really like, yeah, they're like, you're saying that people who are really, you know, supporting each other, I mean, they would never wear that title. It's just part of what they do in their daily life to protect their home, to support each other. And I think that that's really important. The principle of humanity, I would call it, is the first principle. But even this principle having highly loaded, you know, is a big terminology. But there are many other frameworks, ethical frameworks, or caring, I mean, caring approaches of caring frameworks to approach what we do. Yeah, and for you personally, have you ever faced any ethical dilemmas when dealing with context where there is conflict? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I would level you know as a researcher as a practitioner and that's a big question. It would be interesting if you even said as a practitioner as a researcher And also as just as a person as a human. Yeah, I mean definitely one of the biggest dilemma that you have a practitioner is to know that you can only be able to reach or support X amount of people and they's usually much much lower than really a amount of people affected. And that's something that sometimes hands you, you know, by supporting, I mean particularly in disaster, I mean when you work in disaster or you do search and rescue missions, you know, like when you know that you're working with people affected, you know, in one particular area, you are not supporting people in another affected area. Who is home to decide where to go? We also did some research on this and that's a really difficult call, you know, but there's also everyday dilemmas, you know, like Yeah, so it's and also as a researcher and a personal person, there are so many dilemmas behind this, I mean Who are you sometimes as an external actor, you know, to to support people, you know, for the crisis sometimes in Yeah, I don't know how to say, but it's it's there's so many dilemmas ethical calls Things that hands you, but also that keep you awake and also inspire you at the same time. Well, actually we do ask guests every single time what makes a good humanitarian or how would you define that Sort of thing, but it seems like you already answered the question. Yeah, it's been pretty pretty fulfilling for us Thanks so much for holding this space and embodying these conversations and these are the conversations that we need to have I mean we can talk forever about The humanitarian principles or even more technically, you know about the core humanitarian standard, the spheres standard and the technical aspect, the cluster and the wash and we can go into all the Little how you call it no make-letters, you know, all this kind of acronym and you need to Be can be lingual in this sector. You need to speak about all these backgrounds But really what we need to come back all the time is to be reflective and critical about what we're on practices And actually that's something that most human it has always And myself, you know many times we complain, you know, we don't have time to stop and reflect because we're always On the ongoing of price of the crisis. So I think this space is a really Our valuable so thanks so much for hosting it. No, thank you so much. Oh, Dr. Kamehna. Thank you so much for joining us on the good humanitarian So that's the end of the fourth episode of the good humanitarian and in the meantime tell us what you think makes a good humanitarian Let us know by leaving a comment on our LinkedIn. Goodbye. Bye. You