Annual report

Enabling Functions
| National Society development 
161

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HUMANITARIAN 
DIPLOMACY
Context
As the COVID-19 pandemic entered its third year 
(and control measures gradually lifted in most 
countries), the international community inten-
sified its work on reforms of the global health 
architecture, confronting key questions of equity 
and effectiveness that were laid bare in COVID 
response efforts.
However, at country level, few states had begun 
to update their national pandemic prevention 
plans or legislation to implement lessons from 
the COVID experience.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis continued to drive 
disasters around the world, but momentum 
finally started to accelerate in global climate 
policy, including on steps needed to address the 
humanitarian impacts.
In February 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change launched the Working Group 
2 report on climate change impacts, adapta-
tion and vulnerability, formally recognizing the 
humanitarian impacts of climate change, and, in 
November, the 27th Conference of the Parties of 
the UN Climate Change Convention took a sig-
nificant step with the decision to establish new 
financing arrangements for Loss and Damage.
The global gap between humanitarian need and 
available funding continued to grow, intensified 
by the crisis in Ukraine and neighbouring coun-
tries. That conflict became one of the world’s 
worst humanitarian crises at national and 
regional levels (with more than six million people 
displaced), but also a global phenomenon that 
affected lives and livelihoods in distant countries. 
These reverberations were equally felt in the pol-
icy space, including through renewed challenges 
to humanitarian principles.
These crises also arrived on top of long-term 
development challenges, such as rising levels of 
sovereign debt among developing countries, con-
tributing to lagging progress against Sustainable 
Development Goal targets (including in access 
to clean water, universal health care and educa-
tion), combining to make the future less certain 
for many millions around the world, particularly 
young people.
This intersection of crisis and development 
rose higher in development policy debate as 
well, notably at the “Effective Development 
Co-operation Summit” in December.