Against national interests or in craven service of them, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” or a waste of taxpayer money, humanitarian aid today is criticised from all angles now that the funding that has propped up its top-heavy architecture is collapsing. The gamut of critiques and related remedies, however, not only represent diverging political positions, but reflect different understandings of what aid is, has been, or could be in the future. Even the sector that made “humanitarianism” the defining concept of its identity seems unsure exactly what it stands for and how. 

This destabilisation is overlapping with a multifaceted legitimacy crisis. Norms of humanity are violated with seeming impunity, most viscerally in Gaza, corroding the legitimacy of the sector and fuelling divisions within it. Decades-old critiques of Western aid as a tool of (neo)colonialism and capitalist expansion are accelerating, gaining new ground within the sector itself, giving space for self-criticism and repentance. Public acceptance of aid in the Western countries that have conventionally constituted its major donors is on the wane, under assault from the rise of right-wing populist and nativist movements, and treated with indifference (even suspicion) by a disappearing middle class. 

In addition, though too often seemingly in parallel, the advent of the climate crisis has upended the very notion of emergency – one of the keystones of the humanitarian sector’s vision of its place in the world. An industry built around short-term mitigation of human impacts is struggling to grasp the prospect of enduring and compounding crises, in which threats to humans and their environment must be reckoned with together. The ambivalent relationship of many governments, some of them humanitarian donors, to the climate change agenda makes the challenge even harder for humanitarian actors.

As we edge ever closer to what could become an epochal planetary crisis, the humanitarian system finds itself in an impossible position. Unable and perhaps even unwilling to defend itself against anti-humanist attacks, unwilling and probably also unable to embrace anti-capitalist agendas, its power as a symbol appears at odds with its apparent powerlessness as a collective. In 2025, a humanitarian sector in a state of disarray, facing both plummeting funds and the waning legitimacy of its moral claims, appears less ready than ever to confront the challenges of climate change, whether as a spearhead for international cooperation or internally, in its own assumptions and structures.

The undeclared emergency

On 10 November 2021, fourteen children from eleven to seventeen years old submitted a petition to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres. Undoubtedly the best known of the petitioners was Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who launched the School Strike for Climate movement, but all were dedicated campaigners: Ridhima Pandey, from northern India, had been only nine years old when she sued her government for its failure to take action. Others came from across the world, from countries at risk of disappearance under rising sea levels to some of the world’s largest emitters. 

The children called on Guterres to officially declare a worldwide Level 3 climate emergency. For the UN, Level 3 emergencies (or, in the current nomenclature, humanitarian system-wide scale-up activations) are the top of the scale – situations that are so severe, large, complex, and volatile that existing emergency response capacities are overwhelmed and extraordinary measures must be put in place. The deadly threats posed by intensifying and uneven environmental havoc, the petition stated, urgently required leveraging the powers of the UN system, which would also “demonstrate to the youth of the world that the UN has not abandoned us to a grim future.” The petition’s submission coincided with the 26^. UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26), held in Glasgow, where there were more representatives from the fossil fuel industry than from any single country. 

If the moment represented a high point of attention (an estimated 100,000 people took to the streets of Glasgow to demand stronger action on climate change, amplified by protests in some 100 other countries), the mechanism that the petitioners called on would have been unknown to many. Most striking about their strategy was that, rather than appealing to the UN’s political functions, it placed international humanitarian institutions at the centre. But in proposing a global response to an enduring state of crisis, its demand was antithetical to the logics of the very system to which it appealed. In the eighty years since the creation of the United Nations, never has an alert on such a scale been issued. 

Now, a few years later, with no formal declaration of a global climate emergency and with the petitioners still awaiting a decision on their case, the hopes they placed in the power of emergency declarations seem misplaced. The same is perhaps true for others living in places where Level 3 emergencies have in fact been declared – Sudanese, Haitians, Syrians, and Afghans, to name just a few, where emergency assistance, even when “system-wide” and “scaled up”, bears no resemblance to a resolution. 

The climate crisis as a humanitarian crisis

In sounding the alarm on a climate emergency that required a humanitarian mobilisation at a global scale, the fourteen young activists were not alone. Their petition opened with a quote from UNICEF, the UN’s child rights agency, which declared in 2021 that “The climate crisis is a child rights crisis.” In parallel, the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, made the case that “The global crisis is a human crisis, amplifying the drivers of forced displacement and protection needs within and across borders for millions of people and increasing risks of statelessness.” The World Health Organization similarly emphasised that “Climate change presents a fundamental threat to human health.” Even the UN Secretary General warned “It is time to go into emergency mode.”

All these claims would seem to justify the strongest action possible, and UN agencies do have the power to declare Level 3 emergencies in their own domain. UNICEF declared five new L3 situations in 2024 and UNHCR seven. But in spite of their embrace of the language of crisis, no UN agency has seen fit to meet the scale of the climate challenge by taking this step. Indeed, although these mechanisms are regularly used, they are usually limited to certain geographies in the “developing world”.  Despite the rhetoric, therefore, proposals to actually declare a global emergency have almost never been raised, certainly not jointly and barely even unilaterally (the one recent exception is the WHO’s declaration of Covid-19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern).

To declare an emergency is a highly political thing.  A crisis declaration is usually essentially hierarchical, especially in the way the humanitarian system operates. It surfaces power relationships between those affected by it, those responsible for it, and those who can help. Even when a crisis is followed by an outpouring of help, it tends to set limits and differences more than it dilutes them. Sovereignty remains a fundamental – and explicit – principle even in this internationalist domain: according to the UN resolution that set out the coordination of emergency humanitarian assistance in 1991, the affected country must provide consent before the UN initiates a response. In practice, of course, consent or the fact that “the affected State has the primary role in the initiation, organization, coordination, and implementation of humanitarian assistance within its territory” are often subject to interpretation and applied differently.

Within the humanitarian system, perhaps the best known – though still rather shadowy – example of the politics of emergency declarations is the mechanism used to declare famines.  Officially called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, it is known by the shorthand “IPC”.  The IPC process involves identifying indicators of food insecurity at different levels, rising in severity from “minimal/none”, to “stressed”, “crisis”, “emergency”, and “catastrophe” (the only category where the word “famine” is used). It is inherently contentious, dependent on questionable quantification and unreliable figures, subject to the political considerations of host authorities as well as responders. When a potential “famine” situation requires review, it is referred to a committee “entirely composed of men holding US or UK passports,” as an article in the New Left Review put it.   

By asking Guterres to deliver on the implications of his assertion that climate scientists have sounded a “code red for humanity”, the youth activists were inviting a confrontation with the political nature of emergency. Their appeal also, perhaps less knowingly, ran into problems of temporality. For the UN system, L3s are short-term states of exception. In addition to being geographically circumscribed, L3 declarations all have defined end dates, which can be extended but not erased. Climate change, in contrast, threatens the whole world (even if its impacts aren’t the same everywhere), questions humanitarian hierarchies of donors and recipients, and is without time limit. Indeed, as the sociologist Bruno Latour pointed out, collective inaction has turned a potential moment of crisis into a “new climate regime”: 

Alas, talking about a “crisis” would be just another way of reassuring ourselves, saying that “this too will pass,” the crisis “will soon be behind us”. If only it were just a crisis! If only it had been just a crisis! The experts tell us we should be talking now about a “mutation”: we were used to one world; we are now tipping, mutating, into another. […] But here we are: what could have been just a passing crisis has turned into a profound alteration of our relation to the world. It seems as though we have become the people who could have acted thirty or forty years ago – and who did nothing, or far too little.

Herein lies the deceptive coherence of the humanitarian agencies’ positions on humanitarian crises. For all the rhetoric about reducing human impacts, there are limits to what they will (and probably can) do to prevent them. For the most part, they seek to remain the purveyors of relief in a mutated world, as they have been until now. Even this ambition, however, appears under threat.

Doing less with less

Within hours of his return to the Oval Office, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing all overseas aid apart from support to Israel and Egypt. Within days, he and his billionaire hatchet-man Elon Musk had doubled down on their attacks against the agency that managed American humanitarian and development assistance since 1961, closing down its website, ordering a stop-work, and locking staff out of its building, payment systems, and decision-making – “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”, in Musk’s words. Three months later USAID was no longer operational.

The effect on the wider humanitarian system was swift and paralysing. The United States was not the most generous donor in proportion to its GDP (that laurel goes to Norway), but it was the biggest donor in absolute terms, typically contributing over a third of tracked humanitarian spending. For a sector that relies on voluntary annual contributions from a small number of governments, any sudden disruption in the flow of funding was going to have a significant impact on operations and programmes. Almost immediately, stories began circulating of relief and other aid cut off mid-stream, clinics and offices shuttered, people standing in line to receive a distribution of food or medicine turned away from one moment to the next. “Stopping USAID abruptly will kill millions of people and condemn hundreds of millions more to lives of dehumanising poverty,” declared the head of Caritas Internationalis. Instead of reallocating resources, many humanitarian organisations had little or no room for “moving things around” and had to simply stop working, lay off staff and terminate contracts with local partners. Over 80 percent of USAID programmes were terminated in March 2025. By then, it was clear that the financial gap left by the US would not be filled by other governments, philanthropists or by the so-called emerging donors like the Gulf States. 

There may be ethical or practical reasons why certain services cannot be provided in a particular setting. But what happens when the main reason given for humanitarian actors not helping people in need of assistance or protection is lack of money when there is abundance of it elsewhere? Do those holding the purse strings bear any responsibility for deaths and suffering that could otherwise have been avoided? What should humanitarian organisations do in response to this situation? Should they accept doing less with less?

Since the dismantling of US foreign aid cemented the realisation that the years of growth of humanitarian funding are over, questions like these have become desperately urgent. They are, however, in no way new; a constant in the history of humanitarianism, these dilemmas have been especially salient since 2023 when some of the largest donors announced significant reductions in humanitarian budgets. Germany, the second largest humanitarian donor, and Sweden, a recurrent name on the list of top ten contributors, were prominent among those signalling cuts. The humanitarian system became dominated by anxiety about the magnitude, timeline and reasons behind those cuts, the impact on people in need and the implications for the sustainability of the current humanitarian architecture. Humanitarian organisations rushed to gather evidence and adapt messages to prove the value of their work to their donors and the public. Some stayed within the limits of the inherent value of providing protection and assistance to people in need. Other organisations were more receptive to the request to make a clearer case about the contribution of humanitarian aid to the national interests of donor countries (a taboo with regards to their principles albeit also a fixture of the system’s history).

One of the results was a reaffirmation of the value of humanitarian programmes as “life-saving” work. “People die or suffer tremendously when humanitarians cannot respond,” was how the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs denounced the “cost of inaction”, which it attributed to “underfunding”. Multiple statements from UN agencies, NGOs and analysts echoed a similar message. “When humanitarians lower their ambitions, people die,” said one researcher of the sector. More recently, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator (the UN’s top relief official) claimed that “With resources slashed, our defining mission must be saving lives”.  

Also at risk of being slashed are the ambitions of the past twenty-odd years, of shifting from delivering aid to ending needs. The expanded repertoire of humanitarian agencies challenged the temporality of emergency, such as in efforts to better connect with anticipatory risk reduction, longer-term development, peacebuilding and chronic harms. In some cases, it enabled a challenge to the paternalism of outside intervention, encouraging greater recognition of the activities and preferences of affected communities (to use the humanitarian term) when crisis strikes. Yet the recent downturn highlights the extent to which “saving lives” is still a powerful message on which humanitarian actors rely in their campaigns and fundraising appeals to the public in rich countries. The representation of humanitarian action as life-saving work maintains the connection between UN agencies, NGOs and the Red Cross/Red Crescent with their donors among the public, while emphasising other types of assistance appears to be less effective.

According to the “saving lives” narrative, the reduction in humanitarian budgets came at the worst possible time, one defined by unprecedented levels of needs in a global context of proliferating crises compounded by the upending climate catastrophe. To the untrained eye, these would be clear signs of a system at a breaking point. 

However, despite the chorus of critics linking humanitarian budget cuts to people’s deaths and suffering, the dominant players in the system adopted a more pragmatic approach – one that reduced the attack surface on donors and, by association, on humanitarian organisations. It entailed “going back to basics”, limiting the number of people deemed to be in need and therefore targeted by humanitarian responses, and as a result, the amount of funding required. Because of this, total humanitarian funding requirements officially decreased by 16 percent between 2023 and 2025. 

As a strategy, achieving this reduction still relied on the notion of life-saving work. But it did so by proposing that not all humanitarian activities saved lives, implying that it was possible to catalogue those that do and separate them from those that don’t, turning humanitarian crises into huge “operating theatres” where needs can be triaged in a compassionate, dignified and efficient manner. This shift required ignoring that people affected by crises, even the most extreme ones, demand more than “life-saving” aid from humanitarian actors. As one Haitian person told researchers: “we can’t stay in a tarp our whole lives.” 

In this way, despite all the investment in describing the drastic expansion of needs that the climate crisis will entail, the humanitarian sector has been forced to make a sharp turn in the direction of lowering, not increasing, its operational ambitions. The cost of inaction has become less about people dying or suffering as a result of underfunding and more about the humanitarian system prioritising life-saving activities: doing less with less. Most starkly, in the wake of the US withdrawal the Emergency Relief Coordinator announced that he had asked for advice on how to reach the 100 million people “in greatest need”. A sector often accused of being reactive and shortsighted is now being asked to “regroup” in a “humanitarian reset”, as if closing down primary health care centres and education programmes or laying off dozens of thousands of staff were tactical manoeuvres that humanitarian organisations could reverse at will. 

Such choices illustrate anthropologist Mark Duffield’s argument that contemporary Western humanitarianism is better understood not so much as saving lives but as a “technology-driven attempt to regulate excess death” in the neocolonial world. So, too, does how they are being handled. Most of the decisions about the reprioritisation process were made behind closed doors with the participation of only a few international UN agencies and (essentially Western-based) INGOs. The absence of organisations from the countries where humanitarian responses will be cut or continue, or of the affected communities themselves, only reinforced Duffield’s critique.

Os limites do humanitarismo

Despite the climate crisis being one of the two drivers of needs according to the UN (the other one is conflict), it was not considered in the discussions about how humanitarian actors were going to reset their work in response to the drop in funding in 2025. Yet challenges posed by climate change confront the sector with similar questions about what its role should be and who should shape it. 

One possibility is the entrenchment of doing less with less as the essential expression of the humanitarian imperative. However, doing less with less might just only scratch the surface of the problem ahead. The disaster response spending needed with a global temperature rise of 1°, as projected in one set of modelling, would be around $1 trillion a year; even recognising the likely problems with such a figure, and the fact that this includes both domestic and international “humanitarian” responses, it illustrates the chasm that is opening up between the global number of people who will be seeking help and the resources available for that assistance in particular places. There possibility follows that the current “boundary-setting” between lifesaving and non-lifesaving activities is a pilot for the humanitarian prioritisation that will have to occur in the future – the “alarmingly dystopian” prospect of having to brutally triage possible responses to “a constant cascade of disastrous events worldwide […] a continuous global catastrophe rather than a sequence of distinct disasters.” 

In such a scenario, with no changes to the basic ways the system currently operates and waning support for aid spending in rich countries, the humanitarianisation of climate change might lead to the entrenchment of current approaches and practices whereby “the humanitarian ‘instrument’ becomes the sole channel for international engagement” in many fragile contexts. The prospect is of a system increasingly hostage to the whims of major emitting states, which have tended to be the top humanitarian donors, as they exert an increasingly brazen political control over a sector striving to maintain a minimum of funding. 

While this scenario would run counter to the growth-oriented trajectories that UN agencies and INGOs have experienced in the past few decades, it would nonetheless represent a continuity in the power dynamics that have structured the humanitarian system over that time. For decades, changes in the system have largely worked to consolidate existing power dynamics. This is a product of the concentration of resources and normative power among a select group of institutions associated with Western countries. The names on the list of top humanitarian donors or recipient organisations have barely changed in decades, nor have changed the names of those that shape humanitarian policy and practice. 

This is not to deny the value of some of the reforms that have been achieved through cooperation within this system. Most observers agree that the quality of aid under its umbrella has improved, with less duplication, stronger technical standards, and greater shared attention to the ethical compromises inherent in its role. But they have not changed the fundamental picture. Not only are there profound biases in the reach and practice of the humanitarian system, but its very existence often overshadows other agents and modes of action. Still today, the roles of Southern actors in humanitarian responses or of South-South cooperation are seen by many established “international” actors with scepticism, if not as inferior or unreliable.

Another scenario could see the encounter with climate change helping to generate something new. What this new thing might be is somewhat harder to imagine, though plenty are trying to with various degrees of ambition. Some have envisaged the rewriting of humanitarian principles to end the ontological separation between humankind and the natural world. Others, more explicitly concerned with the politics of humanitarianism, have oriented their proposals around the embrace of social justice or movements of opposition to authoritarian rule. 

Thus, while few would endorse the sudden brutality with which the US has wielded the axe, many critics of the existing humanitarian system see this moment as an opportunity to dismantle, or at least radically re-make, the world of aid. Some seek alternative forms of international solidarity outside the humanitarian framework; others propose more solidaristic, participatory approaches than the system has so far been able to produce. What these propositions share is the recognition that communities affected by emergencies are the primary actors in times of crisis. They seek an end to humanitarian hierarchies. “Imagine a situation where a country like Ghana becomes a donor to a crisis in Louisiana or a crisis in France,” urged Degan Ali, one of the most prominent advocates of decolonising humanitarian action. Yet, access to and control of resources will continue to determine what is feasible or not.

Both of these scenarios suggest that much greater humility and courage will be required of the system than it tends to display. Proponents of remaking aid state explicitly that the actors that dominate the formal humanitarian system, with its historical and continuing Western biases, need to not only acknowledge but also address their legitimacy to make decisions on behalf of others and their exaggerated power. So far, the humanitarian system seems to be trapped by the gravitational force of donors, UN agencies and INGOs that are dragging their feet, talking about the need for change but ultimately constraining it, with the “conclave” currently making decisions on the humanitarian reset exemplifying this pattern. The narrative of life-saving external interventions remains a central pillar of the concentration of power whereby the responsibility to provide assistance and protection turns into the perpetuation of privilege. As climate change progresses, however, those seeking essentially to preserve existing approaches as much as possible may end up being confronted with their own diminished relevance just the same. 

Ultimately, real change may be less likely within the spaces dominated by Western donors, UN agencies and INGOs than in its “periphery”. For many years, the work of humanitarian actors was criticised but there was not a viable alternative that would threaten their dominant position. Tweaking around the edges of coordination mechanisms, funding modalities or accountability, and even protecting a space for self-critique, was enough to keep the legitimacy and credibility of the humanitarian system intact. Today, this cautiously reformist approach may no longer work. Not only have more voices entered the discussions about humanitarian reform, but their perspectives have been more diverse and their positions more radical, including opting for exiting the formal structures of the humanitarian system.  

Climate change and the rise of illiberal politics may prove too big of a challenge for donors, UN agencies and INGOs to continue keeping the disruptive challengers at bay. These challengers have been part of the history of the humanitarian system and could determine its fate in the years ahead. Will humanitarian organisations, so attached to an ethos of apoliticism and their claimed life-saving powers, be able to forge the kind of coalitions that will be needed in an era of anti-humanism and climate chaos? Will they even be welcome, without the greater reckoning that they have been called to undertake?Until not long ago, humanitarian crises and the millions of people in need functioned as reference point for the work still to do to ensure no one was left behind. Today, humanitarian crises risk becoming the uncomfortable reminder of the limits of what the international community, and the humanitarian system as an integral part of it, are willing to do. If humanitarian organisations decide to embrace doing less with less as their mantra in these catastrophic times, they might soon find out it is a message without an audience.