Global Humanitarian Assistance 2012

in 2010 major natural disasters in haiti and pakistan had wide-ranging effects on the collective
humanitarian response: driving up overall international spending by 23% over the previous year;
drawing in new government and private donors; and involving military actors in responses on a huge
scale. these crises also shifted historic geographical concentrations of humanitarian spending,
exacerbating the gap in unmet financing for a number of other countries.
in 2011 global humanitarian needs were smaller in scale, with the un’s consolidated humanitarian
appeal requesting us$8.9 billion, 21% less in financing, to meet the humanitarian needs of 62 million
people, compared with us$11.3 billion requested to meet the needs of 74 million people in 2010. the
overall international humanitarian financing response fell back by 9%, from us$18.8 billion in 2010 to
us$17.1 billion in 2011. but despite the reduction in needs in the un’s humanitarian appeals, the gap
in unmet financing widened to levels not seen in ten years.
humanitarian crises not only occur in parts of the world where many people are already poor:
they deepen poverty and prevent people from escaping from it. building resilience to shock and
disaster risk therefore is not only the concern of affected communities and humanitarians; it is
of fundamental importance in achieving, the millennium development Goals (mdGs) and in the
elimination of absolute poverty.