Dimensions of Crisis Impacts: Humanitarian Needs by 2015

This study offers an overview of key global trends and their implications for
humanitarian assistance. It provides a sense of the scale of the numbers of
people that could be affected by a specific set of drivers, shocks and
humanitarian crisis agents between now and 2015 in four broadly defined
regions: South Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia. This study
reflects the findings of major international organisations such as the United
Nations and the World Bank as well as those of leading private and academic
research institutions. It relies heavily upon such reports as the World Bank’s
Natural Disaster Hotspots and more recently the Stern Review on the Economics
of Global Climate Change.

The study’s conclusions indicate that over the next decade the
international community will have to respond to the consequences of interactive
drivers, shocks and crisis agents which will be significantly triggered or
compounded by global climate change. Using the period 2001 to 2005 as a
baseline, these inter-related factors will translate into a 25% increase of crisis
affected people in those four regions by 2015.