Towards Halving Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 in the Humanitarian Sector: a Sectoral Roadmap

The climate emergency is one of the greatest challenges of our time and recognised as an ‘existential threat’ (1) to human society. (2) More frequent and more extreme weather events, such as droughts, flooding, tropical storms, and heatwaves can lead to new conflicts, displacements, migration, damage to essential infrastructure, disruption of food and water supplies, and public health emergencies. (3)

Every day, in their work, humanitarian actors witness the mass suffering and intensifying inequalities caused by the combination of conflict, climate change and environmental degradation. Increasingly faced with the unprecedented challenges posed by climate-related disasters, humanitarian organisations have committed to doing their part.

However, the humanitarian community is still unclear about the steps it needs to take to halve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030 on the way to Net Zero, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement, and the IPCC’s recommendations. (4)

In other words: how do we get from where we are to where we need to be?

To intensify efforts, Climate Action Accelerator has developed this Roadmap for Halving GHG Emissions in the Humanitarian Sector by 2030 as a tool to guide humanitarian actors towards meeting their own climate commitments while addressing both populations needs and organisational risk in a world increasingly under pressure.

We are grateful to have released our sectoral roadmap for halving emissions by 2030 in the humanitarian sector at the German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO) in Berlin, on June 13th, 2024.

Climate Action Accelerator is extremely thankful to GFFO for co-organising this event, and for supporting this project.

(1) In recent years, not only climate scientists but also world leaders including the UN Secretary General and the US Secretary of Defense, qualified climate change as “an existential threat to humanity”.

(2) W.J. Ripple et al., “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” BioScience, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 8-12, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26891410, (Accessed 28 May 2024).

(3) Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability,”2022, p. 9, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_FullReport.pdf, (Accessed 28 May 2024).

(4) IPCC, ” AR6 2023 report”, 2023, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/, (Accessed 29 May 2024).

Cover photo: Ahmed Akacha/Pexels