The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released its annual assessment of global humanitarian needs today.
It’s a grim document.
The report, known as the Global Humanitarian Overview, surveys the dozens of man-made and natural disasters around which the UN has mounted a response over the current year. It also projects the crises expected to demand international attention in 2025. The report estimates that 305 million people across 32 countries and 9 refugee-hosting regions will require humanitarian assistance in the coming year, with a staggering price tag of $47 billion.
Many of these crises are well-known to those who follow the news: Gaza, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan. However, many others have faded from the headlines but remain massive in scale, such as Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Myanmar.
Here are the UN’s 2025 projections:
“In a world on fire, the most vulnerable – children, women, people with disabilities and the poor – are paying the heaviest price,” said Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator in a statement accompanying the release of this report.
Why This Report Matters More Than Ever
The Global Humanitarian Overview both projects humanitarian needs in the coming year and provides a measure of the extent to which the international community, broadly defined, are supporting some of the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable places on Earth. That’s a useful benchmark in its own right, but over the years, the GHO has become imbued with greater and greater geopolitical relevance. This is because responding to humanitarian crises is the UN’s single most important task in the world today — and one in which it still excels.
The geopolitics of today are much different than they were twenty years ago, when I started covering the UN. Back then, the Security Council was a more relevant institution for confronting global crises before they spun too far out of control. Or, if they were already out of control, the Security Council could apply meaningful political pressure on warring parties to bring them to the negotiating table. The Security Council would then authorize peacekeepers to ensure that a peace agreement, once reached, was actually implemented.
That really does not happen anymore. It’s been 10 years since the last UN peacekeeping mission was authorized — an ill-fated mission to Mali that was forced to withdraw last year. Tensions between the West, Russia, and China have undermined the Security Council’s ability to resolve conflicts. Now, with the number of conflicts and crises skyrocketing accordingly, the focus of the UN system has shifted from resolving conflicts to limiting the fallout from the conflicts the Security Council has failed to prevent or resolve. This is where the humanitarian system comes in.
The humanitarian system, which you can think of as a constellation of UN agencies (like UNICEF and the World Food Program), international NGOs (like the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children, and Mercy Corps), and thousands of local NGOs, can do an exceptionally good job of saving lives, supporting livelihoods, and upholding dignity in some of the most difficult places on the planet. The track record is very good. But it comes with a caveat: humanitarians can only do their job well when they have access to people in need and the requisite funding to deliver sufficient supplies and services.
This is where this report provides a useful benchmark. The report lists the number of people in need and how much money is required to adequately address those needs. There is almost always a significant gap between the money required and the money actually contributed to humanitarian causes. This gap is measured in dollars, but the impact is felt acutely by people who desperately need help but are not getting it.
The GHO says that as of November, only 43 percent of the $50 billion appeal for 2024 has been met. This has resulted in cuts to services, including an 80 percent reduction in food assistance in Syria, cuts to water and sanitation services in cholera-plagued Yemen, and surging hunger among Sudanese refugees in Chad, to name a few examples cited in the report.
Fifty billion dollars is a lot of money, but not an insurmountable sum, particularly when spread across the world’s wealthiest countries. The difference between hitting humanitarian funding goals and missing them is most immediately felt by the people these humanitarian services are intended to serve. But the entire UN system would also be negatively impacted because it would undermine the one thing the UN does best these days.
Letting humanitarian crises fester can have unpredictable consequences for international security. And in an era in which faith in international institutions is waning, the harm inflicted by inadequate responses to preventable humanitarian tragedies may reverberate worldwide.