IF the world is ablaze, is the UN’s latest tally of emergency response a blueprint to put out the fire?
UN-backed humanitarian response plans will cost at least $47 billion in 2025, the UN’s aid coordination arm, OCHA, announced on 4 December, launching its yearly “global humanitarian overview” of needs and costs.
It’s the second year of slimmed-down, pared-back planning under a mandate of so-called “prioritisation” and “boundary setting”: The cost estimates for 2025 are nearly $10 billion less than what they hit by the end of 2023.
Facing budget shortfalls, aid groups have been urged – or been told – to focus on the most severe needs to lower the overall price tag for donors, who have been kicking in a shrinking percentage of funding over the last decade.
Proponents say it’s a realistic understanding of what the international system can do – especially given forecasts for continuing drops in donor government funding, and another Trump presidency on the horizon.
Others warn that it leaves out potentially tens of millions of people who need aid from even being counted while giving short shrift to the sorts of reforms needed to adapt to a world of volatile crises.
“When humanitarians lower their ambitions, people die,” Dustin Barter, acting director at the Humanitarian Policy Group at the ODI Global think tank, told The New Humanitarian.
The UN’s new relief chief, Tom Fletcher, acknowledged a “ruthlessness” behind the tough decisions of who to target and what to count. Next year’s response plans estimate some 305 million people are in need of aid, but targets roughly 62% of them.
“It’s a recognition that we have struggled in previous years to raise the money we need,” Fletcher told reporters, a couple of weeks into his job as the UN’s head humanitarian.
“We’re not saying that these crises are getting better. We’re not saying that we don’t need to reach a higher number with more money than we’re asking for. But this is about prioritisation.”
The overview, or GHO, outlines how humanitarian needs are spiralling – driven by a lack of solutions for conflict, the climate crisis, and the flouting of international norms and laws such as Israel’s continuing starvation of Gaza.
“The world is on fire,” Fletcher told reporters in Geneva, waving a printout of the GHO.
But at the same time, funding to the system is stagnating. Crises are lasting longer than they used to – a decade on average, Fletcher said – while conditions deteriorate for those locked in them.
“When humanitarians lower their ambitions, people die.”
Some see the GHO as a prosaic charting of trends with few solutions, and often little input from grassroots groups on the front lines. They say the system must make “bold changes” if it is to find a way out of its maze of shortfalls and tinderbox emergencies.
“We recognise and appreciate the yearly GHO to spotlight humanitarian needs and identify barriers,” said Nanette Antequisa, who heads the Philippines-based group ECOWEB and is a member of the Alliance for Empowering Partnership, a network of local civil society organisations. “But we also recognise the growing disillusionment, especially among the local actors.”
Here are a few takeaways from the latest tally of response needs and costs:
The funding gap is stretching
Are humanitarian needs getting better or worse? Are costs soaring or flatlining?
Prioritisation makes it harder to use the GHO as a true measure of year-on-year shifts in humanitarian funding needs. But the trend remains: The gap between what humanitarian responses cost on paper and what donors provide is becoming a gulf.
Humanitarian response plans were roughly 60% funded in 2016. They’ve been half-funded for the past two years, and aid planners are projecting donor government budgets to be just as squeezed in 2025.
They’re also preparing for more uncertainty as nativist Donald Trump returns in January to the presidency of the system’s largest aid donor government, the United States, and as aid-sceptical governments take shape elsewhere.
There’s a growing pushback against budget “prioritisation”
Humanitarians have been locked in prioritisation mode for the past two years of GHO planning, 2024 and 2025. They’ve tightened, trimmed, and then cut back response plans to lower the total price tag.
Last year, this was in part a nod to donors: Humanitarians often build their advocacy and marketing around inevitable funding shortages, which essentially hoists the blame for inadequate responses on donors already paying in billions.
But some analysts say prioritisation has backfired: Funding has levelled off or fallen, the quality of funding hasn’t improved, and there’s little indication humanitarian needs are any better addressed.
“I think we need to stand firm on the fact that there are a high and growing amount of humanitarian needs,” Barter said.
“The humanitarian sector is very dominated by international humanitarian actors – both [international] NGOs and UN agencies – which are very expensive and cumbersome. I don’t think we should be asking for less money. But we should be looking at how do we much more coherently support local and national humanitarian actors.”
A growing number of people are left out
What’s clear is that people who depend on aid are being left out of response planning – and an unknown number may not be counted at all.
The gap between the number of people who need aid and the number of people targeted has stretched over the last decade. Humanitarian response plans targeted around 67 to 72% of identified people in need a few years ago. For the past two years, the proportion has hovered closer to 60%.
“It is unclear who will target those left behind,” a joint statement published by 109 NGOs warned, underscoring the long-criticised dropoff between urgent emergency aid and longer-term development support.
There are also questions over whether the sector’s imposed boundaries capture the true scope of need. After all, there are 30 million fewer people listed as “in need” in 2025 compared to 2023 but, by the UN’s own estimates, overall humanitarian need has worsened.
In practice, boundary-setting and prioritisation might place cutoffs around geographic regions or on relative levels of hunger – for example, in the interest of concentrating on the most severely affected.
“We are still debating where we draw lines on capturing humanitarian needs, and where we draw the boundaries on what needs we can realistically address,” said Gareth Price-Jones, executive secretary for the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response, a bloc of nine big aid organisations, including Save the Children, CARE International, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement.
Aid groups have offered a hint of the real-world impacts of aid prioritisation.
“Women and girls bear the brunt of funding shortages, as their essential needs are often compromised first,” this year’s GHO report states.
Dozens of emergency obstetric and newborn care centres face closure, and midwifery and gender-based violence programmes in South Sudan and Venezuela face cuts, for example.
Previous prioritisation saw planners in the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Somalia focus on areas only most recently affected by emergencies, or draw a distinction between development and humanitarian needs in Chad (where both are intertwined).
The system still touts old reforms as solutions
Aid leaders often lean on pledges to transform – from shifting power, to better preparing for and anticipating crises, to cash aid – as a partial remedy for a stretched system, and 2025’s response plans are no different.
The problem is many of the humanitarian sector’s reform pledges are nascent, stagnant, or incremental.
For example, money for anticipatory action, the broad movement to make responses more predictive and less reactive, adds up to less than 1% of the system.
The GHO says the system made “significant strides” to centre people affected by crises. It notes that 5.5 million people “shared feedback with humanitarians”. By many measures, however, the humanitarian system has been resistant to independent feedback, and still often relies on complaints boxes and hotlines.
And though Fletcher and this year’s GHO tout the importance of locally led aid, many frontline humanitarians say the system has long stalled on making meaningful changes.
“The global humanitarian system continues to sideline local actors, undermining equitable partnerships, ignoring the invaluable contributions of frontline workers, and failing to honour commitments such as the Grand Bargain,” noted an A4EP statement released in response to the GHO.
Humanitarian talking points are evolving
The humanitarian sector has rarely found the right fundraising balance between pleading poverty or offering hope.
Last year’s slimmed-down, boundary-set appeals came with a message that others need to step up – especially development programmes and their funders.
That message continues in 2025. But there’s a hint of another talking point.
The humanitarian sector may be asking for a sizeable $47 billion, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what governments and corporations are happy to spend elsewhere.
“It is less than 2 per cent of global military expenditure, around 4 per cent of the global banking industry’s profits, and just 12 per cent of the fossil fuel industry’s average annual free cash flow,” the GHO notes.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
