Distribution by Region

Distribution by Organisation Type, Document Type, Region and Year

Crisis occurs mostly in documents published in Europe, followed by North America and Asia with comparatively smaller contributions. Overall, the top five contributors in terms of occurrences are NGO, IGO, NGO_Fed, RC and C/B organisations.

NGO documents provide the greatest number of occurrences, primarily from activity reports published in Europe. In second place, occurrences from IGO were mostly obtained from activity reports and general reports published in Europe, followed by North America but to a much lesser extent. Occurrences from NGO_Fed were mostly found in European activity reports.

Occurrences from RC were obtained primarily from European activity reports, but closely followed by general and strategy documents in order of relevance. Lastly, C/B also generates a considerable number of occurrences from only European general documents.

Forgotten crises are defined as severe, protracted humanitarian crisis situations where affected populations are receiving no or insufficient international aid and where there is no political commitment to solve the crisis, due in part to a lack of media interest.

Humanitarian crises may be defined by mortality in excess of the norm.

This classic definition of a humanitarian crisis (i.e. death and human suffering caused by war) served as a straightforward cue to orient the efforts of aid agencies.

Protracted crises are defined in terms of both duration and magnitude – some have lasted as long as 30 years and are characterized by extreme levels of food insecurity.

Protracted crises have been defined as "those environments in which a significant proportion of the population is acutely vulnerable to death, disease and disruption of livelihoods over a prolonged period of time.

SOFI 2010 defines protracted crisis situations as "characterized by recurrent natural disasters and/ or conflict, longevity of food crises, breakdown of livelihoods and insufficient institutional capacity to react to the crises.

WHO defines a crisis as "an event or series of events representing a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community, usually over a wide area.

In 2016, our donors assisted in emergencies including the Nepal earthquake, Syria crisis, refugee crisis in Europe, Bosnia floods, Yemen crisis and Myanmar's humanitarian emergency.

While some humanitarian emergencies, such as the Balkans crisis, have a clear beginning, middle and end, others are more intractable.

The crisis of displacement is the biggest humanitarian challenge of our time.

The world has been facing a number of unprecedented challenges that include climate crisis, economic crisis, power and energy crisis and the crisis of life and livelihood among many.

ReliefWeb redesigned its topic pages, which offer the latest curated information on gender, humanitarian financing, safety and security, as well as regional humanitarian issues such as the European refugee/migrant crisis.

NRC doubled funding levels from DFID compared to the previous year, and had close dialogue on numerous issues , including the Syria crisis.

Vulnerability to both natural and human-made shocks, such as extreme weather, financial crises, and conflict, is a significant problem for many developing countries.

Despite these challenges, WFP was able to provide life-saving food and nutrition assistance for 101.8 million people affected by conflict, storms, droughts, displacement, financial crises and other shocks that left them without food.

Disasters in the year, such as the crisis in West Africa, did not attract high media profile to drive income and, thankfully, there were fewer disasters in 2012.

Our focus includes all humanitarian emergencies: both sudden-onset and protracted crises, both man-made and natural disasters, including conflict and public health crises .

Funding from the DEC helped us to assist some of the most vulnerable families, in situations such as the Gaza crisis and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) emergency response, and meet their basic and urgent needs by providing food, water and hygiene.

This should be replicated systematically for all protracted situations worldwide, including the multiple 'forgotten crises' where there is insufficient or no international aid or no political commitment to solve them.

The IASC should propose, for consultation and agreement with UN Member States, humanitarian organizations that are not part of the IASC, and development partners, definitions of protracted crises (nuanced according to context) and clear operational criteria for systematic and predictable transition from humanitarian action to that of a developmental and/or peace-building nature.

OCHA has no formal definition of large, long-term crises .

Humanitarian crises are, by definition , chaotic and unpredictable; no two crises are ever the same, and what works in one context may not work in another.

In an attempt to define situations of crisis, MSF and other humanitarian actors can fall into the trap of describing suffering people as if they exist in a humanitarian, apolitical silo, ascribing their problems to a lack of emergency aid and/or development.

[...] the rise of the resilience notion means that debate on longterm visions is being preplaced by shortterm action-oriented debate. As crisis is accepted to be the normal state of affairs, the resilience concept is superseding the sustainability concept. The latter was supposed to restore a global equilibrium, while the focus of the resilience discourse is on managing an unbalanced world.

The third function, supporting resilience, is less central; labelling it a humanitarian function can be controversial, particularly when the system is already stretched thin attempting to carry out traditional crisis response. Some insist this is not an appropriate role for humanitarian actors, as it blurs the line between development and relief, and between governmental responsibility and the distinct, apolitical sphere of humanitarian action that needs to be kept separate for humanitarians to do their job effectively (MSF, 2011).

The evidence collected in chronic crises revealed that a key question for humanitarian actors is whether they should seek to take on additional roles when they lack the capacity to adequately meet the core humanitarian needs of the context.

It is often argued that Gulf State donors channel funding to crises that are both regionally significant and culturally linked.

This argues for 'smart alignment', whereby agencies assess government capacity in advance of crises and develop strategies to build government capacity to coordinate and respond; work in line with government priorities; and substitute for or complement government capacity where required.

For the region's people, suffering did not have a label or a definition. Seeing one's loved ones executed, livestock slaughtered and schools and homes torched did not need labels. If there was one, it would have to be an all-encompassing 'security crisis'. It is the luxury of aid agencies to debate over the label to apply to a crisis , and perhaps we spend too much time on such issues. We focus on 'humanitarian' crisis and sometimes make this more granular and speak of 'a protection crisis' or a 'nutrition crisis'. Such definitions are understandable. If I am a nutritionist and I see malnutrition rates exceed the emergency threshold then there is a crisis, and describing it as a 'nutrition crisis' is comfortable (and might even help me raise money to address malnutrition). Yet nobody I ever met in the region ascribed a label to the suffering. People wanted the shelling, murder and abductions to end; they wanted to be safe.

For urban humanitarian response, context relevance suggests a need to grapple with particularly complex, interconnected environments. Despite the increasing number of crises in urban areas over the past decade, urban humanitarian response is still criticised for a lack of context relevance, just as it was in Haiti in 2010.

It is journalists' responsibility to quantify and characterize a crisis , to ask exactly the questions about it that an operational non-governmental organization (NGO) might prefer not to answer: "Is Darfur genocide or not? Journalists are interested in drama and controversy; they will investigate culpability; they need to know what's being done to help, but they are not concerned with the minutiae of relief operations.

The importance of media coverage and public awareness to help mobilise funds and increase pressure on decision-makers has been proven again and again. Still, the question on how to ensure better coverage of under-reported crises remains largely unaddressed.

Humanitarian actors and aid providers may engage with crisis-affected people for three different purposes: because they believe it is the right thing to do (value-based or normative rationales), because it makes humanitarian programmes more effective (instrumental rationales), or because it addresses structural inequalities and root causes of crises (emancipatory rationales).

Climate change and associated issues: While the world's resources and their inappropriate use have been a growing concern for a few decades now, and have led to the conservation movement, climate change is a newer threat that has achieved crisis status, even while its effects and remedial actions with potential continue to be debated .

The chart below represents the distribution of crisis between 2005 and 2019 in terms of the number of occurrences and relative frequency of occurrences It also allows you to view the distribution across Regions, Organisations and Document types.