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How the Red Cross Red Crescent Confronts Climate Risks

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What does climate security mean for the humanitarian community? 

"For the humanitarian community, climate security is a daily reality. Our 17 million volunteers witness the impacts of climate change on a daily basis. It is not just the changing extremes and the impacts on the natural resources. It is also adding tensions about natural resources for instance; issues that we have usually confronted in the past but that are getting more acute in a changing climate.

In order to address the climate-security challenges we face today, we really need the two pillars that the Paris Agreement also specifies. So in order to avoid risks getting out of hand in the long-term, we also need to do something about greenhouse gases. But in the shorter term, the risks are actually almost the same, regardless of what we do on these greenhouse gases. So it is really urgent. We also look at adaptation to climate change -as it is been traditionally framed- but then not just in the sense of separate stand-alone projects often planned out of Environment ministries. But it actually does require the engagement of a much wider community. We have seen the development community come to the fore in the most vulnerable countries to try and integrate climate risks in their work. What we see increasingly is that also the humanitarian community also needs to confront these risks. We had those discussions in the World Humanitarian Summit last year for instance. And increasingly, it is also the security community, unfortunately, that now has to confront these challenges."