We are seeing more and more extreme weather events with large humanitarian impacts. IFRC’s World Disasters Report 2020, titled “Come Heat or High Water”, notes that in the last ten years, 83% of all disasters triggered by natural hazards were caused by extreme weather and climate-related events such as floods, storms and heatwaves. These have claimed more than 410,000 lives mostly in low and lower middle-income countries.
Humanitarian needs are on the rise and will continue to increase. The latest Global Humanitarian Overview indicates that in 2021, 235 million people will need humanitarian assistance and protection. This means that by next year, 1 in 33 people worldwide will need humanitarian assistance. The IFRC’s Cost of Doing Nothing Report predicts that by 2050, 200 million people every year could need international humanitarian assistance due to climate-related disasters and their impacts, costing more than billion per year in additional assistance.
The most vulnerable people - those who do not have the resources to protect themselves from disasters and have no access to social protection – are hit hardest by the effects of climate change, especially with the compounded risks and impacts of climate related disasters. There is an urgent need to scale-up preparedness and align with early activities to prevent human suffering. Understanding the scale and compounding effects of climate-related disasters and global pandemics like COVID-19 is essential to have effective disaster governance in place.

This disaster governance needs to take a holistic approach which means an urgent need to assure humanitarian and development strategies synergize. Humanitarian work is currently ‘designed’ to apply band-aid solutions to a wider, more structural problem whilst development works through large, siloed projects. We need to find the appropriate links within the nexus approach and commit to stop competing, and rather collaborate efforts to one common goal: resilient communities globally, prepared for our future climate.

Our skilled moderator will engage the high-level speakers from UNDRR, the German and Malawi government in an insightful conversation about climate science, policy and action, and explore how the world can truly be ready to face imminent threats of climate change.

The management of the Covid-19 pandemic has already presented the German civil protection system with a challenge that has pushed it to its limits. While we are still in the midst of the pandemic, additional hazards are emerging. Last year, it was a prolonged drought with accompanying forest fires, and this year, heavy rainfall events that led to the flood disaster in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, among other places.

This leads to numerous questions that Mario Dobovisek would like to discuss together with Armin Schuster, Irene Mihalic and Christian Reuter. How can German civil protection be better positioned? What role should and can the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief play, and what role should the aid organizations in Germany play? And what role can the population itself take on?

In order to ensure the continued survival of people affected by the impact of war in the event of a crisis, a federal emergency shelter and support capacity for civil defense is to be established. This federal emergency shelter and support capacity is to consist of several accommodation and care facilities, each of which can accommodate, feed and care for up to 5,000 people. In April 2020, the pilot project "Labor Betreuung 5.000" started, in which the first of these Mobile Modules will be set up and the equipment and materials procured for it will be tested. It will then serve as a blueprint for the entire federal emergency shelter and support capacity.

Coordinated by the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, the pilot project "Labor Betreuung 5.000" will be implemented from 2020 to the end of 2024 under the responsibility of the German Red Cross (DRK) together with the German Aid Organizations Arbeiter-Samariter Bund (ASB), Deutsche Lebens-Rettungs-Gesellschaft (DLRG), Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe (JUH) and Malteser Hilfsdienst (MHD).

The focus of the event will be to highlight the experiences and innovations gained so far from the pilot project "Labor Betreuung 5.000". In addition, the speakers will address individual areas of expertise and their requirements in their presentations, as well as which general challenges and approaches to solutions are currently being discussed in the pilot project.

Heat waves and intense rain are just a few examples that make it necessary for cities around the world to adapt more to future challenges and become more resilient overall. For this reason, concrete recommendations for action for urban development in Germany were adopted in May with the memorandum "Urban Resilience - Pathways to a Robust, Adaptive and Sustainable City.

Following on from the previous presentation, on the development of the German resilience strategy, the panel will highlight practical examples of strengthening urban resilience, for example in urban planning in Germany, as well as selected examples from Asia.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that health situations of national scope can only be managed through the close cooperation of the public health sector and military health support resources. For example, the large-scale vaccination campaign against Covid-19 would simply have been unthinkable without this interaction. To this end, a recent document from the World Health Organization calls for the development of a national civil-military health network based on a strategic plan to build civil-military capabilities to address large-scale health situations. On the panel, we will discuss this approach.