The Joint Initiative for Greener Humanitarian Assistance builds on years of experience providing tailored, practical guidelines that help humanitarian stakeholders develop and adopt environmentally friendly policies and practices. In this latest iteration, the Joint Initiative aims to help humanitarian donors coordinate and harmonize their efforts to green their policies and practices, focusing on both operations and programs.
Funded by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, the first Joint Initiative began in 2017, supporting coordination between humanitarian and environmental actors to improve access to and use of environmental data. This evolved in 2019 into the Joint Initiative for Sustainable Humanitarian Assistance Packaging Waste Management, with a strategic focus on enhanced coordination among supply chain actors working on environmental issues, and improved packaging sustainability.
The climate crisis affects everyone, but not equally, and humanitarian needs are increasing. With growing support for the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations and the Humanitarian Aid Donors’ Declaration on Climate and Environment, donors are signaling their intention to help humanitarian organizations turn their political commitments into reality. The need to develop donor policies that align with and support operationalization of both the Declaration and Charter is becoming more important, meaning that coordination among donors is crucial. The Operationalizing and Scaling-up Donors’ Climate and Environmental Commitments report identifies opportunities for donors to work together in this respect.
The Joint Initiative aims to help ensure more equitable, climate-positive, and environmentally sustainable humanitarian assistance by leveraging its extensive network and long-standing relationships to facilitate conversations between donors to ensure coherence between agencies.
Through this approach, the Joint Initiative aims to achieve the following:
The Joint Initiative facilitates a Donor Greening Working Group to provide a forum for donors to discuss how to reduce the climate and environmental footprint of humanitarian assistance and to collaborate on practical actions to achieve this goal. Recognizing that the climate crisis is an urgent humanitarian crisis, members of this group are already actively developing or implementing strategies on greening humanitarian assistance and funding or co-funding activities dedicated to this, including support for sector-wide tools that measure and mitigate the climate and environmental impact of humanitarian assistance (e.g., the Humanitarian Carbon Calculator and the Nexus Environmental Assessment Tool (NEAT+)).During previous phases, the Joint Initiative developed a solid network of humanitarian donors, which it will now build upon to better understand their climate and environmental ambitions and how these align (or differ) with the working group’s priorities. Gaining deeper knowledge of this broader network will help the Joint Initiative gain clarity on how greening factors into grant making, donor recommendations and requirements, and partnership management within the sector.
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