Peter Maurer

We live in an environment in which connectivity and cyberspace are transforming all workplaces, including the humanitarian workplace.

Conflicts are increasingly causing devastation in densely populated urban centres rather than open battlefields, creating a host of new problems through the cumulative impact from the destruction of vital services like water and electricity.

Conflicts are not temporary interruptions: they are structural, socio-economic catastrophes, and funding must be allocated accordingly.

People living through armed conflicts need infrastructure and services which will last, and the last thing on their mind is which budget line applies.

While conflicts have expanded and deepened and transformed, actors have transformed, and humanitarian assistance is transforming. Protection work is transforming and taking on another character.

They say that truth is the first casualty of war. But there is another casualty as well: trust. As conflict escalates, trust between people and political leaders crumbles away as surely as night follows day.

As conflicts last longer, as the scale of needs increase, we are having to adapt. There is an increasing blurring between immediate humanitarian assistance and long-term development needs.

Humanitarian assistance, once conceived as a short-term relief effort, is increasingly the only substitute for long-term development work in protracted armed conflicts.

Attacks on health facilities, health workers, ambulances, is now a reality that we observe on the ground - not on a monthly but on a daily or weekly scale in most of the conflicts in which we are engaged.

The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.

I think we are challenged in how we define humanitarian action today and how we relate to long-term needs. We are also confronted with legitimate expectations from the people who want us to respond far more thoroughly to their basic pleas than we would have done in a much more contained form of conflict.

We must understand the factors that cause fragility, violence, and conflict in order to develop solutions that will meaningfully reduce instability at its roots rather than merely addressing the symptoms.