Global Humanitarian Forum

Global Humanitarian Forum

Founded	2007 by Kofi Annan, the Swiss government and the Canton of Geneva, Kofi Annan, President Ivan Pictet, Vice-President Walter Fust, CEO/Director-General Martin Frick, Director
Type	Non-profit NGO
Location	Geneva, Switzerland
Fields	humanitarian challenges, current focus: human impact of climate change
Staff	Kofi Annan, President Ivan Pictet, Vice-President Walter Fust, CEO/Director-General Position empty, Director
Website	http://www.ghf-ge.org File:BAB2009013G0624-3413.JPG Kofi Annan delivers the closing address at the 2009 Annual Forum in Geneva, GHF/Magnum Photos/Bruno Barbey

Founded in 2007 and led by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Global Humanitarian Forum is an independent, impartial and non-profit foundation under Swiss law. It brings together government, civil society, international organizations, business and others to build a stronger global community for solving humanitarian challenges. The Forum currently focuses on the human impact of climate change and how to alleviate the damaging effects of global warming, especially on the world’s most vulnerable populations and communities.

The Forum serves as an independent platform for debate and collaboration on global humanitarian issues, including via a main annual event in addition to other smaller arena. Its activities also include awareness raising through research projects and advocacy campaigning and the initiation of practical projects to deal with specific humanitarian concerns.

The organisation entered a period of uncertainty when Director Martin Frick was fired from his post in March 2010 .

Projects

The Forum’s centerpiece event, the Annual Forum, is held each summer in the world’s humanitarian capital – Geneva – also home to the Forum’s Secretariat. It gathers some 400 senior international participants from public, private and non-governmental sectors. The 2010 Forum will take place 28-29 June 2010. Other Forum projects to-date include:

The ‘tck tck tck’ campaign was created by the Global Humanitarian Forum and strategic communications partner Havas Worldwide/Euro RSCG. ‘tck tck tck’ was subsequently adopted as the unifying symbol for many civil society organizations worldwide, including a coalition of leading NGOs who campaigned for a fair and ambitious global agreement on climate change to be reached at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP15). The Forum and Havas launched their own ‘tck tck tck Time for Climate Justice’ campaign on June 2009 at the 56th Cannes International Advertising Festival. The 'tck tck tck’ symbol communicates a sense of urgency as time ticked down to the start of COP15 as well as the level of urgency for taking serious action to tackle climate change itself. All ‘tck tck tck’ material is open source and its creative use is encouraged.

The Weather Info for All Initiative is an innovative public-private partnership that supports adaptation to climate change worldwide by reinforcing the capacities of National Meteorological Services. The Initiative harnesses the growth of telecommunications services to install automatic weather stations (which report on humidity, temperature and other basic measures) at mobile network sites across the African continent. These locations are ideal as they provide connectivity, power and security. The automatic weather stations help fill the existing ground level weather observation gap and the delivery of accurate weather forecasts and early warnings via mobile short message service (SMS), thus aiming to help those worst affected by, and most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Strategic partners include The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Ericsson, the World Meteorological Organization, Zain and Fairmount Weather Systems, Ltd.

The Youth Forum is a new platform where young people from all parts of the global society come together to help solve humanitarian problems in creative ways. The Youth Forum supplies opportunities for challenging and influential dialogue as well as the scaling up of concrete ideas. With unique access to the Global Humanitarian Forum’s high-level audience, the Youth Forum engages with some of the most important decision makers in the world. The Youth Forum currently focuses, as does the Global Humanitarian Forum, on the human impact of climate change. It encourages young adults to see climate change as an opportunity to develop innovative ideas. Entitled Young Adults 4 New Results, Youth Forum 2009 – the Youth Forum’s annual conference held this past June in Geneva – marked a starting point in developing new initiatives on youth action with regard to climate change.

The Human Impact Report is a major research project that was launched in May 2009 under the full title of Human Impact Report: Climate Change – The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis. The first flagship research publication of the Forum, it is also the first report exclusively and comprehensively documenting the adverse impacts of climate change on human society across the world today and in the near future. The report was based on a collation of the best information and studies that were available on the human impact of climate change, a traditionally under-researched angle of climate change. It was reviewed by an independent panel, including climate change experts such as Saleemul Huq and Hans Schellnhuber, and development and disaster management experts such as Nitin Desai, Jeffrey Sachs and Margareta Wahlström. The report notably includes global estimates of loss of life, economic losses and other impacts linked to climate change, including that over 300,000 people die each year due to climate change - numbers which were subject to debate. The report notes that such figures are estimative in nature and carry a significant margin of error, “The real numbers could be lower or higher”, it states.[1]

Energy for the Poor – a project for launching a global study into the energy needs of the 1.6 billion people worldwide who lack access to any modern forms of energy whatsoever, together with The Energy Resources Institute, India (TERI).[2]

Drylands: Climate Change and Development – a regional initiative to boost adaptation measures in one of the most climate-stressed regions of the planet, together with the Earth Institute at Columbia University New York.[3]

The Foundation Board

The Foundation Board is the supreme governing body of the Forum comprised of senior members from the academic, business, government, international and civil society fields. Members include:

• Kofi Annan, President
• Ivan Pictet, Vice-President
• Catherine Bertini
• Lakhdar Brahimi
• Michel Camdessus
• Mary Chinery-Hesse
• Jan Egeland
• Jacques Forster
• Goh Kee Nguan
• Rita Hauser
• HRH Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein
• Dean Hirsch
• Alois Hirschmugl
• Hans Küng
• Ricardo Lagos
• Dante Martinelli
• Rajendra Pachauri
• Mary Robinson
• Judith Rodin
• Jean-Louis Schiltz
• Amartya Sen
• Barbara Stocking
• Marianna Vardinoyannis
• James Wolfensohn
• Muhammad Yunus

Publications

The Forum publishes a number of reports, working papers, and newsletters in addition to the Human Impact Report to draw attention to the worldwide humanitarian crisis caused by global warming today and to promote faster, higher impact policy responses.

• 2008 Forum Report [4]
• 2009 Forum Report [5]
• 2009 Youth Forum Report [6]
• Key Points on Climate Justice: Working Paper of the Global Humanitarian Forum [7]

External links

• Official website
• Tck Tck Tck Time for Climate Justice campaign website
• Youth Forum website
• Youth Forum Community Portal
• COP 15 website

News articles

• “This silent suffering”, Rajendra Pachauri in The Guardian, 29 May 2009
• “Climate change is already killing 300,000 a year, report claims”, Times, 29 May 2009
• “Climate change causes 315’000 deaths a year – report” Reuters, 29 May 2009
• “Climate change kills”, France 24, 29 May 2009