Humanitarian horizons: a practitioners' guide to the future

This guide serves as the culmination of the Humanitarian Horizons project, a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. It proposes that humanitarian interventions address both the causes and effects of disasters, thus bringing about "new humanitarianism," which would involve governance, livelihood, security, social protection and other conventional development activities. It also addresses short-term and long-term climate change, linking the former to disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction, and the latter with fundamental changes and/or adaptation strategies targeting the productive bases of societies.

The guide is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.