Cold weather: an unrecognized challenge for humanitarian assistance

Abstract

In Afghanistan, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) are stockpiling food and non-food items. Plans have been made to keep roads open throughout the winter, when weather that normally isolates parts of this country from outside access occurs. These efforts, which began during the Afghan summer, are a welcome sign that assistance organizations have begun to recognize that cold weather can be an important factor in providing humanitarian assistance. It is worth recalling that Afghanistan is where at least 150 displaced persons froze to death near Herat, Afghanistan in January and February 2001. Cold weather is not unusual. It returns consistently, year after year, in many parts of the world. The fact that periods of cold weather are largely predictable and will overlap with periods of potential disasters in much of the world suggests that cold weather should be systematically included as a normal part of planning and managing humanitarian response activities. The deaths in Afghanistan, and the need to launch special funding appeals to support humanitarian operations in normal winter weather suggests that the reality of winter has not been fully incorporated into the norms and standards for humanitarian response. Until late 1980s, most international humanitarian assistance focused predominantly on emergencies and disasters in tropical areas: civil wars in Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Sudan; refugees in Africa, Cambodia, and other parts of Southeast Asia; droughts in Africa; and floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes in the Caribbean and in Latin America. These disasters were the genesis of a widely applied approach to humanitarian assistance: provide clean water, basic medical care (often directed by specialists in tropical medicine), and basic food commodities to the disaster victims. Shelter was often provided by the victims themselves, supplemented by a sheet of plastic or, in the recovery phase, some zinc roofing. However, immediate shelter was rarely treated as a life-saving issue and the climate where a disaster occurred was considered benign, though sometimes uncomfortable for non-natives. Although disasters did occur in cold weather conditions, most did not receive sustained attention from the humanitarian assistance industry and had little impact on the prevailing norms for humanitarian assistance. This changed during the earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, in 1988, when direct international humanitarian assistance was provided to the Soviet Union for the first time in decades. Because the Spitak earthquake occurred in winter, protection from the weather was as important to keeping victims alive as was clean water, medical care, and food. International assistance teams had to operate in cold winter conditions and faced the need to secure shelter, heating, and other support services independently of the damaged local infrastructure. Shorts, Tshirts, and mosquito netting (the norms for warm weather disasters) were not sufficient to enable a relief worker to operate in this type of cold weather disaster. ‘‘Cold weather disasters’’ come in two variations. The more numerous are disasters caused by other hazards where cold weather is a factor affecting post-disaster well being and the provision of assistance. These disasters have included socio-economic disruption following the break-up of the Soviet Union; wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan; earthquakes in Afghanistan, Iran, China, Turkey, and most recently Pakistan; refugees in northern Iraq; and floods in the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Poland. The second type of cold weather disaster is where the weather is the cause of the disaster. These disasters are fewer because people who live in areas routinely affected ARTICLE IN PRESS