Overview

How can environmental considerations be mainstreamed into settlements-based humanitarian programming? This session will discuss this question by introducing and launching the “Environmental Addendum” to the Settlement Approach Guidance Note produced by the Global Shelter Cluster's Urban Settlements Working Group (USWG). The session will unpack the key recommendations of the Environmental Addendum and showcase how the settlements approach with its spatial, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder approach can help humanitarian practitioners to advance environmental outcomes, such as how to build settlement-level resilience to natural hazards or how to ensure environmentally sustainable humanitarian action. During the session, practitioners will present case studies on how humanitarian actors have collaboratively used settlement-based principles to address key environmental and climate change issues.

Background

In 2020, the Global Shelter Cluster's Urban Settlements Working Group (USWG) worked with over 30 experts to develop the Settlement Approach (SA)GuidanceNote (Settlement Approach Guidance Note | Shelter Cluster) that promotes a multi-stakeholder, multisectoral, whole-of-population approach for crisis response to address cross-sectoral issues in collaboration with local stakeholders. The USWG has since organized consultations and advocacy campaigns to document and promote the operationalization of the approach in the humanitarian sector. The latest consultations concluded that there was a need to complement the existing guidance with an annex on environmental and climate change considerations to improve the quality and outcomes of the approach and enable corresponding actions. This “Environmental Addendum” will help users incorporate environmental and climate change considerations in settlement-based programming, particularly in the initial steps of settlement identification, delineation and settlement-based need assessment. Concrete actions will be presented and discussed with the audience, including existing tools and analytical methods for area delineation, as well as profiles of stakeholders to engage with for research and data collection.