Global aid cuts and the Humanitarian Reset – with its focus on more narrow definitions of life-saving interventions – raise various challenges for efforts to deliver on the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Agencies. Yet agroecology – through its emphasis on locally-led, nature-based programming – can offer innovation that helps with greening humanitarian action, as well asdelivering onimperatives of efficiency and sustainability in an era of shrinking aid budgets.

This session will involve presentations of new research collaborations with partnerorganisationsin Bangladesh, South Sudan and Kenya documenting learning from agroecology programming and its contribution to resilience at multiple levels, including anticipatory, absorptive and recovery capacities. Examples will include community-based interventions that support those exposed to both rapid onset crises, such as CycloneRemalin Bangladesh, and cyclical, slow onset hazards such as drought and floods in South Sudan.

Speakers will include local/national and international actors, including a representative Caritas Bangladesh, as well as a speaker from a national NGO in South Sudan with experience in agriculture and resilience programming (tbc). As well as their reflections on shifting the power in humanitarian action, speakers will share reflections on the status of inter-agency coordination, cooperation and partnership in support of these efforts; and implications for inter-network and inter-agency collaboration between civil society – local and international; UN agencies, host governments and other stakeholders.