This session will examine how Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland (MSF) and the wider humanitarian sector must adapt to the escalating climate crisis, exposing possible pathways and challenges to transforming its traditional operating model and priority setting.

Tracing MSF’s evolving awareness and actions, it will highlight how climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, exacerbating health crises, displacements, and resource scarcity, and questions the environmental impact of humanitarian operations. The panelists will urge for a profound transformation of humanitarian action to remain effective, robust, and equitable, with greater innovation in programmatic approaches, collaboration with local actors, anticipatory planning and learning how to operate within planetary boundaries. The modern humanitarian imperative and the scientific plea to respect the limits of a finite natural world may ultimately converge in protecting a “safe and just space for humanity”, including the most vulnerable populations.

At a time when actual ‘heating policies’ with deliberate reinvestment in fossil fuels are being developed, and when international solidarity and climate action are under simultaneous attack, humanitarian and environmental commitments face a largely common destiny, because of their most often shared humanist nature, the evolution in people’s fundamental needs, and because of a principle of reality, which will, under the relentless pressure of physical events, impose itself.