On 15 and 16 April, IDMC's senior monitoring coordinator, Sylvain Ponserre, will be in Cannes, France, to present our IDETECT monitoring tool and discuss solutions to facilitate disaster response at the conference 'Health and climate change: Taking care of humankind at +2°C'. 

Following the UN climate conference COP24 in Katowice, Poland, and the landmark UN IPCC special report on 1.5 degrees of global warming, the  impacts of a changing climate on the health of populations worldwide need to be further examined. The conference in Cannes, dubbed the first 'humanitarian COP' on climate change and health, will examine the current and future consequences of climate change on health, explore innovative approaches to dealing with the emerging challenges and raise awareness among citizens and decision makers about the role of prevention, preparedness, adaptation and response to climate impacts.

Specific themes include: reducing the health risks of disasters; adapting to heat waves in urban areas; fighting against food insecurity and malnutrition; promoting access to universal health care; facing the health challenges of climate-related migration; protecting ecosystems to promote health; and financing and governing climate-health initiatives more effectively.

The conference is organised by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and others.

From 9 to 11 April, our head of policy and research Bina Desai will be in Bonn for the 9th meeting of the executive committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism for loss and damage associated with climate change impacts.  

Following the adoption of the recommendations on displacement at the last UN Climate Change Conference (COP) in December, States will now discuss the terms of reference of the Task Force on Displacement.

More information about the event is available here. 

On 11 and 12 April, Justin Ginnetti, head of IDMC's data & analysis department, and Leonardo Milano, IDMC's senior data scientist, will be in The Hague to join a workshop on predictive analytics in humanitarian response. 

The event, organised by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Centre for Humanitarian Data, will bring together technical experts and programme managers from UN agencies, international organisations and the academic world to: 

• Exchange information about predictive analytics initiatives in the humanitarian sector, including but not limited to models for famine, migration, climate risk, humanitarian financing, and other topics;
• Identify gaps, opportunities and challenges related to the application of predictive models in humanitarian crises;
• Consider legal and ethical issues associated with the collection and use of humanitarian data for predictive analytics purposes;
• Explore how predictive models might be integrated into existing humanitarian decision-making processes; and
• Explore collaboration models and areas where the Centre can help in terms of services like data curation, peer review and model hosting.

Organised criminal violence associated with drug trafficking and gang activity has reached epidemic proportions in the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) in recent years. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, IDMC estimates there were at least 432,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) as of the end of 2017, many of them driven from, and within, cities suffering the highest homicide rates in the world and levels of violence comparable to a war zone.
 
With increased attention to the violence and associated factors such as poverty, inequality and weak governance, has come a growing awareness of the many ways in which gang violence and other drivers forces people to abandon their homes in search of safety. However, most of the existing evidence on this form of internal displacement in the NTCA remains anecdotal, and data on IDPs – in terms of figures, locations, vulnerabilities and needs – is not collected through a harmonized approach to allow for comparison at regional level. There is, as such, a growing urgency to understand the phenomenon – the drivers, triggers, impacts and patterns – of internal displacement so as to provide the evidence base for operational and policy responses.

On 27 March, IDMC will be holding a closed-session roundtable discussion on the findings from our third and final report, on internal displacement in Honduras. The report’s findings, along with those from IDMC research in 2018 on El Salvador and Guatemala, will be presented by Vickie Knox of the Refugee Law Initiative and put into operational context by Noah Bullock of the Cristosal Foundation before a discussion with roundtable participants on potential recommendations and how to take them forward.

On Friday 10 May, we launched the 2019 Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID) at the United Nations in Geneva. The 2019 Global Report takes urban displacement as its focus, exploring the humanitarian and development challenges - but also opportunities - presented by displacement to, within and from towns and cities. The opening remarks were delivered by IDMC Director Alexandra Bilak to a full room of 150 people. This was followed by a discussion on the impacts, challenges and potential solutions for internal displacement, particularly in urban settings, with representatives from municipal authorities in Japan, UN Habitat and a civil society group operating in the sphere of climate change.

Moderator and opening remarks:
Ms. Alexandra Bilak, Director of IDMC

Speakers:
Ms. Maimunah Mohd Sharif, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN‐Habitat

Mr. Kiyoshi Murakami, Special Representative of Mayor & Senior Executive Advisor, City of Rikuzentakata, Japan

Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change & Development (ICCCAD), Dhaka, Bangladesh

You can watch the recording of the launch here: 

Photos

Find a selection of photos from the launch here.