Interlinked Crises, Disconnected Struggles: Shared Planet at London Climate Action Week 2026
By Jean-Michel Betran-Makosso
In June, amidst a blistering UK heatwave, Shared Planet and Oxfam brought together a panel of humanitarian experts for London Climate Action Week (LCAW) to explore why systems designed to help communities on the climate frontline often treat climate and humanitarian crises as separate problems, and why bridging this nexus is so critical.
Shared Planet’s second annual LCAW event offered critical reflection on the link between climate and humanitarian disasters, both globally and locally. In fact, communities do not experience ecosystem collapse, displacement and humanitarian need separately — they experience one compounding emergency.
In the Sahel, droughts that once arrived once a decade now arrive every two or three years. In the Congo Basin, forest-dependent communities face displacement, conflict and deforestation driven by climate pressure and global extractivism at the same time. In the Pacific, coastal communities face saltwater intrusion, storm intensification and the erosion of the reef systems that protect their shorelines. And more locally, in London, record heat falls hardest on the lowest-income households and often in neighbourhoods with the least access to green and blue space.
The evidence linking ecosystem health, climate resilience and humanitarian need is extensive and growing. And yet, the financing streams and policy frameworks meant to respond to these crises have long operated in near isolation from one another — at a critical human and financial cost.
The event featured perspectives from four speakers representing humanitarian and development organisations and international agencies and non-profits, whose work operates at this intersection and attempts to break down siloes.
Speakers included: Eva Lee Chih-Jung (Energy and Environment Officer, UNHCR Regional Bureau for West and Central Africa), Paulinho Muzaliwa (Founder and Executive Head, Unidos Social Innovation Centre), Zahra Hdidou (Climate Adaptation and Gender Expert) and Thomas Reeve (Climate Justice Advisor, Oxfam).
This event was facilitated by Shared Planet’s Jean-Michel Betran-Makosso (Lead, Humanitarian Action and Climate Practice) and Mariam Moussa (Lead, Gender Workstream).
Key Event Takeaways
The silos across the humanitarian and climate sectors are structural, not accidental.
Environmental conservation, climate adaptation and humanitarian response sit in distinct mandates, funding streams and accountability frameworks. This is not because the underlying challenges and root causes are distinct, but because of how these systems were built. From humanitarian programming to national climate planning, the same pattern often repeats itself: the organisations doing the work can already see connections, yet the systems around them are not built to support them. A drought does not only hit agriculture. It hits water, which hits health, which hits the economic stability of women already absorbing the adaptive burden of climate change at household level.
Climate should not be a separate agenda — it is a cross-cutting lens for existing humanitarian mandates.
For UNHCR, climate change is not a parallel programme, but an integral part of the agency’s protection mandate: climate change multiplies risk to the safety, livelihoods and stability of displaced populations. This means that affected communities are meaningfully included in national development plans, adaptation plans, early warning and social protection systems, from the outset.
When this approach is effective, it bears positive results. For example, in Ghana, UNHCR is working with the Ghana Refugee Board to integrate refugee responses into the government's flagship agricultural programme, with 8,000 hectares allocated for refugees and host communities to cultivate together. And in Togo, for example, an agro-hub of 1,800 hectares has been allocated on the same logic, with climate-smart, bankable agricultural techniques and blended finance layered in to make the solutions durable.
Crisis-affected communities already operationalise the climate-humanitarian nexus and don't need it engineered for them.
The Unidos Social Innovation Centre started in recognition of the fact that while humanitarian assistance saves lives, it can leave crisis-affected communities trapped in dependency for years or decades — seen only through the lens of vulnerability rather than capacity. Paulinho described how Unidos didn’t start with theory. It started by observing social relations and material conditions in refugee settlements. When community members spoke about hunger, they spoke about degraded soil; when they spoke about degraded soil, they spoke about income; income led to youth employment, environmental degradation, community tension, etc.
One issue always led to the next — which is why Unidos spans regenerative agriculture, clean water, livelihoods and community cohesion. Learn more about Unidos’ recent Kura Kura initiative. The lesson for externally driven programmes: institutions often try to engineer integration from the top down and can end up more focused on connecting sectors than on responding to people’s conditions of living. The role of external actors should be less about designing integration for communities, and more about creating the conditions for communities to design solutions themselves. Consider the following article series for more on the subject.
Participation must go beyond consultation.
"Participatory" too often stops at consulting communities. Co-creation is the step that follows, and it changes outcomes. Eva shared two relevant examples from UNHCR’s work: In Togo, knowledge exchange between host communities and displaced herders from Burkina Faso led to a co-designed integrated farming model that improved both livelihoods and social cohesion. In Mbera camp, Mauritania, households mostly relied on charcoal and firewood for cooking. These are hard to source, and drive deforestation (tree cutting for firewood collection), often fuelling tension between displaced and host communities.
Despite existing alternatives, including cash incentives to switch to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), uptake was weak. Sitting down with women revealed that the barrier to LPG adoption wasn’t the fuel, it was saving up for the bottle. A pay-as-you-go model, designed with community members, took adoption of LPG to 96%. Displaced people are not beneficiaries; they are agents of change; and responses are only sustainable when they are designed by them.
Climate action can be a peace multiplier, but only if it's designed for it. Climate change is routinely described as a threat multiplier. Thomas drew on findings from Oxfam's 2026 report Local Solutions, Global Urgency to demonstrate it can also be a peace multiplier: environmental and adaptation work can deliver peace dividends and build social cohesion. This may include refugees and host communities farming the same land, or peace-positive water management committees in drought-affected areas.
But interventions that overlook power dynamics can just as easily create new tensions. What's needed is conflict-sensitive, gender-responsive design, and for climate and humanitarian finance directed to the solutions and structures that already exist. When crisis hits, success depends on trust and relationships built over years. That is an argument for long-term investment in organisations rooted in their communities, or better, in communities themselves.
Women are absorbing the adaptive burden and leading the response, while remaining critically underfunded.
Zahra reminded us that gender is another risk multiplier — but that women are also the first responders: often at the forefront of community organising and with the clearest understanding of households’ needs after a shock. Yet they remain institutionally marginalised and seriously underfunded.
The problem is systemic, not one of capacity. Women champions in Cambodia teaching themselves social media to fundraise for community rebuilding demonstrates enormous initiative. This raises an obvious question: why should they carry the cost of a crisis they did not cause? What's needed is a paradigm shift that institutionalises funding flows to women-led community-based organisations — and, alongside it, support for communities to influence local government budgets, development plans and disaster management plans directly. Women from affected countries repeatedly demonstrate the capacity to engage in policymaking, but lack the financial support, including childcare costs, that would let them in the room.
The global financial system wasn’t designed to empower frontline communities, that is a justice problem.
Oxfam's research finds around 1% of climate finance in West Africa reaches local communities directly. Fragile and conflict-affected settings receive roughly a third of the climate finance that non-fragile settings do. Globally, some 200 million people live in territories without official governments, and adding 50 million refugees and stateless people puts around a quarter of a billion people outside the state-centric climate finance system entirely.
Some of this is explained by operational barriers such as financial risk, access, lack of data. But the humanitarian system moves money and resources into those very same places every day. What’s needed are funds that can operate regardless of who controls a territory, and pooled funds and special windows that CSOs and community-based organisations can access directly, without requiring INGO or UN intermediaries. Many of these organisations have years, if not decades, of experience managing and being audited on funds. The bottleneck is not their capacity; it's the financial system's design. A justice-centred approach would put an end to the expectations of communities having to constantly prove themselves in order to receive funds.
Concluding Reflections
This panel surfaced concrete responses to the challenge of siloes: the resilience and entrepreneurship of refugee-led organisations like Unidos; the evidence that women-led organisations make peace processes more sustainable; UNHCR’s examples from West and Central Africa showing that where there’s a will, there’s a way. The strides made on gender mainstreaming in programming offer a direct template for embedding conflict sensitivity and peace dividends into climate work. The tools and the models exist, what’s needed now is the political will and the financing to scale them.
The task is to move beyond tweaks to the system. It is to redistribute power and resources towards those most affected and already responding, and to be opportunistic, relentlessly, about the openings that exist.
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The webinar recording is available here to anyone who couldn't join. If you'd like to talk to us about resilience, conservation and humanitarian programming across the nexus, get in touch at sharedplanet@sharedplanet.co.uk.
About Shared Planet: Shared Planet is a global research and stakeholder engagement consultancy delivering insights, analysis and engagement on social issues and environmental justice. Based in London and operating globally, we work with organisations across sectors on the most critical issues affecting people and the planet.
About Oxfam: Oxfam is one of the world's leading international development and humanitarian organisations. Working in over 90 countries, Oxfam tackles the root causes of poverty, inequality and injustice, combining long-term development programming with emergency response, rigorous research and bold advocacy. With a particular focus on climate justice, Oxfam works to ensure that those least responsible for the climate crisis, and most exposed to its consequences, have the resources, rights and political voice to shape the responses that affect their lives.