Today marks the inaugural World Humanitarian Day. Concern Worldwide's Peter Crichton reflects on the issues raised by the event for aid workers, agencies and, most of all, the beneficiaries.

On this, the first World Humanitarian Day it seems a good moment to reflect on the four major changes that have transformed humanitarian action over the last three decades.

I have been an 'aid worker' for most of my adult life, even though 34 years ago that term was not in common usage. In the early Eighties, our vocabulary began to include words such as 'participation', 'ownership' and 'sustainability', all common enough now in many walks of life, but then they heralded a new and exciting, radical even, approach to how humanitarian agencies interacted with disaster-affected communities.

Now, it is almost unthinkable that those affected by disaster would not be listened to, or that their own skills, experience, social structures and priorities would not be included in shaping the disaster response established by agencies such as Concern.

The inclusion of the human dimension, ensuring that aid is appropriate to the needs of communities by listening to their concerns and priorities and ensuring that they are included in the design and delivery of any intervention, has contributed to a major shift in how we perceive those affected by disaster. Rather than passive, voiceless and anonymous 'victims', they are fellow human beings caught up in events very often not of their making and certainly not of their choice. They are the ones who best understand the impact of the disaster on their lives, and they are the ones best placed to determine who is in greatest need of assistance, and what that assistance should be.

The Nineties, with its awful catalogue of disasters including the great famine in Somalia, the genocide of Rwanda, and the war in the Balkans, prompted aid agencies into having a long hard look at how we responded to disasters and at the quality of that response. This has resulted in a much greater professionalisation and regulation of humanitarian assistance. Early warning systems are much better established now and can help predict when and where great weather events such as typhoons and hurricanes will strike, where tsunamis are likely after ocean bed earthquakes, and where extended drought is likely to tip communities into famine.

Codes of practice are now followed for all aspects of assistance, such as the quality and quantity of drinking water provided to refugee camps. Standards of behaviour have been agreed to ensure that agencies work with each other - and with disaster-affected communities - in a professional manner to ensure that we deliver co-ordinated programmes of the highest standard. We cannot pretend that every emergency response is perfect, but we do have a much clearer understanding of what constitutes an effective, appropriate and speedy response.

The last decade has brought an understanding that disaster responses should start before the disaster occurs, not after. Many disasters such as food insecurity, flooding and conflict are predictable and cyclical, and a huge international effort is underway to help communities identify what disasters are likely to affect them and how they can prepare themselves to cope with and respond to them. This approach, known as disaster risk reduction, seeks to help communities protect themselves, their possessions and their means of making a living, and should result in their requiring less external assistance in the future.

The fourth major change is how aid workers are increasingly killed, injured and kidnapped in deliberately targeted attacks. It has been the case for many years that violence is the biggest cause of deaths to aid workers far outstripping deaths caused by illness or road accidents.

2008 was officially the deadliest year yet for aid workers, with 122 killed while carrying out their work, confirming a decade long trend of year on year increases. Over the past decade, over 700 humanitarian workers have lost their lives. Thousands more have been on the wrong end of bombings, kidnappings, attacks, hijackings, robberies and rapes. The Center on International Cooperation (CIC) in New York and the Overseas Development Institute in London produced a report earlier this year which concluded that aid work is now more at risk while working overseas than U.N. peacekeepers.

It is fitting, then, that World Humanitarian Day has been established by the General Assembly of the United Nations not only to increase public understanding of humanitarian assistance activities worldwide, but also to recognise humanitarian workers who have lost their lives or been injured in the course of their work.

August 19th was chosen in remembrance of the 22 people who lost their lives when the United Nations Office in Iraq was bombed on 19 August 2003.

On this day, I also salute with sadness the six personal friends that I have lost in the last fifteen years.

Security management is taking up an increasing amount of humanitarian workers' time, and Concern has devoted much time and resources over the last decade to trying to ensure that our staff can deliver quality programmes as safely as possible in some of the most insecure and volatile places on earth.

Looking into the future it is clear that we are only just now beginning to see how climate change is going to impact on the world. Hardly a day goes by without another report of polar ices masses melting and breaking up at unprecedented and increasing speeds. For many people living in low-lying coastal areas or areas where rainfall is becoming less and less predictable, the future is uncertain and the need for adequately funded and effectively targeted aid is going to be crucial.

I and other aid workers have had to adapt the way we fashion our responses to a changing global context over the years. We are doing it better than we used to and we have and will continue to save lives and help people make awful situations a little more bearable and that they can hold onto their dignity and identity.

Peter Crichton is Emergency Preparedness Co-ordinator for Concern Worldwide. He is based in West Cork. www.concern.net

This piece was originally published in the Irish Examiner.

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