World Humanitarian Day 2025 emphasizes the urgent need for climate justice through global solidarity and local empowerment.
As Brazil prepares for COP30, the focus is on transitioning to renewable energy, protecting ecosystems, and supporting vulnerable communities.
The call is for robust climate policies and international cooperation to ensure sustainable development and resilience against climate change impacts.
On World Humanitarian Day, we honour the courage and commitment of humanitarian workers who support the most vulnerable in times of crisis. This year’s theme— “Strengthening Global Solidarity and Empowering Local Communities”—feels especially urgent as Brazil prepares to host the 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) in November 2025. The summit will address the global challenge of climate change, calling for stronger international cooperation while empowering local communities to build resilience.
The COP30 agenda will focus on six interconnected priorities. Energy, industry, and transport transition towards renewable sources; protection and restoration of ecosystems—forests, oceans, and biodiversity—while tackling deforestation; sustainable agriculture and resilient food systems with equitable food access; climate-resilient cities and infrastructure, including water management; human and social development to reduce climate change’s social impacts and cross-cutting enablers such as climate finance and technology transfer.
The inter-linkage between these priorities is starkly evident in Kendrapada, Odisha, one of 11 Indian districts identified at “Very High” risk for both flood and drought in the District-level Climate Risk Assessment for India. Similar patterns of vulnerability exist across India and beyond.
In Kendrapada, coastal erosion forces families into nearby villages without adequate rehabilitation, or to migrate to far-off cities. Rehabilitation sites often flood during the monsoon, submerging roads and isolating homes. Many displaced families have not received compensation, leaving them without farmland, legal ownership of new homes, or access to forests and kitchen gardens they once relied on.
Each week, buses carry young migrants nearly 2,000 km to cities like Ernakulam, Kerala, where they work long hours for low wages and send meagre remittances home. The COVID-19 pandemic deepened this hardship—many lost jobs overnight, had no shelter, and walked home in desperation—only to return to the same urban precarity.
Deforestation is accelerating agricultural decline. Small farms are abandoned or absorbed into large farms, industrial projects, and infrastructure like the proposed Mahanadi Riverine Port, which will require 300 hectares of land. Disasters are becoming more frequent and intense, worsening ecological degradation. Villages with healthy mangrove cover, however, fared far better during Cyclone Dana (2024), underscoring the protective power of green infrastructure.
India’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) commit to reducing emissions intensity by 45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 and achieving 50 per cent of installed power capacity from non-fossil sources. Yet without robust climate justice policies—focused on resilience, preparedness, and adequate loss-and-damage compensation—such achievements risk being unsustainable.
Insights from community consultations highlight several urgent priorities for negotiators at COP30. There is a pressing need to activate international climate finance for loss and damage in the most vulnerable regions and to expedite rehabilitation efforts. Climate action must recognise the interdependence of environmental, social, and economic issues, while placing people—particularly the poor and marginalised—at the centre of solutions. Local leadership should be elevated, with special emphasis on women as ecological defenders, acknowledging the critical value of the habitat services they safeguard. Disaster-affected communities require comprehensive compensation that includes sustainable livelihood support, alongside robust social security measures such as pensions, housing, healthcare, and employment guarantees for climate-affected informal workers, facilitated through worker support centres. Expanding green cover is equally vital, both to arrest coastal erosion and biodiversity loss and to strengthen natural defences against cyclones and floods. The establishment of climate commissions at both national and state levels with people’s participation can facilitate the monitoring of climate action plans and ensure compliance from the private sector while addressing the concerns of affected community.
On this World Humanitarian Day, let us uphold the spirit of global solidarity and local empowerment—not just in words, but through concrete climate action. Let us honour humanitarian workers who have lost their lives in disaster and conflict response. And let us commit to protecting both vulnerable communities and the ecosystems they safeguard—before it is too late.
Debabrat Patra is Associate Director and Humanitarian Lead, ActionAid Association
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of ActionAid or Down To Earth