Rome — A groundbreaking study into the threats likely to confront southern African communities over the next decade has been released. Titled "Humanitarian Trends in Southern Africa: Challenges and Opportunities," the study identifies regional and global factors that may impact the lives and livelihoods of Southern Africans and, as importantly, the available capacities to address the challenges.
The study found that, contrary to perceptions that southern Africa has a homogeneous and ‘low-risk' profile, the region is exposed to a range of environmental and social pressures, with 47 defined international humanitarian emergencies between 2000 and 2012. However, it is often the smaller-scale emergencies that have the most impact on resilience: multiple, frequently repeating and compounding shocks prevent communities from fully recovering, and as each of these shocks is individually not of a scale that attracts global attention, responses are often under-resourced.
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