As both geopolitical tensions and the climate heat up, humanitarian organizations are finding themselves facing new and increasingly complicated challenges. As war and politics create new barriers and natural disasters become more frequent and destructive, researchers and leaders in Hawaii are grappling with how to respond to humanitarian disasters in a rapidly changing world.

In March, Honolulu think tank Pacific Forum launched the Humanitarian Security Challenges Working Group to look at the future of disaster response. The working group is chaired by Pacific Forum senior adjunct fellow Michael Walsh, who recently consulted with international groups trying to work in northwestern Syria to aid rescue and emergency medical efforts after a massive earthquake in February ravaged the region.

“Work had started on developing a mechanism to deploy search and rescue teams and emergency medical teams into armed conflicts and complex human humanitarian emergencies,” said Walsh. “But that work was not finished.”

The earthquake and its aftershocks collapsed buildings across the region, and current counts are that 50,500 people died in Turkey and 7,260 in Syria. But even today many uncounted bodies still lie beneath the rubble. The international community was particularly slow to respond in Syria’s Idlib province, where a dec­ade of war has already made the humanitarian situation dire. The situation on the ground made it both difficult and dangerous for rescue workers or aid to get where they needed to go.

Northwestern Syria is controlled by a variety of anti-regime rebel and terrorist groups, including Turkish- backed factions, that have at times fought among themselves as much as they fight the Syrian government. Meanwhile, the government forces loyal to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies have subjected the province to a punishing siege, pummeling civilian population centers with artillery and airstrikes, targeting hospitals and cutting off deliveries of food and medical supplies.

Assad’s government insists all aid and support in the country should flow through it. But reports by Human Rights Watch and others organizations have alleged that Assad’s Baathist regime often redirects funding and supplies meant to help vulnerable civilians to paramilitary groups and gifts to political allies.

Navigating the web of conflicts, corruption and threats presents both figurative and literal roadblocks that humanitarian groups have had to navigate to help people. Walsh said that as the war in Ukraine now rages and geopolitical tensions mount in the Pacific, what happened in Syria should a wake-up call for the world — but not necessarily a surprise.

“There will be another northwest Syria in the future,” said Walsh. “It’s not a matter of if, but when — and there’s no telling where that’s going to happen. It could happen in East Asia, it could happen in Southeast Asia, it could happen in the Pacific. So this is an issue that people should care about on humanitarian grounds but they should also care about for regional security purposes.”

The Indo-Pacific region has several ongoing conflicts of its own in the form of long-running insurgencies. But in recent years territorial disputes between China and its neighbors as well as worsening relations between Washington and Beijing have led to fears of potential large-scale conflict breaking out in the region. Walsh said, “I think the contingency situation that we’d be most concerned about in the Asia-Pacific today is a natural disaster occurring in the middle of a conflict.”

Humanitarian responses often have to navigate murky politics. Traditionally, “whoever is having the issue must seek out the help,” said Joseph Martin, director of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance. Situated on Ford Island, the center does academic research and civil-military coordination training to help support decision-makers before, during and after crises.

Militaries are often called upon to help respond to major humanitarian disasters. They offer helicopters, ships and other resources that can prove critical in the immediate aftermath of a disaster for search and rescue or delivering supplies. After the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed 227,898 people, the U.S. military dispatched ships and planes to assist. But Martin said that any military participation, particularly involving forces outside the country in question, has to be carefully weighed and considered.

Martin said foreign aid usually flows in when the damage or human suffering exceeds what a country and its neighbors in the region can handle themselves. Even then the aid usually comes through agencies such as America’s USAID, the United Nations’ World Food Program, the Red Cross or a mixture. Local military forces are often involved, and strongly preferred to outside forces coming in.

But sometimes the scale of the suffering is too great, the damage to infrastructure is too severe and people affected are in areas too remote or difficult to reach for local authorities and traditional aid organizations to handle.

“It’s really only then that the U.S. military can get involved,” said Martin. “And that’s probably happened on average maybe two to five times a year globally … (and) the vast majority of that would be in some pretty specialized areas: airfield management, airlift support, so particularly vertical lift, like helicopters, sometimes some engineering some air traffic control-type thing.”

But typically, those sorts of deployments take place in environments of relative peace with governments that request the help. When it comes to delivering aid in a war zone, humanitarian groups look at militaries very differently. Groups are expected to abide by humanitarian principles, including an expectation of impartiality and neutrality.

“There’s just different dynamics at play,” said Martin. “In a natural disaster event, nongovernmental organizations, so think about the Red Cross or some of the other agencies, they don’t really have an issue in a natural disaster being associated with the military. In a conflict there are some significant challenges with that.”

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations maintains its own Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management in Jakarta, Indo­nesia, which is meant to coordinate the efforts of ASEAN member states to provide humanitarian assistance throughout Southeast Asia. But ongoing conflict in some corners is already posing problems. Notably, Myanmar has for decades been gripped with conflict as various insurgent groups fight against the ruling military junta, which has repressed dissent violently and carried out genocidal campaigns against various ethnic groups.

“It’s very, very difficult for ASEAN to provide humanitarian assistance in Myanmar, because it’s hard to get into, they’re shooting each other,” said Martin. “The need may be there, but you literally can’t get aid in … or if they can get it in, it’s very restrictive on the process for which you do that.”

Deteriorating U.S.-Chinese relations could add new dimensions to these challenges. In the past the United States and China cooperated on delivering aid after disasters. The two countries have coordinated efforts after earthquakes in places such as Haiti and Nepal. The United States has delivered aid to China itself after major earthquakes, including on some occasions aboard U.S. military aircraft.

The U.S. and Chinese armies used to hold the annual Disaster Management Exchange training event until at least 2020, with several of the training events taking place in Hawaii. When the Chinese navy attended RIMPAC in Hawaii in 2014 and 2016, it practiced search and rescue and humanitarian response operations. But as relations soured, these sorts of exchanges essentially halted altogether.

During an online panel in March co-hosted by the Center for African Studies and the Humanitarian Security Challenges Working Group, Walsh warned that “renewed major power competition in the world is something that everyone has to understand is going to have a major impact on emergency medical team deployments everywhere, but particularly in armed conflicts. There’s going to be conflict parties, and you have one side of this major power competition on one side and the other on the other. And so, in those situations, I think we should expect that we’re going to have a repeat of northwest Syria over and over again in the decades to come.”

Walsh said that the hostilities could cause particular problems in a place such as Taiwan. The self-ruled island — which China considers a rogue island — is a key trading partner of the United States and recipient of military aid. Chinese leader Xi Jinpeng has vowed to bring the island under Beijing’s control by military force if necessary. A major natural disaster on the island amid either the current military standoff or an active conflict could lead to more complications — as well as untold human suffering.

Just as natural disasters can worsen suffering in war zones, disasters themselves can destabilize countries and communities and set the stage for new conflicts. Natural disasters are becoming a bigger issue in the Pacific region as the climate warms, creating more intense weather patterns and raising the seas. Storms are becoming stronger and more frequent, droughts are becoming longer and many smaller inhabited islands in the Pacific are in danger of being swallowed by the sea by the end of the century.

In July 2021 INDOPACOM commander Adm. John Aquilino stood up a new Climate Change Program under Martin’s direction to track how climate change is affecting both the risk of disasters and of potential new conflicts. For instance, Martin noted that as clean fresh water becomes less accessible because of either droughts or mixing with rising ocean waters, it creates shortages that can destabilize regions and spark conflicts.

“Climate change may not cause these issues, but it can tip the balance in an area that’s already been in a high risk,” said Martin.

This article has been updated to better reflect the timeline of the organization and launch of the Humanitarian Security Challenges Working Group.