In emergencies, staying connected can help affected persons get in touch with separated family members, plan safe routes, find shelter, engage with Humanitarian Organizations, and access humanitarian and other services. Yet after disasters, the telecommunications networks on which connectivity relies frequently stop working, depriving affected people of the communication channels on which they increasingly rely. Similar situations arise in conflict settings where networks can become compromised or in other humanitarian situations where perhaps connectivity levels were low even prior to an emergency.

Neither scientists, nor economists, nor insurers, nor military planners have assessed the risks of climate change in full. Heads of government are left to guess. A clear understanding of the scale of the risks will not on its own guarantee a proportionate response. But unless we have such an understanding, we can hardly be surprised if our response is inadequate.

Important parts of the Earth’s climate and environment can change in ways that are self-reinforcing, sudden, and irreversible. The risks of such changes are under-researched, under-reported in what is communicated by scientists to governments, and underestimated. In the most authoritative science assessments, the most important policy question of all – whether the climate will be stable at low degrees of warming – is hardly even raised.

The greatest progress so far in decarbonising the global economy has been made by governments that ignored the advice of economists. Investing in new technologies turns out to be a more effective way of changing things than taxing the incumbents. We need to stop being surprised by this and start replicating those successes.

This chapter explores the data protection challenges associated with the use of Artificial Intelligence systems in the humanitarian sector. The most relevant are some key elements of data Processing (such as the use of large data sets) and the purpose of such Processing, particularly as it concerns decision-making processes. The sections that follow first give a basic explanation of the technology in question, then identify the related data protection challenges and provide guidance for Humanitarian Organizations on how to address some of them.

At COP26, countries representing 70 per cent of the global economy agreed to work together to cross the tipping points where clean technologies outcompete the fossils in each greenhouse-gas-emitting sector of the global economy. This could mark the start of a new era for climate change diplomacy. Success will need support from all sides.

Every human being has an identity. The right to identity is undisputed and recognized in international declarations and conventions. But not all human beings have a way to prove their identity. In this regard, everyone should have a means to prove who they are through an identity tool. The form such a tool should take remains a matter of dispute. Yet no matter what its form – document, card, token, mobile app or something else – it needs to be produced and managed. The mandates of Humanitarian Organizations frame their action, and this is particularly acute with Digital Identity as we will see in this chapter.

Estimates of the economic costs of climate change rely on guesswork in the face of huge uncertainties, and arbitrary judgements about what is important. The models can produce any number their creators want them to; and typically, they trivialise the risks. Despite being described as ‘worse than useless’ by leading academics, economic analysis of this kind has been credited with a Nobel Prize, and it continues to inform government policy.

A handful of governments can rewrite the rules for the global car industry, doubling the pace of the transition to zero-emission vehicles and radically cutting the costs. The COP26 campaign woke some countries up to this opportunity, while some of the world’s largest carmakers continued to fight back.

The International Organization for Standardization defines biometric recognition and Biometrics as the “automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioural characteristics”. Biometrics are therefore measurable and unique human signatures that may include fingerprints, iris scans or behavioural characteristics such as the way a person walks.

Geopolitical competition between the world’s major powers does not make cooperation on climate change impossible; neither does industrial competition in clean technologies make it unnecessary. In the power, road transport, and steel sectors, there are ways that the United States, China and Europe can work together to accelerate the low carbon transitions – not by avoiding competition, but by shaping it to achieve better outcomes.