Hunger feeds on crisis. When disaster strikes, hunger often follows. The majority of the time, the crises are caused by conflict, violence, hurricanes or drought. This time, it’s caused by a global pandemic.
COVID-19 is hurting everyone, but it threatens vulnerable communities the most. In many of the countries that the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) serves, health systems are barely functioning, there is limited access to clean water and sanitation supplies are out of reach. Additionally, people are already suffering from poverty, hunger and malnutrition. As a result, the impact of the virus in these places and the economic consequences that follow will be devastating.
With this in mind, on March 30, the U.N. World Food Programme officially classified the COVID-19 crisis as an L3 emergency. But what, exactly, does this mean?
For humanitarian agencies like the U.N. World Food Programme that must respond to multiple emergencies in more than one country, a classification system is used to determine which crises require the most resources. The most severe emergencies are classified as Level 3 or L3 for short. Right now, these are the regions and/or situations that have been classified as L3:
The COVID-19 pandemic
Northeastern Nigeria
South Sudan
Syria
Democratic Republic of Congo
The Sahel
Yemen
But, there are actually two types of L3 emergencies: L3 emergencies across the U.N. system—which apply to most humanitarian organizations worldwide—and corporate L3 emergencies that pertain only to a specific agency like the U.N. World Food Programme.
A system-wide L3 emergency is declared by a committee of United Nations (U.N.) and non-U.N. global humanitarian agencies to ensure that the appropriate leadership structures are put in place for a coordinated, global response to a large-scale event. This need occurs most often when a crisis changes suddenly and significantly, requiring ramped-up efforts on multiple fronts—food, health, support to refugees and so on. To make this determination, the committee considers the scale, complexity, urgency, capacity and reputational risk involved with the crisis.
Meanwhile, the U.N. World Food Programme—and other humanitarian agencies—employs its own internal emergency classification system. The U.N. World Food Programme’s process not only takes into account the complexity of a crisis, but the resources and capacity available to its country offices and regional bureaus to respond.
The U.N. World Food Programme has three levels of classifications. Any country with a U.N. World Food Programme emergency or relief operation is automatically classified as an L1. When the resources of a given country office are insufficient to meet the urgency, scale or complexity—or when the scale of crisis extends beyond a single country or territory—an L2 emergency can be activated, allowing regional resources to be utilized to amplify the response. When an emergency exceeds U.N. World Food Programme regional support capacity, an L3 designation allows the U.N. World Food Programme to use its entire global, or “corporate,” human or financial resource base to respond.
