Next year’s UN-led humanitarian response appeals, released today, come with dire warnings as crises spiral. There’s also a more calculated message – laced with a hint of confronting governments making cuts by speaking more directly to their voters, and a hopeful nod to the Trump administration in the US, which is responsible for some of the sector’s deepest cutbacks.
“While some build driverless cars and contemplate a utopian life on Mars, the reality for most is a driverless world, and an increasingly dystopian life on the planet we have,” UN relief chief Tom Fletcher told reporters in launching the appeals.
The top-line details are stark: UN-led appeals will aim to reach 87 million people while asking for $23 billion, under a so-called “hyper-prioritised” plan driven by cuts.
It’s the fewest people these UN-coordinated responses have tried to reach in a decade – even as humanitarian needs rise, fuelled by conflict, climate change, and rising impunity for international norms. And it again leaves out tens of millions of people said to be in need but not targeted for aid (the plans estimate some 239 million need emergency assistance).
UN relief chief Tom Fletcher described it as a realistic approach, in launching what’s known as the Global Humanitarian Overview – a summary of 29 individual response plans and budgets, from crises in Sudan to Gaza and beyond.
“We don’t get more funding just by naming a bigger number,” Fletcher said. “I’m trying to be realistic here about what would be a stretch goal in the current funding conditions. I want us to go far beyond that, but I’ve got to start somewhere with that sense of realism.”
The “hyper-prioritised” version of the 2026 appeals are asking for $23 billion in funding – the lowest ask since 2017. The overall plan asks for $33 billion and targets 135 million people.
For the past two years, the UN-led appeals have been split into prioritised tiers based on what responses want to accomplish, and what they can realistically achieve.
This follows years of escalating donor cutbacks, and the cratering of 2025 as the US dismantled its aid department and budget under the ruling Trump administration.
The conventional international response sector – a model portrayed as charity and based on voluntary funding – faces an existential crisis as many of the mostly Western donor governments that floated the system turn inward. The system itself has also been targeted, including by politicians who attack big aid agencies and the UN in particular as wasteful.
In launching this year’s response plans, Fletcher is also trying to reframe this narrative around aid, while speaking more to the voting public.
“I know budgets are tight right now. Families everywhere are under strain,” Fletcher said.
“But the world spent $2.7 trillion on defence last year, on guns and arms. And I’m asking for just over 1% of that.”
Here are a few early takeaways from next year’s response plans:
The budget gap is growing, whatever the target
The trend is clear: Humanitarians are asking for less money despite rising need. And they’re getting less, no matter what they ask for.
For years, the humanitarian system mostly asked for what it wanted, buoyed by donor largesse especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Response appeals mushroomed as a result, but the numbers overlooked a funding cliff fall hidden by US money and by European support for Ukraine in particular.
In part due to pressure from donors, humanitarians began shrinking their asks following record appeals – and record shortfalls – in 2023.
GHO appeals topped $56 billion in 2023, but have fallen steadily. In turn, funding gaps have grown as several donor governments – not just the US – make deep cuts to their humanitarian budgets. UN stats count only $12 billion in funding for its appeals this year – about a quarter of what it asked for, and just 40% of its baseline “urgently prioritised” tier.
There are prioritisation haves and have-nots
The squeeze isn’t the same across the board. The numbers show some responses where budgets and people are given top priority, and others where they are not.
Responses for the occupied Palestinian territories, Ukraine, Nigeria, Colombia, and Central African Republic, for example, have 80% or more of their funding requirements included in the “hyper-prioritised” tier. Likewise, plans for Haiti, Mozambique (which suffered a muddled cuts process earlier this year), South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are among those where at least 80% of so-called “people in need” appear to make the cut.
On the other hand, responses for Afghanistan, Somalia, and Venezuela have less than half their funding prioritised. And less than half the people in need are prioritised in Burkina Faso, Cameroon (where the aid cuts mixed badly with the country’s tough politics) , Chad, Mali, and Myanmar, as well as in regional responses for the Horn of Africa and Sudan, the world’s largest displacement crisis.
What the top-line numbers don’t show are the tradeoffs and granular deprioritisation under way. How deep have the cuts to education been, or to services to help survivors of gender-based violence, for example? Or who gets left out when humanitarian decision-makers say that response plans should focus on recent shocks?
“People in need” doesn’t count all the people in need
Who’s in need? Who’s not? It’s getting harder to tell.
Year-to-year comparisons of “people in need” hold little weight as the methodology behind reaching the global figures has changed – as has the blunt donor pressure and funding realities forcing the sector to simply ask for less.
The 2026 appeals say 239 million people are in need. There were 300 million last year – which was itself a drop from previous years.
What is consistently growing, however, is the number of “people in need” left out of response plan targets within each year: This gap has topped 100 million people each year since 2023. And 2026 will see fewer than 60% of “people in need” targeted for the first time (only 36% are targeted under the hyper-prioritised tier).
The UN’s humanitarian coordination arm, OCHA, which steers the appeals, says the drop in “people in need” is partly because 2026 will see fewer plans and appeals. This includes countries that have “transitioned” out of humanitarian programming, and the “sunsetting” of several regional responses by the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR.
“The people facing the most urgent, crisis-driven, needs captured in GHO 2026 therefore represent the tip of the iceberg of global suffering,” the document notes.
Humanitarians working on country-level responses worry the changes go deeper: that the way “need” is measured means many are going uncounted.
Another attempt to change the narrative
The annual humanitarian appeals are often a matter of going cap in hand to donors. This year, there’s a more deliberate attempt to paint a different picture of aid, and to aim that message to electorates as well.
“We’re asking for just over 1% of what the world is spending on arms, defence right now. So I’m not asking people to choose between a hospital in Brooklyn and a hospital in Kandahar,” Fletcher said. “I’m asking the world to spend less on defence and more on humanitarian support.”
This may also include trying to leverage the public when their politicians don’t step up. Opinion polls tend to show that voters in several countries, including the US, support foreign aid.
Fletcher said he planned to take the humanitarian appeals to governments and other donors in the coming weeks – then speak publicly about which governments have contributed.
“Did your governments show up to this plan, or not?,” he said. “The answer to that question will define who lives and who dies.”
It’s a slightly different emphasis for humanitarian leaders, though not exactly new.
Aid groups also often highlight massive unfulfilled humanitarian needs and tie it to funding gaps – essentially blaming operational decisions like refugee food ration cuts on donor governments. Humanitarians’ government counterparts – caught between their leaders’ political priorities and the mood of their electorates – tend not to respond to this strategy, analysts say.
Fletcher’s Trump appeal
Part of the narrative change seems to mean appealing to Donald Trump’s conspicuous bids to be seen as a peacemaker.
Trump, who has openly campaigned to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (and was dubiously given a new gong on 5 December by FIFA), has spent recent weeks touting supposed peace deals from Gaza to Thailand and Cambodia to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Fletcher is attempting to position the international humanitarian response as complementary.
“I want to link this plan to the potential for 2026 to be a year of peacemaking,” Fletcher said. “I think we’ve heard that clear message from the US president. We’re seeing it from many of the key players across the Middle East and Africa that they want to engage to end as many of these conflicts as possible. And that gives me more hope.”
Source: The New Humanitarian
