“We have to be extra honest, this is a challenge; it’s not easy to find a solution.”

From household health surveys on the ground to satellite images taken from space, the vast information networks that inform the humanitarian system are teetering on the brink of “ collapse” as a result of the US Government budget cuts.

Some of the key services that act as the “eyes and ears” of aid responses — whose dependence on US funding has now been dramatically exposed — have already been degraded or closed.

Both the specialists who run the information networks and the humanitarian responders who rely on them to organise programs effectively are reeling with uncertainty over the status of the tools, fearing that emergency responses could be missed or efforts misdirected.

The humanitarian data landscape is a “massive” interlinked ecosystem of various collection, dissemination, and analysis services made up of hundreds of organisations using a vast number of inputs, explained Beth Simons, a hazard, risk, and forecasting expert at German NGO Welthungerhilfe.

“Regardless of whether it’s climate, conflict, or displacement, they all ultimately need consistent and reliable data sources to be able to make their forecasts to enable us to take timely action,” Simons told The New Humanitarian.

From  food aid in Ethiopia to the  PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS, lifesaving aid programs of various stripes are already being directly affected by the cuts. But hits to the information networks could be even more fundamental, hampering the ability of humanitarians to work out where help is most urgently needed in the first place.

“We have to be extra honest, this is a challenge; it’s not easy to find a solution,” said Paola Albrito, director of the UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction..

Here’s a rundown of just some of the ways that humanitarian data collection and analysis is already being affected by the US cuts.

Famine prevention under threat

The abrupt closure in January – after almost 40 years – of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network is, perhaps, the most well-publicised example of a humanitarian data collection system being shut down by the Trump administration’s actions.

Alongside the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, FEWS NET formed one of the main pillars of famine early warning and provided a clear framework for prioritising humanitarian efforts to tackle extreme hunger.

The IPC system is the work of many humanitarian organisations — it also used to receive USAID funding — and “at the country level, it’s intended to be a government-led, kind of coalition of the willing”, said Daniel Maxwell, a professor of food security at Tufts University, and a member of the IPC’s Famine Review Committee.

But FEWS NET “is a USAID project and their primary customer is USAID”, which tended to focus more on early warning, though the purposes of both platforms somewhat merged in recent years, Maxwell explained.

FEWS NET “was the mechanism by which the US Government decided how and where to allocate food assistance [and] other humanitarian assistance,” he said. “Without the eyes and ears of the system, it’s hard to say on what basis” emergency food assistance or other aid granted a waiver from US government cuts will now be allocated.

So what does this mean in practice then?

“We don’t know yet,” said Maxwell. “My fear is that [it] would mean that there is no evidence on which to base the choice of [how to] allocate more food assistance.”

To underline the point, Maxwell gave a real-world example of the kind of food aid dilemma that FEWS NET typically helps to solve.

Should scarce resources go to “Sudan, where we know there’s a famine going on, versus a place like Somalia, which is not currently having a famine, but is facing yet another potential multi-season drought emergency, versus South Sudan, which is probably almost equally as bad as Sudan, but is flying totally under the radar?” he asked.

“FEWS NET could say all of that” and the US Government listened, said Maxwell.

But the loss of FEWS NET — established in 1985 in response to famines in the Sahel region in the 1970s, and to the later lack of warning systems that worsened the 1984-1985 famines in Ethiopia and Sudan — affects more than simply food insecurity.

Anticipatory action programs, which use early warning systems and forecasts to trigger emergency responses before disasters hit, often used information from FEWS NET to help validate data collected elsewhere.

These types of programs have been increasingly in vogue among climate-focused humanitarians, often cited as a rare source of optimism in the strained sector. Anticipatory action also relies on the extensive humanitarian information system, according to WHH’s Simons. “It is a data-hungry field,” she said.

WHH’s Anticipatory Humanitarian Action Facility is one such program, running in nine African countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe. FEWS NET was an important — though not the only — data source that helped WAHAFA determine when “triggers” for pre-emptive humanitarian responses could be made.

FEWS NET’s “absence will have a negative impact on the quality of information”, said Vincent Chiunya, head of the WAHAFA program in Zimbabwe. He added that humanitarian responses “may end up leaving some areas or communities that actually deserve an intervention because of lack of triangulatory validation from FEWS NET”.

The tool is also useful for “contextual information to inform analysis like risk and vulnerability”, said WHH’s Simons. “The loss of [FEWS NET] to the sector is pretty critical, given the key role it had in the last nearly 40 years in identifying adverse food security outcomes.”

A host of other problems

It’s not just the closure of FEWS NET — or even USAID cuts alone — that has experts worried.

The much-praised and highly detailed Demographic and Health Surveys program, which was also run by USAID, is “currently on pause”, according to a message on its website. Its data was used to inform policy responses ranging from health programming to research on the recruitment of child soldiers.

Outside USAID, many other important aspects of the data ecosystem are feeling the heat from Trump’s administration.

Various research institutions and universities have experienced budget cuts and feel threatened – a chilling effect on academia was repeatedly mentioned by sources, including by one academic who declined to be named for fear of legal retribution.

Organisations working on climate have been hit especially hard.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has seen mass layoffs, which former administrator Rick Spinrad told the Associated Press were “the first steps toward [the organisation’s] eradication”.

The  agency, which collects weather data — including about storms, droughts, and floods, both in the US and globally — is critical for informing broader efforts to predict climate crises and supporting national meteorological work, such as in Kenya.

But a lesser known role of NOAA is approving licences for commercial satellites – for which the study of imagery, known as Earth Observation, has become a “sub-industry within the humanitarian space”, according to Jamon Van Den Hoek, an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University who leads Conflict Ecology, a research group analysing satellite data of crises.

Satellite data is used by humanitarians for a wide range of purposes, including assessing the severity of natural disasters and helping to inform estimates of refugee camp populations, said Van Den Hoek. They can also — safely — highlight growing violence, particularly in remote, hard-to-access areas, which can “result in some reallocation of [humanitarian] resources”, as well as to analyse the damage after violence has taken place, he added.

Even NASA, the better known US extraterrestrial agency, has repeatedly delayed its research grant applications page, which funds science programs at many US universities.

This “tells you about a lot of uncertainties… we don’t know which programs will be gone,” said the academic who didn’t want to be named. “You can imagine [the research supported by NASA] won’t be the same… Without NASA funding, I cannot do any research.”

A major NASA-USAID joint program called SERVIR, which used satellite imagery to support climate and development programmes, is also offline, with its pages scrubbed from the NASA website. SERVIR’s mission was to increase “global access to NASA Earth data to support locally-led environmental and development efforts”, according to a press release marking the December 2024 launch of a new hub in Central America for SERVIR. It was a “very unique” program, said Van Den Hoek.

Both NOAA and NASA were also contracted to USAID to be scientific partners to FEWS NET, said Maxwell.

Other US institutions that supported humanitarian data collection are now going through major cutbacks: the National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation; and even the Department of Defence, which closed 91 studies, including those “focused on global migration patterns, climate change impacts, and social trends”, according to a Pentagon press release. The statement did not mention the  closure of the Minerva Research Initiative, which  included a wide range of studies relevant to humanitarians, such as on climate adaptation or on crisis displacement.

Are humanitarian ethics themselves at risk?

A deeper fear is that some of the core ethical principles that underpin humanitarianism — like impartiality and independence — could be at risk, especially if the data dearth leads aid responses to become more knee-jerk and politicised.

“In the overall quest for data-driven decision-making, we need analysis,” said Simons.

Maxwell agreed. Being driven by need “rather than some other criteria” is “the way in which you observe the principle of impartiality”, he said. “It has taken a long time to get to the point where there was at least a modicum of impartiality in the way the system runs.

“There has been a huge effort put into improving the analysis of crises… in the last two decades,” he added. “The system was by no means close to perfect, but it was a lot less random than it had been in the eighties and nineties.”

Without independent assessments, humanitarians are left without a “counter to state narratives… Leaders can say whatever they want about what’s happening,” said Van Den Hoek. “But the documentation brings compelling evidence,” he added, citing the growing use of satellite images in war crimes investigations.

FEWS NET was able to play a similar role, occasionally facing down governments that did not want famine declared on their territory, such as in areas of Nigeria recaptured by the state from Boko Haram, according to Maxwell. He acknowledged that the US Government did force FEWS NET to retract a report on famine unfolding in northern Gaza last December, but stressed that this was the only occasion he was aware of, “which speaks to me more of their independence over 40 years”.

For Chiunya, there is an opportunity too in this aid cuts crisis. There is also a hard lesson that needs to be learnt now that the dependence on US funding has been laid bare, he said: “It comes as a wake-up call to countries to cover their citizens locally.”

Republished from The New Humanitarian, 25 March