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Issued 30 November 2010 at the launch of the Humanitarian Appeal 2011 in Doha, Qatar, by the State of Qatar, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Next year, millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world will look to the international community to address their basic survival needs and provide services that will allow them to maintain a measure of human dignity even in the worst of circumstances.

The Humanitarian Appeal 2011, consisting of 14 individual Consolidated Appeals addressing the needs across 28 countries, is the humanitarian community's response to this urgent call.

Globally, the Consolidated Appeal requests US$7.4 billion to assist 50 million people who have been victimized by natural disasters, conflict and displacement. These people already suffer or face an imminent threat of malnourishment, disease, or violence.

If adequately and timely funded, projects in the Appeal 2011 will allow the humanitarian community to help the survivors with nutritious food to eat, clean water to drink, proper sanitation facilities, shelter to protect against freezing temperatures or blistering heat, medical services, mine clearance, education and protection of the children and agricultural inputs to re-start their own food production, to name some of the main types of projects.

The Appeal 2011, however, not only provides a catalogue of projects that the international donor community can support, as they have generously done in the past. The Appeal devises coordinated strategies for action based on rigorous analyses of the humanitarian situation and the needs of the affected men, women and children. Interventions are designed and coordinated to ensure that gaps are covered and that costly and inefficient duplication of efforts is avoided.

2010 was a rare year of two mega-disasters, the Haiti earthquake and the floods in Pakistan. Governmental and non-governmental donors rose to the challenge, allocating some $13 billion in international humanitarian funding, the most ever recorded in a single year. Of this, the peer-reviewed and coordinated projects in Consolidated and Flash Appeals have attracted a record $6.6 billion.

Our call today is to maintain and hopefully increase this level of generosity in 2011. The humanitarian organizations have devised their strategies and designed their projects in partnership with governments and with the participation of the beneficiaries in the affected countries. They stand ready to assist.

We urge the international community - governments, organizations, individuals and private funds and charities - to listen to the call of the millions in need and provide the relief and rehabilitation necessary through the humanitarian organizations working on the ground, in the midst of the emergencies, striving to fulfill the noble humanitarian mandate of addressing human suffering wherever it is found.

We all have our individual roles to play. What bind us together are strong and enduring partnerships in the service of humanity.