Jan Egeland
Jan Egeland
Jan Egelandis a Norwegian politician, formerly of the Labour party. He has been the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013. He was previously the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch and the Director of Human Rights Watch Europe. Egeland formerly served as director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Under-Secretary-General of the UN. Egeland also holds a post as Professor II at the University of Stavanger...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 September 1957
CountryNorway
All humanitarian organizations are acutely aware that our window of opportunity for action is closing with the onset of the severe winter.
The concept is one warm room per family before it becomes too cold.
This is one of the biggest challenges of our time and age, we need to make vulnerable people living in developing nations more resilient to natural hazards.
If we don't work together we will become a disaster within a disaster.
It will take billions of dollars to rebuild ... To reconstruct this will take five to 10 years,
The number one priority is to get to those who have nothing. If we don't, we will become a disaster within a disaster.
I think it's a matter of weeks or months that we will have a collapse in many of our operations. As I told the Security Council today, I don't think the world has understood how bad it has become of late.
It is not right to sit with the money for reconstruction for one year from now if it is a question of whether people will still be alive.
I have received assurances from the government that this will never be repeated and that the government has taken a number of actions to prevent such an event in future. This is good new for us, because we don't want to leave Cote d'Ivoire - we want to stay and continue our effective actions for all the Ivorian people.
In terms of the human lives lost, this is the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today. It is beyond belief that the world is not paying more attention.
The United Nations stands ready to help with any kind of disaster expertise that might be required ... in full recognition that the United States is the country in the world that possesses the greatest civilian and military search and rescue and recovery assets themselves,
In the second week you will see much more orderly relief. The first week is always pretty chaotic.
It's even more urgent than it was in these other hurricanes or tsunamis.
I think it would be a massive undertaking to actually have a full-fledged tsunami warning system that would really be effective in many of these places,