When the Emirates Red Crescent arrived after the Mexico earthquake, it did not have the full picture. It had some information about what people needed and which buildings had collapsed, but not all of it, and not reliably. Local supplies were hard to confirm, so the teams ended up sourcing aid from neighbouring countries, a process that cost time the survivors did not have.
“Artificial intelligence makes it easier for us to receive information from outside and to analyse data, especially in the areas that have been hit,” said Saeed Al Mazrouei, Director of the Relief and Crisis Aid Department at the Emirates Red Crescent, who told Khaleej Times that the gap exposed in Mexico had an impact on him to understand the imminent need for the technology. “When we arrived, we had some of the information but not all of it, about the needs and about the buildings that were affected.”
The gap he describes is the one the humanitarian sector has struggled with for years. “So many humanitarian disasters are predictable,” said Greg Puley, Chief of Climate and Innovation at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “We have powerful new tools to anticipate disasters, yet too often we in the humanitarian system respond after the crisis hits. We need to close this gap between prediction and anticipatory action.”
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Closing it was the purpose of a roundtable held on Tuesday at Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi. Convened by the Office of Development Affairs at the Presidential Court, under the patronage of Sheikh Theyab bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Court for Development and Fallen Heroes’ Affairs, it gathered humanitarian and AI experts to weigh whether the UAE should build a centre dedicated to predicting humanitarian crises before they happen.
In his opening remarks, Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, said the technology is opening new horizons for the sector, strengthening its ability to understand challenges before they emerge and to anticipate future needs. The coming phase, he said, would change how humanitarian priorities are defined and how international efforts are coordinated, and the true measure of AI would be its impact on people.
For the UAE, the ambition is a redesign of the model itself. “Traditionally, humanitarian systems are designed to respond after a crisis has already emerged, after a drought deepens, a conflict displaces people, or a disease outbreak spreads,” said Rashed Al Hemeiri of the UAE Aid Agency. “The UAE’s vision is to help move the sector from reaction to anticipation. Rather than asking how quickly we can respond, the question becomes how early can we see a crisis coming, and what can we do before it escalates.”
The scale of the need frames the urgency. “There are 300 million people in need around the world while we are speaking today, and the humanitarian system is underfunded, under political pressure, and its access is restricted,” said Sajeda Shawa, head of OCHA in the UAE. The tools to anticipate crises, she added, have never been more capable, even as the system meant to act on them comes under greater strain.
How good those tools actually are remains the harder question. Patrick Brock, a senior data scientist at the World Bank and UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement, is careful about what the technology can and cannot yet do. Medium-term forecasts, built on risk factors such as prolonged conflict and economic decline, can guide planning, he said, “but they tend to be conservative, and they can’t predict acute shocks. At the moment the models are not very good at that, but they’re getting better.”
The deeper obstacle, in his account, is fragmentation. “Very often different organisations are processing the same input data, making the same effort in different places,” he said. “If a new centre could save all of that time by making preprocessed data responsibly available, we would all be able to make progress quicker.”
If the science is improving, the financing has not caught up. Simon Winter, who leads humanitarian nutrition work at the Rockefeller Foundation’s RF Catalytic Capital, named the barrier as uncertainty. “Organisations are often very hesitant to pre-position financing in advance of a crisis,” he said. “They would rather wait and be sure the crisis happens, but that means they have to spend a lot more money. With the advances in data systems and AI, we can be much more sure those crises are going to hit, and the risk of pre-positioning that finance and it not being used is significantly reduced.”
That economic logic is central to why the UAE is focusing on prediction rather than simply more funding, Al Hemeiri said. “Every dollar spent preventing a crisis or reducing its severity can save multiple dollars that would otherwise be spent responding to a full-scale emergency. More importantly, it can prevent displacement, hunger, disease, and loss of life before they occur.” Prediction, he added, “is not a substitute for aid; it is a way to make aid more effective.”
For those on the ground, the difference is measured in hours. “Previously, the analysis of information and handing it to the decision-maker to deliver that relief used to take us two to three days. Now I expect it will not take more than an hour or two, and that speed is what allows us to save lives,” Al Mazrouei said. The stakes of that compression are not abstract. “During the disaster, we depend on delivering food, health supplies, and shelter, the things that keep a person alive. You do not know what has happened to these people during the crisis. Disease, the lack of clean drinking water, injuries, all of these lead to death.”
What the UAE believes it can add is not another aid agency but the connective layer between the ones that exist. “The UAE occupies a unique position at the intersection of logistics, technology, diplomacy, and development,” Al Hemeiri said, pointing to infrastructure linking Africa, Asia, and Europe, heavy investment in AI and data, and a record as a trusted convener. “The contribution is not to replace those institutions, but to connect capabilities that are often disjointed, data, technology, finance, logistics, and diplomacy. The goal is to become a platform that enables others to act earlier, rather than simply another actor delivering aid.”
The international participants saw the same logic. Brock pointed to a rare combination of early investment in AI and a leading humanitarian donor, and welcomed that the discussion focused on complementing existing efforts rather than duplicating them. Winter called the UAE “a very strong emerging power in both the world of AI and global action on development.” Jan Rielaender, Head of Resilient and Sustainable Development Strategies at the OECD Development Centre, cautioned that the technology must be guided by clear principles of transparency, fairness, and accountability, “so that it serves rather than undermines the public good.”
Dr. Tareq Al Ameri, Director of the Office of Development Affairs, said the session was part of the UAE’s effort to identify gaps in global capacity to anticipate crises, building on a legacy of aid that dates to the founding of the Union. The roundtable is expected to produce a set of recommendations and a white paper feeding a feasibility study on whether the predictive centre should be built.
Source: Khaleej Times