PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Disaster and Emergency Medicine
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1602366
This article is part of the Research TopicGlobal Health and Warfare: Assessing the Broad Impacts of Conflict on Public HealthView all 16 articles
Making sense of shaky data in humanitarian crises
Provisionally accepted
- 1Independent, El Escorial, Spain
- 2Center for Humanitarian Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
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Humanitarian decision-making occurs in volatile and politically charged environments where information is often incomplete, outdated, or conflicting. Effective humanitarian response often requires interpreting poor-quality data to guide interventions, allocate resources, and assess impact. Despite advances in evidence generation, knowledge gaps persist, and decisions are frequently influenced by political and organizational factors rather than by data. This paper argues that data interpretation is an area of weakness in humanitarian response. Data availability and quality vary across crises, with methodological challenges and political sensitivities further complicating interpretation. The three examples of Darfur (Sudan), Yemen and Ethiopia illustrate how conflicting information and ambiguous interpretation can negatively impact critical decisions with far-reaching consequences on the affected communities. This paper concludes with suggestions for making better interpretation and use of data in humanitarian crises.
Keywords: Humanitarian crises, Data Interpretation, decision-making, Epidemiology, uncertainty
Received: 29 Mar 2025; Accepted: 14 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Colombo and Altare. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sandro Colombo, Independent, El Escorial, Spain
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