This year, the challenges will continue in full force, according to an annual report from UNOCHA, the U.N. humanitarian agency, called World Humanitarian Data and Trends 2018.
That’s because the root causes are increasingly a messy mix of conflict, climate shocks, poverty and social inequalities.
Humanitarian resources must be stretched even further for more and longer-lasting crises.
More than 80 percent of the funding required that year was for just eight "mega-crises," as the report calls them, that have lasted five years or more, in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Traditional disaster response isn’t cut out for long crises.
The report calls for increased coordination and cooperation between humanitarian and development agencies.
In many cases, people lost their supply of water.
And in some conflicts, cutting off access to water was used as a weapon.
For example, the report found that in Yemen there were 28 conflict events in 2017 in which water set off fighting or was a casualty of hostilities.
Internal displacement is notoriously under-reported, leaving many without the aid they need.