After 4 years in the commercial sector Peter Rees-Gildea worked with Non-Governmental Organisations from 1979 to 1990 before he joined the International Federation.

He worked on the Cambodian and Laos borders with refugees for four years before spending a further four years managing Vietnamese refugee reception and care programmes in north Wales.

He subsequently led a staff of 200 in cross border emergency and development programmes in Afghanistan between 1987 and 1990.

After a year off to take a Masters Degree in rural development he joined the International Federation on field missions to Myanmar, Albania, Pakistan and Afghanistan before leading the Federation response to the crisis in the Balkans between 1993 to 1996.

After six years as head of donor relations, he led the newly created department of Operations Support, providing Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies worldwide with international support in the forms of Disaster Response Emergency Funding, Field Assessment and Coordination Teams, Emergency Response Units and the humanitarian worlds most modern Disaster Management Information System.

With the responsibility to monitor disaster trends, and noting the dramatic influence of climate change in the past decade, he initiated and promoted the concept of ‘Early Warning and Early Action’ within the International Federation and promoted some critical adaptation of the International Federation’s disaster response tools to promote a change from the more traditionally recognised role of disaster response to a role of taking early action before disaster strikes.

He formed critical alliances with the scientific community to provide the International Federation with the early warning information it needed, most notably with NASA and Colombia University.

Peter Rees-Gildea is one of today’s top professionals in finding and using the links between the science community and the humanitarian community to promote the use of early action to reduce the loss of life and impact from disasters.