The unfolding crisis in Syria has left more than eight million people displaced from their homes. Cut off from vital services, desperately in need of water, food and health care, today an entire generation of Syrians are teetering on the brink. How does the international community respond to such a crisis? Luciano Calestini, currently coordinating UNICEF’s humanitarian response in Lebanon where more than 800,000 refugees are struggling to survive, provided a unique insight into the heart of one of the largest humanitarian crises the modern world has known.

Luciano Calestini was born in Sydney, Australia to a New Zealand mother and an Italian father. He spent his childhood equally between those three countries, completing his education in Australia before accepting a short-term mission to southern Sudan in the late 1990s to join the famine response. Luciano has also lived and worked in East Timor (in the aftermath of the 1999 referendum), in Kosovo (following the 1999 war), in western Afghanistan (after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention), in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Baghdad, Iraq. He recently completed a second three-year mission in Kosovo, during which time he was also deployed to support the cholera response in Haiti and the emergency response during the Libyan conflict.

Luciano is currently charged with coordinating UNICEF’s response to the Syrian crisis in Lebanon, and has been based in Beirut since January.

This lecture was presented by the Development Policy Centre at Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.