The 2016 World Humanitarian Summit in Turkey will be a major opportunity to align major global commitments to support the world’s most vulnerable people, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said Monday.

The Secretary-General’s remarks came during a meeting at UN headquarters on preparations for the summit, scheduled for May 2016 in Istanbul.

The first-ever global humanitarian summit of this scale will seek to find new ways to tackle the world’s humanitarian needs. “We look to the World Humanitarian Summit to generate strong global support for bold changes in humanitarian action,” Ban said.

He said a unified global stance on humanitarian action “is the only way we will meet the enormous challenges we face in the coming years and decades.”

The number of people forcibly displaced by conflict has exceeded 51 million, the highest figure since the end of World War II, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

“I would like to thank the government and people of Turkey for agreeing to host the summit and for their strong commitment to making it a great success,” he added.

For his part, Halit Cevik, Turkey’s Permanent Representative to the UN, said the selection of Istanbul as the host city of the summit “reflects the overwhelming change in the humanitarian landscape and the need for partnerships that have to make humanitarian action more effective, inclusive and accountable.”

“As a country that has extended a helping hand to those in need and has witnessed the same compassion when struck by disasters, we understand how the humanitarian response can save lives,” he said.

Amid a staggering growth in displacement from Syria, Turkey has become the country hosting the largest number of refugees in the world, according to the UN.

The UN refugee agency says Turkey is hosting more than 1.6 million Syrian refugees who have fled the civil war, which has killed more than 220,000 people.

Cevik said challenges faced by the international humanitarian system are beyond the scope of only a handful of actors.

“Failure of political solutions to end violence, protracted conflicts, the persistent gap between humanitarian needs and response, lack of investment in early warning and preparedness, require long-term, cross-regional and genuine partnerships,” he said.

“In this vein, the World Humanitarian Summit has to move forward as a comprehensive, inclusive and wide-ranging process that would enable us to collectively to reach a new thinking,” he added ( Anadolu Agency).

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