Over the past five years, considerable efforts have been made to reform the humanitarian sector. Increasingly, however, the relevance and effectiveness of these reforms have to be tested against a rapidly changing humanitarian context and criteria. A recent spate of emergencies underscores the point. The Russian heat wave and brushfires in the summer of 2010 that affected wheat exports and ultimately contributed to food riots in Mozambique. the unprecedented scale of the July 2010 Pakistan floods, and the simultaneous Indonesian tsunami, earthquake and volcano eruption. It is by no means certain how key actors in the humanitarian sector should best meet such future challenges, that will increasingly be characterised by a rapid pace of change, uncertainty, and complexity. With this concern in mind, HFP launched the Integrated Action Plan (IAP) in 2007. Its purpose was and continues to be to assist the UN system to assess and test its capacities for dealing with future humanitarian threats and opportunities. Also, to identify measures that can help it to work in a forward looking, strategic and streamlined manner. In so doing it has focused on the triangular relationship between the UN’s Inter- Agency Standing Committee Working Group, six UN Country Teams and host governments in order to determine the extent to which their individual and interactive capacities contributed to the sort of strategic thinking and planning that will be necessary to deal with longer-term threats and a changing humanitarian landscape.