International movers and shakers are making their way across Midtown Manhattan this week as the United Nations General Assembly convenes. Among them is one person who has come to speak not for a national interest but for the interests of an increasingly forgotten group of people.

Alistair Dutton is the secretary general of Caritas Internationalis, the umbrella organization for the church’s global charitable and humanitarian outreach. He is in New York to speak for people living on the global margins, people confronting famine and people displaced because of war or disaster, natural or human-made.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the impact of the abrupt withdrawal of the United States from humanitarian assistance commitments will be at the top of his agenda. He also plans to raise the issue of debt relief for heavily burdened nations, a special commitment of the church during this Jubilee year through its Turn Debt Into Hope campaign.

Mr. Dutton says that despite the year’s setbacks and geopolitical turmoil, there is still hope that the world community, wealthy and poor nations alike, can work together to address the persisting challenges of poverty, armed conflict and climate change.

“This is the year of hope,” Mr. Dutton says, speaking with America on Sept. 23, “and we are pilgrims of hope.”

“Hope is in the irrepressible human spirit, that whole sense of incarnation, [that] wherever we are in the midst of the grimmest situations, people are working together and doing whatever they can to help one another.”

He may live in hope, but Mr. Dutton understands the profound geopolitical challenges before him. He notes that as conditions deteriorated during the latest offensive by the Israel Defense Forces this week, Caritas Jerusalem was forced to suspend operations at its 20 medical facilities in Gaza. “The plan of the Israelis is everyone has to move down to a tiny strip on the beach down in the south,” he says, but “there are no tents, no infrastructure—nothing for them to go to.”

Mr. Dutton reports that humanitarian actors in the region are poised to deliver life-saving aid as soon as the fighting stops. But he is unsure how the suffering in Gaza may be brought to an end without a formidable intervention from the Trump administration, something that does not appear likely even as the death toll in Gaza climbs higher.

Caritas has already described the Israeli campaign in Gaza, undertaken after a Hamas terror raid in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as a violation of U.N. genocide conventions. “The difficulty is where do you go from [there]? We’ve been ratcheting up the rhetoric. We’ve been talking; we’ve been naming it all the way through. And it doesn’t matter,” Mr. Dutton said. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seems only more “emboldened” to continue the fight against Hamas, whatever the cost to noncombatants in Gaza and to the Israeli hostages there who survive.

Mr. Dutton has sounded an alarm throughout the year over deep reductions in humanitarian capacity and proved to be a sharp critic of the Trump administration’s decision to terminate the 60-year relief and human development mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“At the beginning of the year, we knew that 300 million people needed humanitarian assistance, but we knew there wasn’t the money for that collectively,” he says. U.N. and humanitarian officials lowered the annual appeal to donor states to fund a capacity to reach 180 million of the world’s most vulnerable people.

The United States had been the world’s largest single donor to humanitarian relief campaigns. After the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. and the withdrawal of other aid commitments, the threshold was reduced further to 118 million people, Mr. Dutton reports. “We’ve left the best part of 200 million people out of the appeal because there isn’t the money for them.”

Now, just one in three people in critical need may be reached by humanitarian workers, assuming that even the deeply reduced funding request is answered. So far, the annual appeal has been 20 percent funded. If that figure holds, then only one in 15 people in life-threatening conditions may be reached in 2025.

Mr. Dutton fears that decades of progress against poverty and hunger and promoting human development may be turned back as nations abandon aid commitments. The funding of a “loss and damage fund,” created to confront the worst impacts of climate change on nations least able to shoulder that burden, appears even shakier now.

President Trump has abandoned U.S. commitments to address the problem since returning to the White House in January. During his lengthy and at times wayward speech at the United Nations on Sept. 23, Mr. Trump denied that the threat from climate change was even real, describing it as a hoax.

“I’m afraid that your president saying that does not make it true,” Mr. Duttons says. “The climate emergency is absolutely real.”

He worries that denialism may be adopted by other nations and the crisis will only deepen. Mr. Trump has already demonstrated great antipathy to human migration, Mr. Dutton points out. Climate change threatens to create conditions that could drive billions of people out of their home nations to the world’s temperate zones, he warns.

As support from affluent states dwindles, humanitarian agencies have been grappling with the new reality, prioritizing which crises to address and streamlining operations to get as much aid as possible to the people who need it. “We’re taking food from the hungry to give to the starving” is Mr. Dutton’s wry assessment.

“At the turn of the millennium, we said there should never be another famine in the world,” he says. “Today, we have two famines live—one in Gaza, one in Sudan—and South Sudan looks as though it’s probably going to tip that way.” He notes that the United Kingdom’s outlay for overseas assistance is now at the lowest level since the U.N. charter was signed at the end of World War II. “All of the money’s gone, and the system is really creaking and groaning.”

The venerable British medical journal The Lancet warned in July that the loss of U.S. humanitarian assistance would likely result in 14 million preventable deaths by 2030. Mr. Dutton believes The Lancet’s projection will prove to be a deep undercount.

He recites a litany of current humanitarian crises because of conflict, climate change or natural disaster that are going under- or unaddressed right now because of U.S. and European aid cuts—among them Sudan and South Sudan, earthquake-struck Afghanistan and Myanmar, and the sprawling camps of Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh.

And because of budget tightening, the aid rations themselves have been reduced. “They’re getting a small fraction of the [previous standard] ration,” he says, “and that’s going to have huge implications.”

Adding to the agony, many of the resources pulled from humanitarian aid have been diverted to defense spending as European powers pivot to counter Vladimir Putin’s imperialist ambitions and the Trump administration seeks to create a “historic” trillion-dollar defense budget.

He described the renewed focus on defense spending as “hopelessly shortsighted.” Humanitarian assistance is “the cheapest form of defense,” he argues.

The crash of humanitarian and development investments, he explains, will in the end mean destabilized states and more conflict. “That’s more refugees coming to the States and other countries,” he says. “If you invest even a small proportion of what’s now being spent on defense in development, we can prevent some of that.”

The church will still be present all over the world, he assures, even in nations abandoned by other international donors, trying to maintain “the three pillars of the work of the church…proclaim the word, celebrate the sacraments and care for the poorest in our midst.”

“The real challenge for us is how do we remain good news for the poor when there aren’t the resources to work at anything like the scale we had?”

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).