UN80 includes a New Humanitarian Compact, and part of the Compact is work to make humanitarian data easier to combine. The plans for that work call for shared administrative boundaries and place codes (P-codes), which COD-AB provides.
UN80
The Secretary-General launched the UN80 Initiative in March 2025, the year the UN turned 80. With resources shrinking and needs rising, it aims to make the UN system deliver more with less. The UN80 Action Plan sets out 31 work packages and 86 actions. Each package has named leads, and Member States guide the decisions.
The New Humanitarian Compact
Work Package 2 is the humanitarian package, led by OCHA. It sets out six steps toward faster, leaner and more accountable humanitarian response, covering planning, supply chains, common services, data, humanitarian diplomacy and the division of labour between agencies.
Humanitarian data
Humanitarian organizations use different baselines, geographic units and systems, so their data is hard to combine. In a 2025 survey of more than 100 crisis-response organizations, 88 per cent named this fragmentation as a key challenge.
The Compact’s data work (Actions 20 and 24) sets up a Humanitarian Data Collaborative, so that everyone in a response can work from the same evidence. Within it, five agencies known as the UN80 Data Quint are building a common Humanitarian Data Model: OCHA, WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR and IOM. The plans for this work call for shared P-codes and administrative boundaries to join data across agencies.
Where COD-AB fits
COD-AB provides those shared P-codes and boundaries for each location (see Why CODs matter). The plans set two milestones for boundaries:
- By the end of 2026Harmonized global boundary data released publicly
- 2027 and beyondA common boundary dataset and place-coding standard adopted by UN partners