Draft:Anticipatory action

Anticipatory action

Anticipatory action is a form of humanitarian assistance that aims to save lives and livelihoods before a hazard occurs or its impacts fully unfold. It is part of the disaster risk management cycle, bridging a critical gap between disaster preparedness and disaster response.

While anticipatory action takes different forms, there are common parameters to this approach:

• The actions are implemented before a hazard occurs or before its most acute impacts are felt.
• The objective is to reduce the potential humanitarian impacts of forecastable hazard(s).
• The decision to act is based on forecasts or predictive analyses of when and where a hazard will occur.

According to data reported by the Anticipation Hub, in 2023 anticipatory actions were implemented in 48 countries and for 16 types of hazards, with many more developing frameworks for different hazards. These actions reached 12.8 million people and were supported by financing worth US$198m.

Overview

Different countries and organizations take different approaches to anticipatory action. However, experiences from different countries indicate that it works best when the core elements are agreed in advance, including:

• the thresholds, or triggers, that are used to activate the actions; for many hazards, this will be a forecast or other form of monitoring data (e.g., rising river levels to indicate a likelihood of flooding)
• the actions that will be taken ahead of the hazard to reduce the risks to people in areas forecast to be affected
• the amount and source of financing for the actions; if agreed in advance, this can be released rapidly, allowing the actions to be carried out before peak impacts are felt.

By acting ahead of a hazard – when the forecast is issued – it is possible to reduce the humanitarian needs caused by a hazard, leading to a reduced overall impact. However, establishing these elements ahead of a hazard requires funding, time, resources and collaboration across sectors and between partners. Ideally, the process of setting up an anticipatory action system should include stakeholders from the humanitarian and development sectors; for weather-related hazards, involvement by hydrometeorological services and/or the climate sector is also important.

Financing for anticipatory action

Theoretically any financing for disaster management could be pre-arranged to support anticipatory action. To date, however, the majority of activations – when the anticipatory actions are implemented based on a ‘trigger’ threshold being reach – have been financed from three core sources: the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund, the IFRC’s Disaster Response Emergency Fund, and Start Network’s Start Fund. As more organizations look to include anticipatory action within their work, more diverse funding sources will be needed, including those beyond the humanitarian sector (e.g., climate funds, government funds).

Benefits of anticipatory action

Benefits of anticipatory action include the fact that it helps to preserve people's dignity, provides value for money, and protects wider development gains. It can also contribute to the broader sustainability of the humanitarian system by reducing humanitarian needs after a hazard and thereby saving costs. There are also sector-specific benefits. For example, an impact evaluation by the World Food Programme, of anticipatory actions ahead of floods in Nepal in 2022, indicated an overall net gain in food security for people targeted by the actions, as well as positive impacts on the coping strategies they used and their psychological wellbeing.

Criticisms of anticipatory action

Criticisms of anticipatory action include:

• it is sometimes considered to be too technical (due to its dependence on forecasts or other scientific information)
• the limited financing available means that, in many countries, not everyone at risk from a hazard is covered by the frameworks in place.

These and other criticisms have been aired during events discussing this approach, such as the dialogue platforms on anticipatory action held each year.

History of anticipatory action

Communities have been preparing for weather-related hazards, including through the use of forecasts (whether scientific or traditional), for centuries. However, the use of forecasts to trigger financing for humanitarian actions began in 2014, when the concept of forecast-based financing was conceptualized by humanitarian actors. In 2015, the German Federal Foreign Office financed pilot projects in Togo and Uganda to test this principle, with the focusing being acting ahead of floods.

Since then, a number of humanitarian organizations and non-governmental organizations have begun to implement this approach (which quickly became known as ‘anticipatory action’), in more countries and for an increasing number of weather- and climate-related hazards.

Since 2020, there have been targeted efforts among humanitarian actors to involve governments in anticipatory action. This has led to increasing efforts to formalize anticipatory action as a disaster management approach. In 2024, the ‘State of Imminent Disaster’ was formally introduced in the Philippines, which allows for the implementation of proactive measures before natural calamities strike based on risk assessments by agencies such as the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

Another development in recent years has been projects that implement anticipatory actions ahead of non-weather events, such as disease outbreaks and epidemics, while research is exploring its potential to mitigate the impacts of livestock diseases, locust swarms and population movement/displacement.

References

1. Grand Bargain political caucus to scale up anticipatory action: Problem definition and caucus strategy, IASC 2024