Agenda

Anticipatory action is increasingly moving beyond humanitarian financing. This session will explore how international financial institutions and social protection systems can help scale, institutionalize, and sustain early action. We will introduce participants to international financial institutions (IFIs), their financing mechanisms, and other forms of pre-arranged disaster finance, and then explain how this finance can be channeled through government social protection systems to deliver anticipatory action at scale. Rather than showcasing financing products, the discussion follows a practical question: once a forecast threshold is reached, what must happen for finance to drive action before impacts occur? Introduce the financing problem - follow the money-out pathway to households - hear experts' and the government’s perspectives - identify practical solutions.

The El Niño 2026/2027 is predicted to be among the most intense in history and has already prompted activations of AA frameworks across multiple regions and hazards. This session will bring together early lessons and first insights on impacts from El Niño-related activations in 2026. It will also explore questions such as: How did different actors, financing instruments, and frameworks complement one another? How did our systems for early warning, readiness, joint planning, and coordination hold up under pressure? And what worked when multiple responders anticipated the same hazard at once? The aim is a candid exchange of what the latest activations can teach the wider community, as El Niño will continue to cause humanitarian impacts through early 2027.

In recent years, anticipatory action (AA) has moved towards an established humanitarian approach, with the number of frameworks nearly tripling between 2022 and 2025. At the same time, increasingly constrained humanitarian resources are creating pressure to maximize efficiency, minimize fragmentation across frameworks, and ultimately reach more people before crises unfold. Against this backdrop, this session will explore what it means to pursue a decentralized scale in AA: scaling in ways that are coherent and connected, while remaining anchored in local analysis, decision-making, and leadership. The discussion will interrogate the assumption that larger-scale activations are inherently more efficient and examine the perceived trade-offs between localization and scale. It will ask whether fragmentation is a by-product of diverse context-specific approaches or a manifestation of broader coordination challenges within the humanitarian system; how efforts to maximize the scale of AA can complement commitments to localization; and how to harmonize AA without flattening contextual differences or losing the unique benefits of locally-led anticipatory responses.

Building on the findings of the Climate Centre's future fit report, the session will facilitate a discussion on how to take forward the recommendations towards making AA effective in a changing landscape.

As countries implement the Early Warnings for All initiative, a key challenge emerged: how can preparedness and anticipatory action be sustainably financed within broader early warning systems? This session will explore how anticipatory action stakeholders have approached financing anticipatory action under the Early Warnings for All umbrella through the Green Climate Fund global programme and complementary financing mechanisms. Drawing on experiences from multiple countries and financing instruments, participants will examine how climate finance, anticipatory financing, preparedness financing, and humanitarian financing can be combined to strengthen preparedness to respond before disasters occur.

Against the backdrop of growing humanitarian needs and constrained funding, this session tackles the urgent question of efficiency. It moves beyond simply proving that AA "works" to critically examine how we can make it work more efficiently at scale. The session will examine the following questions: How we can invest available resources more wisely. What prevents us from achieving maximum efficiency with current resources and how can this be fixed? How can we use efficiency data to advocate for reallocating a fixed percentage of existing humanitarian budgets toward anticipatory action?

As the number of anticipatory action frameworks around the globe and within countries is constantly growing, so is the need for coordination and harmonization. But harmonizing triggers is not only a technical exercise: At its best, it involves sharing data, methods, and assumptions, and agreeing on who acts when. This session will explore what genuine interoperability can look like in practice: where harmonized or shared triggers reduce duplication and level expectations among at-risk communities, where data sharing arrangements make them possible, and where institutional, legal, or political barriers can impose challenges. The aim is an honest exchange on the conditions and incentives needed to move toward more connected anticipatory action ecosystems.

Most anticipatory action frameworks are built around a single hazard, and few of them systematically consider cascading or compounding impacts: a flood, for example, might lead to the outbreak of water-borne diseases or be compounded by conflict and displacement, blurring the line between different hazards and their impacts. This session, therefore, will explore what it takes to mainstream compounding and cascading risks into frameworks that hold up across multiple, interacting hazards, even if designed for a single-hazard focus. Drawing on emerging practice and study findings from complex settings such as South Sudan, participants will work through concrete design choices and collectively unpack how to mainstream risks related to, e.g., conflict or health, into their frameworks.