Agenda

Anticipatory action has lagged behind for certain hazards, such as flash floods (including flooding from intense precipitation), urban flood events (including flash floods and compound flood events, such as flash and storm-surge flooding), glacial lake outburst floods, mudflows, landslides and landslips. These events are devastating to those who experience them, but they have not yet been addressed within the anticipatory action community.

Due to changes in population, settlement patterns and other pressures, some areas are experiencing these events having never done so before. At the same time, forecasting skill for the physical elements of these events is increasing.

This session will outline the challenges in developing anticipatory action systems for localized, sudden-onset, high-impact hydrometeorological events. It will create a space for critical discussions on if, and to what extent, the current standards and guidelines for protocol development are both applicable to these types of events, and  able to support anticipatory action for the most underserved and traditionally deprioritized vulnerable populations.

We will discuss which kinds of action might be feasible, seeking to co-produce a set of principles and differentiate areas that may not be candidates at the moment, but which should be prioritized once the enabling factors are addressed.

Successful orientation on IBF concept and it’s use for the trigger development at local level Anticipatory Action for flood for two unions in two upazilas of Kurigram district. 

The IBF for local level triggering mechanism as coproduction by are agreed to support and produce for anticipatory action as pilot in the Kurigram District. This session will report on that.

This session will explore various aspects related to collaboration with local actors and tapping into local knowledge as a mechanism to scale up anticipatory action. In theory, if localities and local actors are all prepared to act, they should be able to act faster and in greater numbers. Thus, in this session the success of local anticipatory action implementation will be illustrated through the perspectives and first-hand experiences of local actors throughout Africa and Pakistan. 

Further, we will outline how centring decision-making around local actors and local knowledge can contribute to making better-informed decisions. Finally, we will zoom in on the topic of trigger development as a central building block of anticipatory action, which still constitutes a major challenge for many NGOs when it comes to engaging in and upscaling anticipatory action, and in which the systematic integration of local actors and local knowledge remains particularly underexplored. 

The facilitator will lead the discussion by presenting questions to panelists from academia and humanitarian practice. This will be followed by an open hybrid discussion, in which we seek to collect participants’ experiences regarding the general importance, evidence, opportunities and challenges related to the meaningful localization of anticipatory action.

Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines have strong anticipatory action communities. Their governments and partners have been working on a range of anticipatory action tools to be better prepared for disasters. For this session, speakers from Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines will shed light on how they have been advancing anticipatory action as an effective disaster management tool. For example:
- The government in Bangladesh is currently working on developing nationwide Early Action Protocols (EAPs) for cyclones and floods to better coordinate the efforts among anticipatory action stakeholders in the country.
- The government of the Philippines is drafting a bill for the declaration of a state of imminent disasters to allow local government units to utilize funding for anticipatory action before a disaster hits. 
- The government of Nepal has mainstreamed anticipatory action into its Disaster Preparedness and Response Plan, as well as its Flood Standard Operating Procedure and Contingency Plan, which enables improved planning and coordination among all stakeholders. 

Government representatives from all three countries will highlight how they have been trying to integrate anticipatory action in their disaster management systems and plans, to expand this approach from the policy level to operationalization in the field. Participants are invited to discuss the possibilities and opportunities for governments to advance anticipatory action.

The international humanitarian sector has incorporated anticipatory action as a key approach to reducing humanitarian needs. These efforts, in recent years, have focused on a wide array of interventions: from agreeing on triggers to developing plans and securing financial resources, as well as increased coordination among humanitarian actors to implement coordinated and value-adding actions.  

Governments have been part of these efforts. In some cases, their participation has been limited to a specific, time-bound project, but there is evidence that they are increasingly incorporating anticipatory action into state-led strategies and plans.  

In this session, we will explore why is it important - and to what extent - for governments to internalize the anticipatory action approach. For instance: 
- the extent to which they have participated in risks analyses and the definition of triggers and thresholds, and in the definition and implementation of anticipatory actions, if they are part of the delivery strategies (e.g., through public cash transfer mechanisms)
- if anticipatory action has been incorporated within disaster preparedness and broader disaster risk management strategies
- and the extent to which these efforts have considered what is needed to ensure food security and livelihoods as key sectors to reduce humanitarian needs.  

In addition, this session will explore governmental priorities and the support they might be looking for to operationalize anticipatory action measures, from other government entities and beyond. 

Experiences will be shared from Africa, Asia and Latin America, in collaboration with representatives of regional and national organizations. 

Recent years have seen an increasing number of anticipatory action plans developed by practitioners to anticipate displacement, including when this is not linked to an extreme weather event. At the same time, more and more models are available to predict migration flows and displacements. Some of these can go beyond forecasting trends at the country level and might be specific enough to enable anticipatory action.

This session will showcase examples of anticipatory action for displacement and discuss with experts what can be anticipated and what is better left to response efforts.

Anticipation Hub and its partners and networks.

There are lots of different skills, expertise and types of experience needed to implement anticipatory action well. This session presents an example of a project that was able to bring together a group of organizations that brought everything that was needed to be successful.

First and foremost, the Malawi government (the departments for water, meteorology and disaster management) had the mandate and access; UNICEF in Malawi brought its network and started the project;, Royal Haskoning DHV had expert knowledge of flood modelling; the Malawi Red Cross Society enabled local community engagement; and 510, from the Netherlands Red Cross, brought the Impact-Based Forecasting Portal, a digital tool that brings it all together.

In this session we will show which role each organization played, how they worked well together, and the (technical) solution to which this has lead. Future implementations of anticipatory action will also be modelled.

510 Initiative of the Netherlands Red Cross, UNICEF, Royal Haskoning DHV, Malawi Red Cross Society, Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services in Malawi, Department of Water Resources in Malawi.

There is an opportunity to strengthen the integration of multi-risk approaches to improve humanitarian anticipation and response to the impacts of multiple interrelated events. The new technical working group on multi-risk (which includes, for example, compound risk) aims to facilitate connections across academia, practitioners and donors; accelerate learning; and focus on hands-on joint analyses to produce practical guidance for the sector.

In this session, you will help shape the agenda of the working group, and practitioners will share insights on how they have integrated multi-risk approaches in complex contexts to improve anticipatory action. 

Join us to learn more about multi-risk analysis, opportunities and challenges!

In this deep-dive workshop, we will discuss experiences and strategies for adapting disaster risk financing instruments – such as insurance, crisis modifiers or reserve funds – to fuel anticipatory action. By exploring emerging practices, lessons learned and conceptual considerations, participants will have a chance to identify and discuss practical ideas on how to overcome challenges in adapting disaster risk financing instruments for anticipatory action.

The workshop will form the basis of a policy paper being developed by the Sectoral Community on Linking Risk Financing and Anticipatory Action.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) network and a number of partner organisations have developed systems and online tools/platforms to assess risk and accelerate anticipatory action. The most mature of these tools, such as GDACS and the Pacific Disaster Center’s DisasterAware portal, have been around for more than a decade. 

Newer tools include the IFRC’s Anticipation Hub and GO platform; OCHA’s impact-forecast modelling platform; UNDP’s risk portal; WFP’s interactive ADAM map viewer; the Start Fund’s Start Ready portal; the WMO’s Weekly Scan; the ACAPS Risk List; and Google’s FloodHub.

The aim of this session is to enable interested colleagues to explore these tools with support and guidance from the agencies which developed them.

The Data Guardian game is a useful tool for helping participants to grasp the significance of data in the decision-making process for anticipatory action. Initially, participants are divided into four groups, assuming the roles of government decision-makers. Each group is tasked with investing in various governmental agencies to enhance their data collection and analysis capabilities.

In the second stage of the game, a flood scenario is introduced, prompting participants to gather information exclusively from the agencies in which they had initially invested; they are only permitted to access data and information from these specific agencies. Armed with this information, the groups then proceeded to make crucial judgments regarding the activation of an early action protocol.

Join us!

The Global Shield aims to increase protection for vulnerable people against climate risks by substantially enhancing and scaling up prearranged finance, coupled with social protection mechanisms and early warning systems. Greater financial protection, and faster and more reliable disaster preparedness and response, will help to cost-efficiently and effectively minimize and address losses and damages exacerbated by climate change.

This workshop will focus on the Global Shield’s potential to promote anticipatory action through employing holistic approaches, highlighting its cooperation with early warning actors (especially in the framework of the United Nations Secretary General’s Early Warning for All Initiative), as well as the Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS) Initiative and the Systematic Observations Financing Facility, to enable payouts even before disasters hit and support anticipatory action (e.g., by supporting the forecast-based financing approaches of humanitarian actors).

The workshop will also discuss how the Global Shield's Solutions Platform can provide support for climate risk insurance and other climate and disaster risk finance and insurance instruments, including anticipatory and forecast-based risk financing. It will conclude with an interactive Q&A session with audience members, allowing them to find out more about how they can engage with the Global Shield.

German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), InsuResilience Global Partnership.

Locally led approaches are needed to scale up and mainstream current best practices in anticipatory action. This workshop will provide a space to discuss various question around locally led anticipatory action. Participants will have the chance to critically reflect on:

• what a working group on locally led anticipatory action could look like
• what the role of international actors, such as INGOs, UN agencies and other networks, could be
• what the barriers and potential solutions are for locally led anticipatory action.

They will also be able to share their views on what an upcoming briefing on this theme should include, and to revise the first draft, jointly written by the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, Start Network and Welthungerhilfe. All inputs from the session will be fed into further efforts to establish a working group and briefing on locally led anticipatory action.

This workshop will bring together a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss how Earth observations have been harnessed to support humanitarian action in some of the largest and most complex disasters recently experienced. We will look at the spectrum of products that have been developed by data providers, and unpack the lessons learned by both product developers and product users.

The workshop will actively engage participants in identifying opportunities for building on these lessons to date and determining where can we go from here. We will also explore how emerging technologies can be leveraged to assist us in this journey.

Any humanitarian assistance is an intervention into the context. Conflict sensitivity informed by comprehensive, or at least good enough, context analysis is crucial in the design and implementation of anticipatory action in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Where anticipatory action is undertaken without it, interventions may have unintended side-effects and do more harm than good by exacerbating existing tensions or deepening societal divides.

While the need for conflict sensitivity is increasingly recognized within the anticipatory action community, acting on it requires taking forward a commitment to context analysis and conflict-sensitive programming. Yet, guidance on practical approaches –what to do and what not to do – is scarce.

Building on a training programme currently under development within the Anticipation Hub’s Anticipatory Action in Conflict Practitioners Group, this workshop brings together anticipatory action practitioners and conflict sensitivity experts in anticipatory action and wider humanitarian and development programming. It aims to formulate tangible recommendations for conflict-sensitive anticipatory action, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected settings, including relevant indicators, minimum standards and requirements. It will also be a chance for participants to actively reflect on the current ways of working in their own organizations.

Implementation-oriented research on what works and what doesn’t in anticipatory action helps practitioners to design the most impactful interventions. It can also reveal unanticipated effects on what matters, to whom, and under what circumstances. In this session, practitioners will share recent evidence and experience from implementation around the world.

Anticipatory action has been tested and implemented in humanitarian contexts for over a decade, mainly in humanitarian aid contexts Africa, Asia and the Americas. Impacts by hydrometeorological events are increasingly felt everywhere, however – for example in Europe – and are expected to exacerbate with climate change and above-average temperature increases by global comparison, all over the world This means that instruments and approaches should not only be applicable for so-called 'classic' humanitarian contexts, but also for domestic preparedness and response efforts all over the world.

Despite decades of global experience in anticipatory action, and generally high-quality forecasting and response capacities, anticipatory action in Europe is not yet implemented in a systematic manner, let alone mainstreamed in disaster risk management systems and mindsets.

This session will look at current efforts and challenges in Europe, starting off with hazard- and impact-forecasting capacities, then moving on to national anticipatory action and response capacities, including case studies of organizations’ international experiences being transformed to their respective national contexts and authorities.

German Red Cross, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and partners.

In this roleplaying session, participants will assume distinct roles in an imaginary country affected by very real extreme events, and their challenge is to protect their people by taking appropriate early actions though social protection systems. As participants juggle development priorities and budgetary constraints, how will they develop social protection programmes that are anticipatory, scalable and protect whoever is in need, whenever they arein need?

Join us as we explore how social protection provides a unique opportunity for anticipatory action, and the core components that can make this happen.

Anticipatory action is an emerging approach where early actions take place ahead of predicted hazards. This can reduce the impacts of shocks on vulnerable people and their livelihoods, and improve emergency preparedness, response and recovery efforts. 

The risk of 'acting in vain' (i.e., delivering early action when forecasts are inaccurate) is a major perceived barrier to scaling up anticipatory action, due to the implications for accountability and constraints associated with finite resources. But when early action initiatives target communities that are not directly impacted by shocks (e.g., due to forecasting errors, changing probabilities and uncertainties), they can – through the effective targeting of poor, vulnerable and marginalized people – still tackle the wider, indirect impacts of poverty, such as those on food security, nutrition and well-being.  

However, early action pilots across the world still speak about good practices and lessons learnt; they seldom talk about the failures or when things go wrong. This session will talk about those.

The early action landscape is shifting rapidly and, as things change, it is critical to keep building synergies across initiatives and sectors to ensure collective impact and better outcomes for vulnerable people. 

In 2023, the Risk-informed Early Action Partnership undertook a review of its activities to understand whether it is still serving the needs of its partners in bringing together multiple communities around the shared aim of scaling up early action. At the same time, the Somali Disaster Management Agency joined REAP to further its ambition to mainstream early/anticipatory action into its approach to disasters. This session is a prime opportunity for humanitarian partners and friends to engage in a dialogue with both organizations on how to work in ever-closer partnership to protect the most vulnerable people.

The global community is faced with an increasing number of protracted and complex crises, emerging from a combination of conflict, successive economic shocks, natural hazards and extreme weather events brought on by climate change. To overcome this challenge, there is a need for anticipatory action to shift from a data-centric and single-hazard approach, which fails to accommodate the intricate complexities of diverse contexts with uncertain futures, to a multi-hazard and multiple-scenario approach.

ACAPS will present their Joint Anticipatory Analysis Workshops, which aim to equip participants to incorporate anticipatory thinking into the strategic planning and activities of humanitarian organizations. By jointly envisioning diverse possible future developments and conceptualizing their impacts on affected populations and humanitarian operations, participants will gain insights into an applied methodology that supports the implementation of more robust and contextualized programming that considers the dynamic complexity of humanitarian crises.

Join us to explore how this comprehensive approach sets the stage for effective preparedness measures and more fit-for-purpose and impactful anticipatory action.

Donors are asking if cash is always the right way to go for anticipatory action interventions. How do we help them understand what is appropriate (and not) in different situations, based on the evidence that we’ve all gathered to date? This session will facilitate a discussion around which tools are currently available to help with assessing anticipatory action modality 'appropriateness'.

The World Food Programme and the Red Cross Red Crescent network will share practical examples and tools that demonstrate the integral links between national and local preparedness, readiness and response capacity strengthening and anticipatory action – and, crucially, will provide an update on progress and lessons learnt.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many experiences and lessons have highlighted critical links between preparedness, anticipatory action, response and recovery. The session, therefore, will provide an opportunity for practitioners to discuss how and where anticipatory action fits in the disaster risk management continuum and which opportunities there are to strengthen collaborations between different teams working across the continuum. A practical case study will be used to demonstrate how this complementarity works in practice.

The session presents an opportunity to share not only experiences and challenges for capacity strengthening, but also potential solutions.

This session will focus on how different stakeholders and actors can be brought together to enhance collaboration on anticipatory action in differing contexts. It will start with a brief presentation of the World Food Programme’s work in Somalia and protracted crises to highlight how a partner is working in this context. Next, it will continue to focus on the country contexts of Pakistan and Somalia to discuss the anticipatory action and disaster management strategies that exist in both countries. This includes current government plans, how they work with networks and NGOs (e.g., Start Network and its national hubs) and how civil society is involved in anticipatory action and disaster management in these countries, and their strategies to better understand the risks and advantages of pre-positioned financing.

The session aims to provide a forward-looking perspective on collaboration between governments and NGOs, and the future structures in the contexts of Pakistan and Somalia to work on anticipatory action and disaster risk management overall. By bringing together government representatives focusing on disaster management, a local NGO, and an NGO consortium in a dynamic and engaging conversation, it will explore the roles and expertise of different actors for anticipatory action and the ability of anticipatory approaches to respond in diverse contexts.

World Food Programme, Disaster Management Agency of Somalia, NEXUS Somalia, National Disaster Management Agency Pakistan, IDEA Pakistan.

How do we know that we have accomplished our goals if we haven't set any? 

In this session, we'll look into the future and think about what our hopes are for anticipatory action in 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Do we hope to have built so much resilience that we are no longer in need of anticipatory action? Do we hope that all humanitarian aid is anticipatory? 

This small group discussion will allow you time to think about how you hope to interact with anticipatory action in the future and discuss how we move towards the goals we set for ourselves in this session.

People living in areas with protracted fragility/conflict are highly susceptible to suffering disproportionately from climate and weather-related hazards. Affected by multiple vulnerabilities, there is an argument that they need anticipatory action support most urgently, yet anticipatory action is nascent in these contexts.

This session focuses on the crucial need to enhance resources for initiatives that aim to provide early warning systems and anticipatory action in fragile contexts. It will explore how early action initiatives can be designed and delivered which are tailored to the unique needs of communities affected by conflict and consider how operations need to be adaptable in the face of sudden changes and volatility.
The session will bring together practitioners and financing institutions who are supporting AA initiatives in fragile contexts such as Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Haiti.  

The participants will exchange examples of projects and financing models that have been (or will be) implemented in different regions. The session will encourage learning from different initiatives on how forecast-based early actions (FBEA), for example, can be taken to build resilience in these contexts, in particular on how FBEA can protect refugees and internally-displaced persons. 

It is recognized that scaling up financing for early warning and anticipatory action requires a collective effort to bridge the existing funding gaps. Therefore, the session is drawing on the need of enhanced coordination among stakeholders, including governments, humanitarian organizations, donors, academia and private sector to facilitate and maximize resources for enhanced outcomes in fragile situations.