Anticipatory action

Women collecting water from a well in Niger

Women collecting water in the garden of Goubey, Dosso region, Niger on May 15, 2023. Implemented by the NGO Garkua and funded by WFP, the anticipatory action project aims to reinforce communities’ food security in response to the risk of drought. Photo: OCHA

Every year, millions of people face the reality of increasingly intense and frequent climate-related disasters, such as floods, storms, droughts and other extreme weather, killing loved ones and destroying livelihoods. Since 2000, the escalating climate crisis has also meant an eightfold increase in funding requirements for United Nations humanitarian appeals linked to extreme weather.

Today, we can predict with increasing confidence the occurrence and humanitarian impact of some of these shocks, such as droughts, floods, or storms, but also some disease outbreaks.

Taking actions based on such predictions to support vulnerable communities facing disasters aims to prevent and mitigate the effects of shocks through fast, dignified and cost-effective action that can also protect development gains.

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What is anticipatory action?

Anticipatory Action is acting ahead of predicted hazards to prevent or reduce acute humanitarian impacts before they fully unfold. Effective implementation of anticipatory action ideally requires three elements:

Pre-agreed trigger: This consists of thresholds and decision-making rules based on reliable, timely and measurable forecasts.

Pre-agreed activities: This consists of accountable, feasible, effective and efficient actions to be implemented to support vulnerable communities in the window of opportunity between the trigger moment and the full impact of a shock.

Pre-arranged financing: This consists of funding that is guaranteed and available to be released based on the pre-agreed trigger towards the pre-agreed activities.

OCHA underpins this approach, with a learning component to iteratively improve anticipatory action over time, but also to provide a growing evidence base that receiving assistance earlier results in significant improvements of the wellbeing of the people impacted by disasters.

OCHA is committed to use its financing tools to facilitate, generate evidence for and scale up collective anticipatory action.

OCHA-facilitated Anticipatory Action
Learning and evaluation
Mainstreaming
Partnerships
Resources

OCHA supports scaling up of anticipatory action primarily through the roll-out of coordinated anticipatory action frameworks which combine pre-agreed triggers, pre-agreed activities and pre-arranged financing. The below map provides a global overview of past, ongoing and developing anticipatory action frameworks. Each OCHA-facilitated anticipatory action framework is typically endorsed for a period of 2 years, after which they may be revised or extended if necessary.

A global map showing locations of anticipatory action projects.

Growing evidence suggests that acting ahead of a shock has significant impact on people’s wellbeing and supports the premise of anticipatory action being fast, dignified and cost-effective action that can also protect development gain.

Collective, anticipatory approaches are still an innovative space that must be guided by iterative improvements. Thus, in addition to the three core elements, OCHA also invests in documenting evidence and learning from each framework underpinned by a clear learning, monitoring and evaluation plan.

OCHA’s Anticipatory Action learning framework includes three main learning elements:

Independent evaluation, for instance through

A quantitative evaluation of the impact of anticipatory action on household welfare;
A qualitative evaluation to assess beneficiary experience; and
Forecast/trigger evaluation to assess the performance of the predictive model and ways to improve.

Process learning: Capture qualitative data on the benefits of setting up the pilot, as well as how the process supports high-quality anticipatory action frameworks and effective implementation.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E): Coordinated, agency-specific M&E to collect and track data on implementation progress and outputs achieved with some common, coordinated questions and indicators on timing, output, reach and challenges.

Key resources

Anticipatory action: Lessons for the future, Frontiers in Climate, 2022

Centre for Disaster Protection: Five lessons on collective approaches to anticipatory action

OCHA Anticipatory Action Toolkit

A risk-informed Humanitarian Programme Cycle involves applying a 'risk lens' through all phases of the cycle: analysis, planning, implementation and monitoring. This includes the identification, prioritisation, monitoring and planning for the mitigation of risks based on their probability and expected humanitarian impact.

The Humanitarian Programme Cycle’s approach to risk-informed planning integrates high-impact and highly probable risks directly into humanitarian response planning. In contrast, lower probability or less predictable risks might be managed through separate contingency or preparedness plans. A combination of response preparedness/readiness, anticipatory action, and rapid response planning can typically be considered ways to mitigate the impact of priority risks.

Mainstreaming anticipatory action within the Humanitarian Programme Cycle is, therefore, one of the methods envisioned to implement risk impact mitigation for high-impact and highly probable risks within the Humanitarian Programme Cycle’s main planning document/instrument – the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan. Anticipatory action is specifically tailored for predictable hazards, often climate hazards, enabling predefined triggers for rapid response before these risks materialize. Implementing anticipatory action requires well-established readiness and often involves agreements in advance about who will perform specific activities, where, for whom, and with what funding.

OCHA has been working with a wide range of partners to develop and implement anticipatory action frameworks.

Activities under OCHA-facilitated frameworks are implemented through continued partnership between OCHA and various national governments, UN agencies, the Red Cross family and international and national NGOs. Additionally, the collective anticipatory action approach is used to pool resources from multiple donors and partners to achieve greater scale and impact in implementation. To do this, OCHA brings together the OCHA-managed pooled funds, donors, International Financial Institutions and other anticipatory action focused funds. As a majority of anticipatory action frameworks address climate-related shocks, OCHA works closely with climate actors to enable anticipatory assistance that contributes to longer-term climate outcomes and to facilitate effective use of climate financing for reducing humanitarian impact and OCHA is committed to generating rigorous evidence on anticipatory action, and understanding what works, when and how. Strong partnerships with academic and research institutions have helped OCHA integrate robust learning and evaluation approaches into the anticipatory action frameworks.

A snapshot of our partners at the global level can be found below. Detailed country-level partners can be found under individual frameworks.

OCHA would like to thank the following donors for their generous support to advance the work on anticipatory action:

Australia
Germany
United Kingdom
United States of America

The delivery and scaling up of anticipatory action for people at risk of imminent shocks has been made possible by donors who have continuously supported OCHA-managed Pooled Funds