Abstract
Faced with increasing challenges such as rising food insecurity and cascading and compounding risks, the humanitarian system needs to find new ways to cope with rising humanitarian needs. Anticipatory Humanitarian Action (AHA) enables humanitarian actors to act upon forecasts and early warnings before a crisis materialized. The created window of opportunity is used to implement early actions supporting communities to prepare for imminent hazards. To utilize this anticipative method best, humanitarian networking and partnering is needed to help mainstream and scale this innovative approach. Through the practical application of the approach Welthungerhilfe gained practical experience on how AHA can help to avoid losses and damages before they occur. The Madagascar case study presented showcases on how AHA works and why it needs to be scaled.
Drawing from its AHA networking and partnering at global and local levels as well as from its practical field work, Welthungerhilfe calls the humanitarian system to advocate and promote a common understanding of AHA, to assure open-source data and open-access to risk models, to act beyond economic reasoning, to understand and account to people and communities at risk, and to go beyond humanitarian action. Overall, Welthungerhilfe concludes: AHA saves lives, AHA avoids suffering, AHA reduces humanitarian needs.
1. Humanitarian paradigm shift and Anticipatory Humanitarian Action
Today 350 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. With current humanitarian crises only exacerbating due to manifold factors, such as climate change and protracted or newly emerging conflicts, humanitarian needs are even further on the rise while crises tend to become more frequent, complex, and protracted. Therefore, humanitarian action is needed more than ever. This global humanitarian situation is accompanied by an increase in costs, which puts further strains on humanitarian actors (OCHA, 2023). But traditional humanitarian action must only be the last resort to support people. The humanitarian system is obligated to adapt to these new realities instead of only reacting to loss and damage; humanitarian actors need to find innovative ways to mitigate the impact of humanitarian crises.
Therefore, Welthungerhilfe is pushing for a humanitarian paradigm shift away from solely relying on reactive humanitarian interventions responding to a shock and the resulting spike in humanitarian needs. Instead, Welthungerhilfe pursues more proactive modes of support to prevent impacts of the shock which ultimately help to reduce death, suffering and loss of livelihoods while making more efficient use of existing limited resources. While strengthening the resilience of communities and individuals and accelerating efforts in emergency preparedness and response planning, Welthungerhilfe intensively engages in anticipation (Welthungerhilfe, 2019). This is to avoid or mitigate loss and damage caused by shocks before they even occur and preserving human dignity in the process (Figure 1).
Under this umbrella of Anticipation Welthungerhilfe employs the concept of Anticipatory Humanitarian Action (AHA). It is defined as “acting ahead of predicted hazards to prevent or reduce acute humanitarian impacts before they fully unfold. This requires pre-agreed plans that identify partners and activities, reliable early warning information, and pre-agreed financing, released predictably and rapidly when an agreed trigger-point is reached” (GFFO, 2022). Thus, early actions as part of Anticipatory Humanitarian Action are implemented according to pre-built and pre-agreed Early Action Protocols (EAP) with pre-agreed financing (“fuel money”) after an early warning is issued but before the actual predicted hazard occurs or its impacts fully materialize (Figure 2). Therefore, Anticipatory Humanitarian Action enables humanitarian actors to make use of the window of opportunity created by acting on available forecasting information.
By acting early, Anticipatory Humanitarian Action (AHA) provides comparative advantages on costs and efficiency compared to the reactive humanitarian action (Anticipation Hub, 2023a; WFP, 2020). However, despite all economic reasoning, AHA first and foremost is an ethical obligation for the international community, humanitarian practitioners and science alike. To enable this action ahead of impacts, forecasting of e.g., droughts calls for science-based solutions in the sense of generating, analysing, and sharing scientific data for practical use. Here, Welthungerhilfe has been working in the context of droughts and food security over the past years and draws on its humanitarian networking and partnering actions and on a practical case of AHA in Madagascar.
There is a global momentum for amplifying Anticipatory Humanitarian Action, yet the number of active frameworks, hazards and the scale of the projects is still small and does not match the potential (Anticipation Hub, 2023b). Achieving this humanitarian paradigm shift towards increased anticipation and scaling up AHA to its full potential requires the pooling of a wide range of competencies and concerted efforts. Accordingly, an innovative, agile and anticipatory humanitarian actor landscape and the strengthening of complementary partnerships from humanitarian, development and science are important (Mogge et al., 2021). This applies to both the global level as outlined in Chapter 2 and within the practical work in countries, provided by an example on drought in Madagascar in Chapter 3.
2. Humanitarian networking and partnering on anticipating food crises
Increasing acute food insecurity: Changing climate, increasing conflict, mass displacement and other stressors (like economic crises and pandemics) put particular pressure on food security all over the world. As a result, progress in tackling hunger has largely halted as shown by the 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI) score (Welthungerhilfe, 2022). At the same time, acute food insecurity has reached extremely alarming levels worldwide over the past decade. Today, according to the seventh edition of the Global Report on Food Crises, over a quarter of a billion people are facing acute levels of hunger in 58 food-crisis countries and territories, and some are on the brink of starvation (Food Security Information Network, 2023).
Complex risks: Food crises can result from several causes and hazards. In many cases, different stressors interact, leading to cascading and compounding disaster risk. Natural hazards like e.g., droughts, cyclones, floods, landslides, or pests, can add to underlying risk drivers (conflict, crises, climate) and exacerbate negative food security outcomes. Strengthening multi-hazard early warning systems can help to anticipate different hazards allowing for Anticipatory Humanitarian Action to protect lives and livelihoods against the most acute impacts of these shocks.
AHA at scale can help: There is growing evidence that Anticipatory Humanitarian Action can help curb and reverse current food insecurity trends as it can ensure that local food production and economic and physical access to food are maintained despite shocks. The Rockefeller Foundation in a recent report on food security saw Anticipatory Humanitarian Action emerging as one of four key recommendations that, if implemented at scale, can contribute to global food security and provide best practices to work towards SDG 2 (The Rockefeller Foundation, 2023). Likewise, the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) 2023 Global Food Policy Report stresses the important role anticipatory action can play in future food policies and announces a CGIAR research initiative i.e. aiming to strengthen anticipatory action in complex crises (IFPRI, 2023).
Mainstreaming AHA in humanitarian coordination: Against this backdrop key stakeholders active in food security increasingly engage in close exchange and collaboration to make AHA work to prevent and mitigate food crises: develop shared principles, make use of synergies, and push for collective action. Already in 2021, Welthungerhilfe provided input to the annual partners meeting of the global Food Security Cluster (gFSC) on the potential of Anticipatory Humanitarian Action to address drought-induced food insecurity (Semet & Burakowski, 2021). For the current revision of the gFSC 2023-25 Strategic Plan (forthcoming), Welthungerhilfe in its role as member of the gFSC Strategic Advisory Group led the workstream on a specific anticipatory action pillar that will be integrated in the strategy plan (Food Security Cluster, n.d.).
Convening food security actors to align and agree on core principles: Contributing towards a similar objective, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Global Network against Food Crises (GNAFC) convened a workshop on “Anticipating Food Crises” which facilitated technical and strategic dialogue and exchange on priorities and alignment between several key actors engaged in AHA, incl. UN Agencies, the Red Cross / Red Crescent Movement, Non-Governmental Organizations, and academia resulting in agreements on core principles and criteria for mainstreaming and scaling up AHA in food crises contexts. This discussion focused around leveraging food security information to inform AHA, enhancing evidence on AHA impact and efficiency, increasing use of AHA in protracted crisis and as a catalyst for operationalizing the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus in food crisis contexts (WFP et al., 2023 forthcoming).
Influence high-level policy discussion: Key considerations on AHA have also been discussed intensely during the European Humanitarian Forum 2023 (European Humanitarian Forum, 2023). Though only a spotlight on a complex discussion, they already shed some light on challenges still existing on the way towards mainstreaming AHA – particularly regarding food crises – as envisioned in the humanitarian paradigm shift. The partnership of humanitarians not only with development, climate and peace actors, but importantly also with science and academia, can help to better understand some of these complexities and improve different elements of this crucial approach. Particularly the work on forecasts, Acute Food Insecurity projections, triggers (including both natural and social scientific analyses) as well as a comprehensive evidence agenda that supports proving the assumptions of the benefits of AHA, will require a close collaboration that allows scientific findings and evidence to be directly translated into practical contributions in the fight against hunger.
Networked civil society: Within the NGO sphere of AHA, the Start Network through Start Fund Anticipation (Start Network, 2023a) and Start Ready (Start Network, 2023b) provides member organisations with access to funding in the event of impending or emerging crises and disasters in order to implement early actions that mitigate the predicted harmful impacts. The forecasts are supported by the Forecast-based, Warning, Analysis, and Response Network (FOREWARN) of the Start Network (Start Network, 2023c). FOREWARN consists of scientists and humanitarian practitioners from various institutions and organisations and is tasked with developing a scientifically sound and verifiable basis for decision-making. Welthungerhilfe actively participates in advisory and decision-making committees in both the Start Fund Anticipation and FOREWARN.
Collective learning: Overcoming isolated work in the different spheres of UN, IFRC and NGO, but rather to learn and engage collectively in scaling up AHA within the humanitarian system, is the aspiration of and facilitated by the Anticipation Hub (Anticipation Hub, 2023c). Here, thematic working groups are addressing different aspects and challenges of AHA. This interaction by different stakeholders is mirrored in the Anticipation Hub Advisory Group which “aims to have diverse membership with a broad range of practical, scientific and policy knowledge and experience from different geographical and sectoral backgrounds” (Anticipation Hub, 2023). Through its advisory work and engagement in the Anticipation Hub, and by sharing respective data and experiences from its practical field work (Anticipation Hub, n.d.), Welthungerhilfe contributes to collectively scaling up AHA (Anticipation Hub, 2023b).
Welthungerhilfe draws from years of experience in practical implementation of AHA, generating best practices, sharing its experiences and evidence on its effectiveness to further push the humanitarian paradigm shift with other humanitarian actors on all levels. Chapter 3 will provide a more detailed insight in Welthungerhilfe’s AHA implementation on the case of drought anticipation in Madagascar.
3. Drought Anticipatory Humanitarian Action in Madagascar: Mitigate negative food security outcomes
In Madagascar, smallholder farmers are already heavily impacted by the changing climate especially by the increase of extreme weather events. Since they are often reliable on rain-fed crops without access to coping strategies like irrigation, hazards like droughts, storms or strong rains pose immense risks for their food systems causing acute food insecurity (IPCC, 2022). This affects the poor and hence most vulnerable within an affected community the most. In line with the call for “effective action for protecting the poor” (PAS, 2023, internal communication), anticipating drought events and taking AHA to prevent acute food crises increasingly gains in importance.
Functioning of AHA mechanism in general: Anticipatory Humanitarian Action uses detailed hazard and risk analyses to identify extreme weather events such as droughts in due time and thereby enables the people at risk to act ahead of impending crises through early action. The financing of assistance is guaranteed by the donors before a crisis occurs. In so-called Early Action Protocols (EAPs), the allocation of funds and the responsibilities of those involved are defined and pre-agreed. This ensures rapid and efficient action before an imminent threat turns into a disaster with high losses and damages (Figure 3). Welthungerhilfe has been engaged in this field since 2015. With financial support by the German Federal Foreign Office and in cooperation with local partners, Welthungerhilfe is now pursuing this approach regarding droughts in multiple projects in Kenya, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe (Semet & Burakowski, 2022).
Hazard modelling to predict droughts: To enable AHA in droughts, it is necessary to understand the different drought risks in the affected regions. Based on open data from global long-term observations of indicators – for precipitation amounts, soil moisture, and water availability of plants – past drought events are analysed to generate insights for current drought monitoring. The indicator used by Welthungerhilfe in Madagascar is the Water Requirement Satisfaction Index (WRSI). The WRSI indicates the soil-dependent water supply level of agricultural crops over the course of the growing period. The WRSI is calculated within the framework of the GeoWRSI of the Climate Hazards Center at UC Santa Barbara, a software program performing crop-specific water-balance-modelling using satellite data. The GeoWRSI software with the satellite data is freely accessible. As a result, humanitarian organizations can even create their own long-term data sets for a historic analysis of past droughts and use the possibility of this open data themselves. Supplementary to the satellite-based WRSI data, publicly available precipitation observation data from local meteorological services is used. The combined use of these data sets helps to validate the GeoWRSI results (Semet & Burakowski, 2022).
Based on the WRSI, Welthungerhilfe assesses which regions in a certain country were particularly frequently affected by drought events and how the WRSI data of the locally used staple crops have developed over the decades (10-day measuring intervals) along the vegetation period (Figure 4). From these analyses, WRSI thresholds are defined at which drought events and subsequent water-related damage to staple crops and harvest losses are to be expected. These thresholds are incorporated into the respective current drought monitoring. They serve as an alert mechanism and lead to the activation and implementation of the EAPs, including the release of the financial resources allocated for this purpose.
Early actions used to prevent hazard impacts: Within the development of the EAP, vulnerability studies are conducted to analyse how harvest damages and harvest losses will affect a certain population and which early action will support communities most successfully to prevent hazard impacts. In Madagascar, for example, early cash assistance was identified as the most feasible and effective option to mitigate drought impacts. With financial support by the German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO) through the Start Network early cash was transferred each month to particularly vulnerable households when the drought threshold was reached in spring 2021, even before harvest failures led to food insecurity. Welthungerhilfe decided to implement the cash transfers up until the lean season to sufficiently support project participants during the hunger period as well. The cash assistance was provided via digital transfer to accounts on mobile phones, which the households had previously received and were assisted in using. This credit can be exchanged for cash or used as a means of payment in shops. After the completion of this forecast-based drought assistance in Madagascar, the mobile phones remained in the households and communities for further use (Semet & Burakowski, 2022).
Rigorous monitoring to generate evidence on effectiveness of AHA approach: To check whether the mobile cash distribution had the intended effect, distributions were closely monitored in this Madagascar case (Figure 5). The aim was to trace the progress of the early action once implemented, and to evaluate the added value and lessons learned from each distribution.
This showed that 80-90 per cent of beneficiaries were ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the process of early cash distribution. A post-distribution evaluation also indicated how people used their cash distributions, showing that more than 85 per cent of respondents used some of their money to buy basic food staples. This was confirmed by focus group discussions, in which participants explained that they spent the majority of their cash on white rice, generally to stock up in order to survive the coming months of drought. Households also used money to prepare for the start of the school year (14.2 per cent), for basic necessities (12.4 per cent), agricultural inputs (8.5 per cent), medicines (6.7 per cent) and agricultural equipment (2.7 per cent). Some project participants (30.9 per cent) spent part of their money on things besides daily household needs. These included house repairs, paying debts, reviving small businesses (e.g., purchasing raw materials) and non-essential items such as furniture. Around 5 per cent of respondents saved some of their money to serve as an emergency fund if further problems arose during the lean season. Overall, the post-distribution monitoring shows that the early cash distributions were effective and that project participants put their cash to its intended uses. A close monitoring of the Food Consumption Score Index shortly before, during and after the distribution of early cash showed that the food security situation was stabilized or even slightly improved for most project participants. This can already be counted as a success as project participants did not slip into increased food insecurity with proceeding drought conditions experienced (Burakowski & Semet, 2022; Burakowski, 2022).
4. Conclusions and Outlook
Drawing from its networking and partnering at global and local levels as well as from its practical field work, Welthungerhilfe concludes that the following challenges need to be addressed to achieve the humanitarian paradigm shift away from merely reactive humanitarian action towards scaling-up AHA within the humanitarian system.
Advocate and promote a common understanding of AHA: In part due to its growing momentum, there is a risk of blurring the AHA approach by labelling a rapid emergency response being an early action in the sense of AHA. This can weaken AHAs potential to become the future priority and default approach and provide maximum impact in a yet underused window of opportunity immediately ahead of disasters. Clear definition must be established and followed to protect the intention of AHA and its core concerns. Welthungerhilfe therefore advocates for the definition in the G7 Foreign Ministers’ Statement on Strengthening Anticipatory Action in Humanitarian Assistance defining Anticipatory Humanitarian Action as: “acting ahead of predicted hazards to prevent or reduce acute humanitarian impacts before they fully unfold. This requires pre-agreed plans that identify partners and activities, reliable early warning information, and pre-agreed financing, released predictably and rapidly when an agreed trigger-point is reached” (GFFO, 2022).
It is important to promote that AHA is not exclusively about the timing of the measure, but also about the quality and objective. Especially in slow-onset crises, it is often not possible (or necessary) to clearly define the starting point and what was before and after. However, AHA is always designed to protect and to prevent or reduce needs (instead of alleviating needs that have already arisen). This is the special new quality of AHA.
Assure open-source data and open-access to risk models: Humanitarian action shall never become a business! Selling data and claiming intellectual property rights to risk models developed will limit their respective access (thereby impact) as well as sustainability and opportunities for collective improvement. AHA should remain a common good by using shared models and open-source data for transparency, optimization, further development, and collective learning amongst all actors governmental and non-governmental is essential to generate synergies and increase sustainability in handling and maintaining risk models and putting them to maximum use.
Act beyond economic reasoning: Monetary advantages and efficiency gains of AHA compared to classical emergency response, recovery and rehabilitation costs must be analysed by expanding and including an ethical component of saving lives, providing support in a more dignified manner, and avoiding misery and traumata for people and communities.
By doing so, the humanitarian imperative must become reality, i.e., when we can see disasters coming, we must not remain idle and allow people and communities to go into misery by experiencing losses and damages. We need to do what we can to avoid the latter. We have all means at our hands to support a more dignified way of thinking about humanitarian action. Thus, the advantages of AHA must be seen and promoted far beyond favourable cost benefit analyses. If we continuously improve our ability to predict disaster in cooperation with science, we cannot just wait and see. The humanitarian imperative extends also to acting ahead of predictable disasters to save lives and avoid unnecessary human suffering.
Understand and account to people and communities at risk: AHA comprises understanding and quantifying risks, risk modelling actions and setting thresholds, followed by the development, implementation (upon triggering), and maintenance of Early Action Protocols (EAP), thus before and after the actual early action support of people and communities at risk requires additional works and investments, including close collaboration with science.
However, AHA is not merely developed at the desk and is not simply a modelling issue. It is an ambition wherein science, and humanitarian practitioners meet realities of people and communities on the ground. Thus, exchange with people and communities at risk is essential to understand their vulnerability and coping mechanisms. To put the costs for these field works into value, a reference community (participating in the initial EAP design) and scaling community (in sufficiently comparable contexts and livelihoods) approach (RCSC Approach) is a pathway to combine efficiency and accountability, knowing that ideally all communities should be involved, if only e.g., to ensure that early warnings are understood and transformed into early action. Thus, to take AHA to scale remains the challenge for the future and is demanded by Welthungerhilfe within the humanitarian system (Iseli, 2021; Mogge, 2021).
Accountability does not end with the end of a project. In the context of Early Action Protocol (EAP) development for AHA, people-centred humanitarian action requires mechanisms which assure deliverables after respective project durations, the EAP had been developed. This applies also to EAP maintenance and the resources involved. Hence, it is important to establish (Mosebach, 2023).
Go beyond humanitarian action: The work invested by people and communities at risk and by AHA agents into risk analysis must be infused into HDP nexus programming. This includes avoiding that development efforts are destroyed, and anticipating and mitigating conflict impacts.
Finally, we conclude that AHA saves lives, AHA avoids suffering, AHA reduces humanitarian needs and is more dignified and more efficient than traditional reactive humanitarian action, especially with the scientific community at our side. A close collaboration between the science and AHA communities will be of utmost importance to validate and provide evidence for this again and again to help us improve and convince decision-makers and critics on AHA.
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