While Anticipatory Action (AA) has gained momentum and is consolidating as a practice, it is well recognised that pre-arranged (fuel) funding is not yet at the level to bring AA up to scale and unlock its full potential, particularly in the face of increasing humanitarian needs caused by the effects of climate change. Humanitarian funds, which are those mostly financing AA, are under strain. In view of this and the cross-cutting humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nature of AA, there is an increasing call for development actors to strengthen the complementarities and contribute more intentionally to scaling up anticipatory actions.

Further, in recognition of AA’s contribution to mitigating and addressing loss and damage from climate related events, there are opportunities to use climate finance - an option not yet fully explored or regularly used. AA implementing partners are on the first line for tapping into finance other than from humanitarian funds. However, promoting the use of non-humanitarian finance for AA cannot be solely their responsibility. In fact, this should be a collective effort in which donors have an important role to play in providing pre-arranged financing from several funding streams, including humanitarian, development, and climate to support the scale-up of coordinated AA by actors which deliver often in difficult contexts in very short timeframes. Therefore, beyond humanitarian actors, development, peace and climate ones have a responsibility in ensuring that AA is sustained and used to protect development gains. The session will hence discuss and identify how donors and the AA community can bring more development, peace and climate actors to apply anticipatory approaches and to identify and access pre-arranged fuel finance for AA.

The issue of limited pre-arranged financial resources for AA, particularly at the local level, remains a topic of long-standing concern as funds remain inadequate and fragmented, thus not allowing activities to reach the required scale to protect those most vulnerable to shocks. In 2022, finance pre-arranged by the main AA operational agencies for the activation of AA protocols was about USD 138 million; this amount is quite limited if compared to the total humanitarian ‘ask’ for 2023, which is about USD 50 billion. While observing a slow but steady growing trend in contributions to AA outcomes from development and climate actors, AA remains primarily financed
by humanitarian funding. It is critical that the ongoing discussion on how to ensure that scaling-up the use of pre-arranged funding for AA identifies concrete steps forward that can bring all interested parties - humanitarian, development, peace and climate actors - at the table to define how and what each could and should contribute to AA.