Anticipatory Action (AA) generates significant efficiency gains by avoiding losses and reducing humanitarian needs before they escalate, lowering operational and logistical costs, and enhancing early response. In today’s tightening funding environment, these efficiency gains are increasingly critical. Despite the improvement in forecasting capacity and the approach’s growth in recent years, AA remains a niche strategy.

The Humanitarian Reset presents a critical opportunity to move beyond reactive models and establish crisis anticipation as a standard feature of fit-for-future humanitarian system. This session situates AA within the Humanitarian Reset as a practical, system-level lever to improve coordination efficiency and value for money.

The session will examine how AA can help deliver key Humanitarian Reset priorities by enabling more agile coordination, reducing duplication across sectors and actors, and streamlining operational processes. It will explore how anticipatory action can be scaled up and optimized. It will focus on concrete efficiency levers such as common risk analytics, harmonized triggers and thresholds, coordinated SOPs, shared data standards, and shifting power and resources to local actors — building on the valuable work already underway.

Session objectives:

• Review how anticipatory action delivers efficiency gains and can help accelerate the priorities of the Humanitarian Reset.
• Present recommendations to operationalize Action Item 25 of the IASC Humanitarian Reset Roadmap (“Bringing together scaled up anticipatory action and a ‘green humanitarian reset’ that is ready for the climate challenges ahead”)
• Present the latest evidence on the cost-effectiveness of anticipatory action, including avoided losses, cost savings, and efficiency gains, and assess what this means in a constrained funding environment.
• Share and discuss how existing AA work can be improved to enable its scaling and greater impact in the changing humanitarian landscape