Towards forecast-based humanitarian decisions: Climate science to get from early warning to early action

Why do people continue to suffer and die due to entirely
predictable natural hazards? The remarkable progress in
science and technology over recent decades allows us to
anticipate future conditions, communicate early warnings
and take early action to avoid losses, yet many recent disasters
are evidence of a dreadful gap between science and the
humanitarian sector. Can forecasters and risk managers
build common ground, designing smart forecast-based decisions
as well as simple decision-based forecasts?
The humanitarian sector needs to restructure its relationship
to predictable climate-related threats. One option is to
evolve towards knowledge-based entities that can rapidly
absorb and act upon information about risks: routinely taking
humanitarian action before a disaster or health emergency
happens, and making full use of scientific information
on all timescales. Two successful instances of collaboration
between forecasters and the Red Cross illustrate this concept
of “Early warning à Early Action”: The 2008 emergency
appeal launched by the IFRC West and Central Africa Zone
to improve flood management based on a seasonal rainfall
forecast (the first of its kind), and a workshop that convened
scientists, humanitarian workers and vulnerable
people in Senegal, which enabled a constructive dialogue
through innovations such as participatory games and videomediated
approaches to risk management.
This paper proposes a framework based on four key four
attributes of science-based forecasts: location (where is the
event likely to happen?), magnitude (how big?), lead time
(how far into the future?), and probability (what are the
chances of it happening?), linking them respectively to vulnerability,
expected loss, range of plausible actions, and the
decision of whether or not to act. It is not easy to compare
failure to prevent losses (e.g. fatalities due to inaction) and
false alarm (e.g. expenses related to actions that prove unnecessary).
While it will inevitably involve subjective criteria,
the choice to act or not to act should be informed by a
rigorous assessment of possible outcomes. Stakeholders
need to jointly identify the constellation of means, relationships,
and processes that can enable forecast-based decisions
to save lives.