Looking back at the 7th Asia-Pacific Dialogue Platform

There were over 400 participants, representing at least 25 countries; three in-person days in Kathmandu were followed by five interactive online sessions; we had interviews, cartoons, kites, a new board game – and a Nepali street drama to inform communities about anticipatory action. It’s fair to say that this year’s Asia-Pacific Dialogue Platform was the biggest – and the most creative – to date.  

Part one: the in-person meeting, June 2023 

Anticipatory action continues to increase in scale across the Asia-Pacific region and this was reflected during the first part of this year’s event. Over 200 people met in Kathmandu, Nepal, to share country-level and project experiences, while also working together to identify a joint way forward at the regional and national levels.  

“The Dialogue Platform was a stepping stone for raising the profile of innovative early action pilots, not only in Nepal but across Asia-Pacific,” noted Anil Pokhrel, the chief executive of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), which co-hosted the Kathmandu meeting. “We have a collective vision... on collaboration to scale early action initiatives, and using evidence to evaluate implementation approaches across partners.” 

Part two: online sessions, July to September 2023 

“The in-person event attracted a record number of participants, coming from over 20 countries,” said Raymond Zingg, the anticipatory action coordinator for Asia-Pacific at the IFRC. “But to allow an even wider audience to share experiences and learn from anticipatory action initiatives in the region, we continued with a series of online events.” 

Held over two months, the virtual part of the event comprised five online sessions. Alongside a community conversation to summarize the main outcomes from the meeting in Kathmandu, each session explored a different aspect of anticipatory action in Asia-Pacific. 

• In the first session, OpenStreetMap shared examples of how it supports anticipatory action efforts in Asia-Pacific and sought to find ways to collaborate further with the region’s anticipatory action sector.  
• Next, the Supporting Forecast-based Action and Learning project in Bangladesh shared its experience of trying to enable financing mechanisms for anticipatory action, from local to national levels.  
• A thematic session looked at the progress made by different government actors in Bangladesh in terms of monitoring and producing hazard-related forecasts, delivering warnings and – based on these – implementing anticipatory action  
• The final online session focused on early warning education for children, presenting some of the different ways of doing this. 

This split format – with the online and in-person elements held consecutively, rather than at the same time – was a new approach to hosting hybrid Dialogue Platforms. The aim was to allow the organizing team the space to focus on the different needs of both audiences, and to capitalize on the advantages of each format, rather than trying to balance the two. The Anticipation Hub will work with the organizing team and participants to review how successful this was, and then use this to guide the development and planning for future events, in Asia-Pacific and elsewhere.