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When hazards ‘work together’ in complex ways, how can anticipatory action stakeholders keep pace?
To date, most anticipatory action initiatives have focused on natural hazards, often a single hazard at one time. But the contexts in which humanitarians operate are all too often shaped by a complex interplay of cascading and compounding hazards that comprise conflict, climate and economic factors. Effectively addressing the intricate challenges these pose requires innovative and adaptive approaches to anticipatory action.
Take the Ukraine conflict, for example. Its escalation in 2022 created immediate shocks to global food systems. This led to cascading impacts on food security in countries already facing complex crises, such as Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan – and these impacts were foreseen (e.g., Breisinger et al. 2022). This demonstrates how the complex interactions between conflict and climatic factors can shape the humanitarian situation, both within a country and beyond its borders.
And there are further examples of how countries face a complex interplay of multiple climate hazards and, in some cases, conflict. In Bangladesh, climate extremes and long-term, slow-onset saline intrusion have degraded agricultural land, reduced potable water availability and affected aquaculture systems, which in turn have threatened food security. In Nigeria, seasonal flooding and severe droughts pose significant challenges to communities, with conflict further exacerbating an already difficult situation.
The majority of contexts have multiple connected, cascading or compounding hazards. In addition, there is often limited access to timely data and limited scope for expert judgement that could better facilitate the consideration of complexity in anticipatory action approaches. The complexity will not go away, thus anticipatory action stakeholders need to find new ways of accounting for it.
New approaches to understanding complex and cascading risks
Understanding complex, cascading risks requires a systems-thinking approach – which means looking at systems and their internal relationships as a whole, rather than splitting them down into parts. Several initiatives are under way to apply this.
One development in this respect is being led by researchers at Chatham House, who have developed novel, evidence-based assessments of climate risk. They are now working with Practical Action to understand better how communities experience cascading risks and how multi-hazard early warning systems can be strengthened.
The level of risk can be determined from the combined impact of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Through the risk cascade, across multiple geographies, borders and administrative units, the combined ‘risk’ and impact on communities look very different.
Another recent output is a publication from the H2H Network, which highlights the growing interest in applying anticipatory action in complex contexts, thus moving beyond its more common use for settings with individual hazards. It points towards the use of ‘soft trigger’ systems as more appropriate for addressing complex and compound forms of risk. Such systems can be supported by scenario-based risk analyses and multi-hazard early warning systems.
Insecurity Insight has been contributing to such analyses through a series of briefings that consider the compounding and cascading effects of conflict on food insecurity in Mali; these propose relevant anticipatory actions that humanitarian organizations and communities can take to mitigate the worst impacts of these hazards. And Action Against Hunger is working on the Modelling Early Risk Indicators to Anticipate Malnutrition (MERIAM) initiative, which aims to forecast acute malnutrition prevalence rates, while also accounting for the interplay of conflict and climate factors.
During the 12th Global Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action, held in October 2024, the authors convened a session on ‘Demystifying compounding and cascading hazards in anticipatory action’, which explored new approaches to mitigating food insecurity. This session can be watched again online. A follow-up paper has recently been published, which summarizes the discussion points and lessons; this is available here.
Adopting an anticipatory mindset to complex and cascading hazards
What all these efforts have in common is a desire to provide new tools and approaches to account for the complex lived realities of many people. This can be described as promoting an ‘anticipatory mindset’ that is based on the underlying rationale and central tenets of anticipatory action: protecting the dignity of at-risk populations and acting as early as possible to prevent human suffering. Anticipatory action is one tool within this broader anticipatory mindset (cf. Alcayna et al., 2024).
Regardless of whether a formal anticipatory action programme can be developed in a given context, it is important to use the tools available to plan ahead and be as proactive as possible. Climatic hazards and conflict will continue to ‘work together’ and create compounding and cascading risks. Shying away from the resulting complexity is not an option; instead, anticipatory action stakeholders need to continue exploring novel ways to account for this complexity and build new approaches – which adopt an anticipatory mindset – to protect affected populations.
One place to continue this discussion and learn more about what is being done is the Anticipation Hub’s Working Group on Multi-Risk and Anticipatory Action. If you are interested in joining the group, please contact the convenors.
This blog was written by Bhargabi Bharadwaj, Tim Bishop, Larissa de Winter, Muhammad Fawwad, Debora Gonzalez and Beth Simons.