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New Delhi [India], March 14: Extreme weather events and climate-linked disasters are no longer rare or unpredictable.The World Weather Association identified 157 “most severe” extreme weather events in 2025. To earn this classification, an event was required to meet at least one of several stringent criteria, such as resulting in over 100 deaths, affecting most of an area’s inhabitants, or triggering a formal state of emergency.
Floods, heatwaves, cyclones, and droughts are occurring with increasing frequency, often following patterns that communities and institutions have witnessed repeatedly over the years. Yet, disaster response continues to lag behind the event itself, prioritizing reaction over prevention. This imbalance is the starkest in funding: typically, over 90% of humanitarian and disaster budgets finances immediate crisis reaction, while a mere 2% is invested in proactive measures like early warning systems and resilient infrastructure. Emergency relief remains essential, but it is also costly, reactive, and often too late to prevent the deepest losses. This is where anticipatory action makes the difference.
Anticipatory action is based on a simple idea: act before a disaster strikes, not after. Instead of waiting for floods to inundate villages or heatwaves to overwhelm health systems, early warnings, climate forecasts, and risk indicators are used to trigger pre-planned interventions. These actions might include releasing funds in advance, supporting communities to safeguard livelihoods, strengthening shelters, or ensuring access to food, water, and health services before conditions worsen. The aim is not to replace emergency response, but to reduce the scale of harm that makes emergency response necessary in the first place.
The logic is increasingly supported by evidence. Acting early is often more cost-effective than post-disaster relief, and it gives communities greater agency at a time when they still have choices. Anticipatory action (AA) in disaster management demonstrates a strong cost-benefit advantage. By using pre-emptive measures such as cash transfers or evacuations before a crisis peaks, every $1 invested in AA can yield a return of $1.50 to $7 or more through the prevention of losses.
A farmer who receives support to harvest early or protect livestock before a flood is less likely to need long-term aid later. A household that receives cash or essential supplies ahead of extreme heat can avoid health complications and income loss. These interventions may seem modest, but their cumulative impact can be significant.
In countries like India, where floods, cyclones, and heat stress recur in predictable geographies, anticipatory action holds particular relevance. Data from the Centre for Science and Environment and Down to Earth show that from January to September 2025, India encountered extreme weather events on 331 days. This figure represents a remarkable 99 percent of the period. River basins flood year after year, coastal districts face seasonal cyclone risks, and heatwaves intensify each summer. The challenge has never been a lack of knowledge about risk, but the ability to translate that knowledge into timely action. Anticipatory frameworks attempt to bridge this gap by linking scientific forecasts with administrative decision-making and hyper-local preparedness.
However, anticipatory action does not eliminate the need for emergency response. Sudden-onset disasters, unexpected intensification of events, and compounding crises will continue to require rapid relief, search and rescue, and recovery support. What changes is the starting point. When early action reduces exposure and vulnerability, emergency response can focus on fewer people, shorter timeframes, and more targeted needs. In this sense, anticipatory action and emergency response are not competing approaches, but complementary ones.
The success of anticipatory action depends heavily on local context. Forecasts must be reliable, triggers must be clear, and actions must be relevant to how people actually live and work. A generic warning is not enough if communities lack the means to act on it, it needs to be hyper-locally tailored. This is why locally anchored planning, community consultation, and coordination with government systems are critical. Without these, early action risks becoming a technical exercise disconnected from real outcomes.
Organisations working at the intersection of disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response are beginning to test and refine these approaches. SEEDS, for instance, has been involved in anticipatory action projects that link flood forecasting with early interventions in vulnerable regions, working alongside communities to reduce potential losses before waters rise. Such initiatives highlight how anticipatory frameworks can be grounded in local realities rather than imposed from the outside.
There are also institutional challenges that need to be addressed. Funding mechanisms are often designed for response rather than prevention, making it harder to release resources before a disaster is officially declared. Coordination between meteorological agencies, disaster management authorities, and local administrations can be uneven. In some cases, uncertainty in forecasts leads to hesitation, even when the risk of inaction may be greater than the risk of acting early. Overcoming these barriers requires not just technical improvements, but shifts in policy, incentives, and organisational culture.
As climate risks continue to intensify, the question is no longer whether anticipatory action is useful, but how systematically it can be adopted. Emergency response will always be necessary, but relying on it as the primary mode of action is becoming increasingly unsustainable. The future of disaster management lies in a balance where early warnings lead to early action, communities are supported before crises escalate, and emergency systems are reserved for what cannot be prevented.
Reducing disaster impacts is not only about faster response, but about smarter timing. Acting earlier, even in small ways, can preserve livelihoods, dignity, and resilience long before relief arrives.
(The article has been authored by Yezdani Rahman, Incident Commander, SEEDS)
English (US) ·