Articles

Editorial: Climate services for risk informed anticipatory action

Kruczkiewicz, Andrew J.; Rodriguez Morata, Clara; Raju, Emmanuel

It is increasingly evident that disaster occurrence and the magnitude of disaster impacts continue to evolve, with these changes driven by climatic, cultural, socio-political and economic factors (Peek and Mileti, 2002; Lewis and Kelman, 2010; Raju et al., 2022). Yet, gaps remain in understanding the extent to which Early Warning Systems (EWS), Anticipatory Action (AA) programs and other Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) strategies are appropriately structured to be sufficiently agile in incorporating evolutions of both natural and socio economic systems (Garcia and Fearnley, 2012; Kruczkiewicz et al., 2021).

However, certain aspects of AA are improving, such as integration of Earth Observations (EO) into trigger model development and the production of funding structures that are designed to facilitate distribution of resources pre-disaster (Nauman et al., 2021; Pache et al., 2022). Yet, additional progress is needed, particularly related to prediction of geophysical and climatic variables, validation of forecasts, governance, and in defining processes for selection of one AA approach over another for a particular context (de Ruiter et al., 2020; Kruczkiewicz et al., 2022; de la Poterie et al., 2023). Best practices and opportunities for engagement within climate services, and for alignment with adaptation and mitigation strategies, as well as collaborating across various sectors in private industry, are also lacking, while demand accelerates. There is also a lack of incentives and standards for providing substantive details around if and to what extent how all people subjected to an AA or EWS program experience these programs, across a spectrum from benefiting to actually being worse off. Such descriptions of influence should include both potential gains, losses and additional hardships introduced, in order to assess potential effectiveness and risks. Understanding types of governance, and potential for scalability and sustainability, is crucial for this purpose.

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Also Published In

Title
Frontiers in Climate
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2023.1243391

More About This Work

Academic Units
International Research Institute for Climate and Society
Published Here
March 13, 2024

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