Post by GreenAnt

🌊 In July 2020, four days before what would become one of the most severe flooding events on record in #Bangladesh, the World Food Programme triggered anticipatory cash transfers based on the country’s national early warning system. The program, WFP’s Forecast-based Financing initiative, developed in partnership with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society (BDRCS) Society and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, used a pre-agreed two-stage trigger system to determine when to act. 📡 The first stage activated when the European Commission’s Global Flood Awareness System (#GloFAS) 10-day probabilistic forecast showed greater than a 50% chance of severe flooding in the targeted areas. The second and final activation trigger was reached when Bangladesh’s Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre predicted that the water level at Bahadurabad would cross 20.35 meters. When forecasts on July 4 predicted severe flooding from July 18 onward, the framework was triggered and aid payouts within 4 hours, in what became CERF’s fastest-ever allocation. Today, WFP can reach 350,000 people five days before a forecasted flood, using mobile money and early warning messaging. 36% fewer people went a day without eating throughout the floods when they received anticipatory assistance. This kind of humanitarian structure is a game-changer. But it requires a trigger threshold that is credible enough to unlock pre-committed, anticipatory financing. And yet threshold design remains an under-scrutinized element of anticipatory action program architecture. Many such programs inherit imprecise thresholds from early warnings systems calibrated to detect conditions across a broad area. They can’t trigger protective action for a specific community in a specific catchment at a specific point in the rainy season. 📌 A threshold set too high misses genuine events. Pre-financing mechanisms stay dormant while communities flood. Donors see a program that didn’t activate when it should have. 📌 A threshold set too low generates false alarms. Pre-positioned resources deploy to communities that don’t flood. Donors see a program burning through its activation budget. Communities begin to discount the warnings. The behavioral response the program depends on degrades over time. GreenAnt’s Desidera supports the creation of credible, site-specific disaster risk thresholds that supercharge anticipatory action and make programs more precise, more defensible, and more effective. Read more about the WFP Bangladesh program here: https://lnkd.in/gzVrgTpG #AnticipatoryAction #EarlyWarning #FloodRisk #HumanitarianFinance #ForecastBasedFinancing #DisasterRiskReduction #ClimateResilience #GreenAnt