Follow the Forecasts

Climate disasters push more than 39 million people into crisis each year. Yet humanitarian aid still largely arrives after the damage is done, when crops have failed, livelihoods have been lost and families are already making impossible tradeoffs. Anticipatory systems can move earlier, but most depend on plans, triggers and funding arranged far in advance for specific places, leaving emerging crises elsewhere uncovered.

Follow the Forecasts flips that model. IRC uses long-range climate forecasts to pinpoint where a crisis is becoming likely months in advance, combines those forecasts with local vulnerability data, and rapidly builds a response to get cash to families before the worst impacts hit. Our approach moves from planning to cash delivery 4X faster than other sector models. This speed is crucial: evidence on anticipatory action suggests every dollar spent before a disaster can generate more than $7 in benefits by helping families protect food, livestock, income and other assets before they are lost.

We’ve already reached more than 96,000 people across six responses. We’re now turning the approach into a shared system that multiple humanitarian organizations can use, allowing partners to act on the same forecasts and collectively cover an at-risk area rather than stopping at IRC’s operational footprint. The goal is a global humanitarian system that moves resources with the forecast, not after the disaster.