Landscape of anticipatory action for health in a changing climate

The report identifies two main approaches to Anticipatory Action (AA) for health: hazard-driven and disease-driven. Drawing on case studies of AA systems for several common health outcomes, the authors recommend AA designs to help prioritize scarce resources and improve effectiveness in the increasingly complex environment of climate-aggravated health threats.

Overall, AA can be a means to efficiently allocate scarce resources in the public health sector. For example, AA can be incorporated into public health measures that are already happening to improve their effectiveness by changing the timing or location of these initiatives. Coordination among actors will be necessary to achieve this goal, and is recommended experimentation with novel forecasting methods and the use of drills/simulations to practice large-scale, forecast-based activations.