Dr. Alfredo Mahar Francisco Lagmay was the keynote speaker in the 10th Global Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action, organized by Anticipation Hub, on December 6, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. He presented the “Review of a Year in Forecast”¹ in line with the theme “Lessons from anticipatory action: are we getting it right?” It discusses the lessons, outcomes, experience, and evidence gathered from over years of implementing anticipatory action.
The G7 defines anticipatory action as “acting ahead of predicted hazards to prevent or reduce acute humanitarian impacts before they fully unfold. This requires pre-agreed plans that identify partners and activities, reliable early warning information, and pre-agreed financing, released predictably and rapidly when an agreed trigger-point is reached.”
Dr. Lagmay begins his speech with a recap of hazardous weather patterns across the globe, such as typhoons in the Philippines and Heat waves in India and Bangladesh over the past years. He uses Super Typhoon Rai (Local Name: Odette) from 2021 as an example of how a typhoon can rapidly intensify upon landfall and inflict significant damage.
He highlighted a repeated saying among survivors of these hazards, which is that they did expect that level of intensity, people have not experienced it before, this is the first time it happened, this is something we’ve never seen before, and it is repeated year after year and it is always unexpected. He added that “if we hear this on a yearly basis, for each and every disaster, it means we fail to anticipate [and] we must do something about that.”
Dr. Lagmay concludes his talk with the assessment that even though these events were well forecasted, using models that were known to be accurate and reliable, there are still challenges. These events are getting stronger and getting harder for modelers to predict sudden intensifications. There is a need to update existing models and there is a need to improve the science in order to anticipate better.
You can watch the full keynote speech of Dr. Lagmay here.