A new perspective piece in iScience calls for anticipatory action (AA) frameworks to move beyond a single-hazard focus and account for multiple, interacting risks.

Tesse de Boer and co-authors including Evan Easton-Calabria point to mounting evidence that hydro-meteorological hazards increasingly intersect with conflict and economic shocks.

Drawing on a desk review of 261 AA frameworks activated in 2023 and 2024 and 17 key-informant interviews, the authors identify four challenges in advancing multi-risk (MR) approaches to AA:

…continued emphasis on hydro-meteorological over societal risks, limited methods that balance analytical complexity with usability, difficulties in identifying early actions across cascading events, and financing structures that remain too rigid for evolving risk contexts.

The authors recommend aligning advances in MR analysis with practitioner insights to make AA more adaptive, inclusive, and context-specific, and emphasize the need for flexible financing and stronger links between AA, preparedness, and mitigation.

Read the open-access article in iScience