LocationsEmbedding risk intelligence into planning, financing and programming decisions
Getting ahead of the crisis curve
July 28, 2026
INFORM Warning is an open system of shared risk intelligence that feeds into partners’ own processes, adding insights without adding bureaucracy.
Photo: UNDP Ethiopia
Crises don’t arrive in isolation. Conflict, climate shocks, disasters, economic stress and political instability compound and accelerate one another. As a result, they are moving faster than our decision-making systems were built to handle.
The good news: we’re no longer short on data. The challenge: acting on it in time. That’s what risk anticipation is about; identifying the signs of emerging crises and embedding that intelligence into planning, financing and programming decisions before things spiral out of control.
The shift required is from static risk measurement—snapshots of vulnerability—to anticipatory analysis that tracks how quickly situations are changing and flags where near-term action will matter most. UNDP is accelerating this shift with two dynamic new initiatives.
INFORM Warning: From data to early action
INFORM Warning is built to bridge risk analysis and operational response by providing frontline decision-makers with the insights they need to act early. Drawing on the INFORM Risk and Severity indices, it forecasts multi-hazard and multi-sector trends over a 12-month horizon, revealing escalation signals before they show up in traditional reporting.
The aim is simple: give decision-makers a shared, quantified and transparent picture of how risk is moving so they can allocate resources before crises peak. The question is no longer whether we have enough data — but whether we use it effectively to act early.
INFORM Warning doesn’t replace institutional early warning systems or country analyses. It’s an open system of shared risk intelligence that feeds into partners’ own processes, adding insights without adding bureaucracy.
The question is no longer whether we have enough data—but whether we use it effectively to act early.
The Risk Anticipation Data Hub: infrastructure for anticipation
Good analysis needs good data. To that end, UNDP is building the Risk Anticipation Data Hub (RAD), an open platform that consolidates over 15,000 curated indicators across conflict, climate, disaster, socioeconomic, environmental and governance risks. Rather than siloed datasets, the RAD enables integrated, multidimensional analysis. Developed in partnership with Google, it will support natural language queries so analysts can interrogate complex data without needing to be data engineers. The RAD is built on UNDP’s Crisis Risk Dashboards, to transform organizational analytics into a digital public good available across the humanitarian and development system.
Tools are only as good as the decisions they enable. UNDP’s wider crisis risk practice links early warning signals directly to planning, programming and resource allocation choices at country level, connecting analysis to the moments when it can still buffer impacts and protect development gains.
The direction of change is clear: anticipation over response, integration over silos, risk-informed decisions over crisis-driven ones. INFORM Warning and the Risk Anticipation Data Hub are shared resources for that shift. But the bigger task is institutional—agile systems for how organizations plan, invest and act—to get ahead of the crisis curve.
INFORM Warning is funded by the European Commission and developed through the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Task Force and builds on the INFORM suite of risk indices. The Risk Anticipation Data Hub is funded by the Complex Risk Analytics Fund (CRAF’d) and by Google.org and is an open platform developed by UNDP in partnership with Google.
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