Early Warnings for All (EW4All) is the UN's global early warning initiative for the implementation of climate adaptation, launched in November 2022 at the COP27 meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Working together with the UN and partners, our aim is to ensure that that everyone on earth is protected by early warnings by 2027.

The IFRC is contributing to three of the four pillars of the initiative's executive action plan, leading on the ‘preparedness to respond' pillar. We are turning this plan into action, by:

• Providing community level information on vulnerabilities and capacity
• Developing Early Action Protocols to ensure National Societies' rapid response to alerts and community needs
• Developing a standard set of actionable messages for each country that can be included in official alerts. This work is done in partnership with governments, academia, civil society and community members
• Ensuring alerts reach ‘last mile’ communities – amplifying alerts with communities, notifying people who aren’t digitally connected, making sure alerts are trusted and understood.
• Organizing, training and testing community response teams to understand risks and respond appropriately
• Providing feedback on how community members use alerts - for instance whether they are received, trusted, understood, and whether they led to action

You can read more about the IFRC's involvement in this initiative in this press release from March 2023. And many of the other initiatives outlined on this page are contributing to our work in EW4All.

Emergency alerts issued by national authorities don’t always reach everyone at risk. We’re supporting Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers to actively monitor and issue timely alerts about risks to their local communities. By doing so, they can ensure even hard-to-reach communities are informed and prepared before a disaster strikes.

We have produced guiding principles and a training toolkit for National Societies and non-governmental organizations to create new, or improve existing, community early warning systems in their countries. National Societies can also access additional resources on Fednet.

Anticipatory action refers to actions we can take before a predicted hazard hits to prevent or reduce its potential impacts. Examples of these actions include early evacuation, reinforcing homes, distributing health protection kits, setting up mobile cooling centres and distributing cash.

Read our anticipatory action brochure for an introduction to what anticipatory action is, how it works and why it's important. Learn about different examples of anticipatory action here and read our Operational Framework for Anticipatory Action 2021-2025 to see how we plan to scale up this work across our network in the coming years.

You can also visit the Anticipation Hub website: our one-stop-shop for sharing knowledge, learning, guidance, and advocacy messaging around anticipatory action. The Hub aims to support practitioners, scientists and policy-makers to do more anticipatory action, do it better and do it together—within and beyond the humanitarian sector.

Forecast-based financing is a way of getting humanitarian funding to communities before a disaster strikes. It uses weather forecasts and risk analysis to activate the release of funding ahead of extreme weather events. The overall goal is to prevent natural hazards from becoming disasters and reduce human suffering.

The IFRC has pioneered and improved our forecast-based financing approach since 2014. In 2018 we launched Forecast-based Action by the Disaster Response Emergency Fund, now known as the Anticipatory Pillar—our dedicated funding mechanism that helps National Societies take early action before disasters strike.

Hosted by the IFRC, the Risk-informed Early Action Partnership (REAP) aims to make one billion people safer from disasters by 2025 by:

• Increasing funding for early action
• Improving early warning systems
• Improving the ability of local responders to take early action

Find out more on the REAP website

Our WhatNow service enables National Societies to adapt our Public Awareness and Public Education (PAPE) for disaster risk reduction key messages to their local risks, languages and contexts.

They can then upload them to a global portal to enable partners—such as Google or regional, national and local media companies—to broadcast them alongside hazard alerts.

Find out more on the WhatNow service website.

We are currently developing the IFRC Alert Hub, a free online source that brings together published emergency alerts from national, regional and local alerting authorities.

The platform will be unique in its focus on multi-hazard emergency alerts (from national to local levels) which are free to use and centralized in one place, bringing us one step closer to ensuring that emergency alerts reach everyone at risk. 

We will also work to integrate public messages about how to prepare and reduce risks in tandem with government alerts.