6.1 The costs of anticipatory action
6.1.1 The cost of acting in vain
Responding to a crisis before it has fully materialised
brings with it the increased risk of acting in vain. The
cost can be high. Many interventions that might be
considered as part of an SOP will bring benefits regardless
of whether the crisis occurs or not. From this perspective,
investment is highly likely to be cost-effective regardless
of the accuracy of the forecast. Equally, some early action
activities can have very high costs, for example evacuation
of a large population. It is also important to consider the
opportunity cost of any investment, as triggering funding
for an extreme event that does not occur will divert funds
away from another crisis, and thus limit the scope for
early response elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is generally felt
that a false early response is more than offset by the cost
of a late response. DFID’s Economics of Early Response
and Disaster Resilience study (see Box 4) found that, ‘for
every early response to a correctly forecast crisis, early
responses could be made 2–6 times to crises that do not
materialise, before the cost of a single late response is met’.
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