Rome, Italy – At the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters, recent engagements highlighted efforts to translate conflict forecasts into actionable triggers for anticipatory response, particularly in the context of parametric insurance.
At the “Leveraging Evidence for Effective Anticipatory Action” conference on 20 April, VIEWS’ Simon Polichinel von der Maase presented preliminary research developed in the context of the VIEWS-FAO collaboration supporting the Financing for Shock-Driven Food Crises Facility (FSFC). The talk introduced a method for estimating conflict return periods. By decomposing conflict time series into long-term trends, short-term shocks, and noise, the approach identifies escalation episodes – helping answer how often conflicts of a given magnitude occur and how long they persist.
Unlike discrete hazards such as earthquakes or floods, conflict is continuous and diffuse, making return periods difficult to define. Extending the method into a spatio-temporal risk framework to extract discrete conflict episodes will be the next step.
The conference followed a visit to FAO headquarters on 14 April, where discussions with core partners focused on the current state of the joint work. A broader presentation also introduced colleagues outside of the immediate collaboration to the system’s forecasting pipeline, data, and modeling framework, supporting wider uptake of conflict risk analytics in food security and crisis response.
Together, these engagements underscore the growing role of data-driven forecasting in anticipatory action – and the need to bridge methodological innovation with operational decision-making.