This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than 80 countries face chronic drought, yet only a third have systems in place to act before a drought arrives rather than after. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, every $1 invested in anticipatory action can save up to $7 in averted losses, while also helping protect lives and livelihoods before crisis conditions take hold.
So why don't more countries do it? That question was at the core of Mitul Iyengar and Luke Fiorante's Master in Design Engineering (MDE) thesis. The MDE program, a joint degree between the Harvard John A.
Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, trains its students to diagnose a problem before solving it—to identify, in a tangle of technology, institutions and incentives, the real bottleneck, and then build a solution. For Iyengar and Fiorante, MDE '26, that meant traveling to Mozambique, home to one of the most institutionally developed government-led drought anticipatory action systems in the world. What they found helped them reframe the problem of drought preparedness entirely.
Iyengar and Fiorante traced the full path of drought preparation from forecast to decision, mapping it against more than 100 conversations with meteorologists, disaster managers, data scientists and humanitarian practitioners. "The hard part is not predicting drought," said Iyengar. "Reliable seasonal forecasts exist, and global predictive models are multiplying.
The hard part is deciding when a forecast justifies action." Act on a 20% probability of drought, and a country risks mobilizing millions for a rainy season that turns out fine, burning trust and budget. Wait for near certainty and the window to act has closed. Somewhere in between, a threshold must be determined.
That threshold is called a trigger, and setting it is one of the most consequential decisions a country makes about disaster response—equal parts statistics, politics and local expertise. The stakes are not abstract. The 2023–24 El Niño brought southern Africa its worst drought on record, affecting more than 30 million people and pushing five countries to declare national disasters.
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