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As a major El Niño event threatens to increase extreme weather, Save the Children is launching a child-focused €4.5 million regional initiative funded by the European Union to save lives ahead of climate-fueled emergencies in Southeast Asia.
Working with partners and governments, the programme will help communities, schools, and local authorities across Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam turn early warnings into early action, protecting children and families before floods, storms, and other extreme weather events become disasters.
The same extreme weather can strike multiple countries, yet each country has separate warning systems and issues its own alerts. The programme will bring the four countries together to coordinate and harmonise emergency warnings, ensuring that affected communities receive timely, consistent, life-saving information before extreme weather strikes.
As climate change drives more frequent and severe extreme weather events, children will suffer the most. In the coming year, the combination of El Niño and global warming will cause more extreme temperatures, more dangerous droughts and more devastating floods across the region, threatening to upend lives and livelihoods – and underscoring the urgent need for strengthened early warning systems that reach at risk communities at speed and enable them to act immediately.
Floods triggered by increased rainfall are devastating children’s lives in Southeast Asia, with hundreds of thousands of children driven from their homes and classrooms by floods in 2025.
Back-to-back typhoons in Vietnam affected nearly 3 million people across the country, Thailand was impacted by some of the worst flooding in a generation and in Laos and Cambodia, families were forced to flee rising water levels triggered by storms, causing terror for children.
Despite the growing numbers of people affected by catastrophic weather events, early warnings are still not reaching the ‘last mile’ and the most vulnerable, especially children. Cambodia has a national anticipatory action (AA) strategy, but only just over half of provincial officials are aware of it, according to Save the Children research, and in Laos, only a quarter of sub-national AA groups are active, with nine out of 10 district offices citing a lack of funding and staff.
Building on Save the Children’s decades of work in the four countries and partnership with the European Union in Asia, the initiative will bring together child-centred disaster risk reduction - including child-friendly early warnings - school and community preparedness, child protection and strengthening of local systems.
Arshad Malik, Asia Regional Director, Save the Children said:
“Climate driven disasters don't respect borders, so this programme is deliberately regional and will save lives by ensuring that warnings actually reach the most vulnerable, especially children, in time to act quickly and save lives.
“The programme is the foundation for Save the Children in Asia’s innovative multi-country initiative to connect and strengthen child-centred community preparedness, anticipatory action, early warning systems, schools, and disaster risk governance across the region.
“These strengthened, integrated systems will be locally led, affordable, and built to last. They will also generate evidence by establishing ways of working that can be scaled up by governments and regional organisations.”
The two-year programme will operate in four countries – Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand – across nine provinces, 20 districts and 70 communities. It aims to ensure that more than 223,000 people are covered by early action and contingency plans, 56,000 are covered by a functional early warning system and local officials receive training and support. The programme also includes a crisis modifier, enabling flexible funding to be released as soon as pre-agreed triggers are met.
Save the Children will partner with the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre and local organisations across all four countries. It will also link national disaster risk management authorities and hydro-met agencies with key regional institutions - the Mekong River Commission (MRC), ASEAN's AHA Centre, ATCSW and the ASEAN Secretariat - to ensure that warnings, tools and standards are harmonised across borders rather than stopping at each frontier.
The programme will also support the priorities of the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER) by providing evidence of community-tested early warnings and anticipatory action.
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