Tenders Are Invited For Consultancy: El Niño 2026 Research On Anticipatory Action For Children

Tenders are invited for Consultancy: El Niño 2026 Research on Anticipatory Action for Children - Bangladesh and Somalia. Summary El Niño 2026 is highly likely to intensify extreme weather, hitting hardest in already fragile, crisis-affected contexts. Children will bear the brunt through cascading impacts on health, education, protection, and lifelong well-being, alongside significant and under-recognised loss and damage. This research will generate evidence on how these impacts unfold and how to reduce impacts and loss and damage for children, using El Niño as an entry point to inform more effective design, targeting, and scaling of preparedness, anticipatory action (AA) and adaptation. It will examine what works in AA, pinpointing effective interventions, and how systems can deliver timely, child-centred responses at scale and contribute to the evidence base for policy, financing and practice on how AA can reduce climate-related risks, losses and damages for children and strengthen resilience to future shocks. Save the Children is seeking proposals from qualified consultants to deliver this piece of research. 1. Background As of June 2026, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirms with high confidence that El Niño conditions are developing, with an estimated 80% likelihood during June-August and a greater than 90% probability of persisting into late 2026 (WMO 2026). Fuelled by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific and arriving amid record global temperatures, this event is expected to significantly alter global temperature and rainfall patterns, increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather beyond what ENSO intensity alone would suggest, including droughts, floods, and heatwaves. What makes this El Niño particularly exceptional is that it is unfolding within a context of compounding and intersecting global crises. Recurrent climate shocks have already eroded coping capacities, while ongoing conflict, displacement and fragile governance systems continue to strain public services. At the same time, global geopolitical tensions, including the Iran crisis, are driving fuel price volatility and rising fertiliser costs, further increasing food production costs and weakening already fragile food systems. These overlapping pressures are projected to push an additional 44-45 million people into food insecurity globally, with the heaviest impacts in countries already experiencing protracted crises. In such contexts, even a moderate El Niño is likely to trigger disproportionately severe and cascading impacts. For children this translates into multi-dimensional and reinforcing risks such as increased malnutrition and disease, disrupted education, reduced access to essential services, and heightened protection risks such as child labour, early marriage, and displacement. Impacts risk becoming long-term and irreversible, with consequences for childrens development, well-being and resilience. For example, the 20152016 El Niño drove widespread impacts across sectors impacted an estimated 60 million people, with around one million children requiring treatment for severe acute malnutrition, widespread school disruption, significant crop losses, large-scale displacement, and increased outbreaks of climate sensitive diseases (UNICEF, 2016). This context demands urgent early action, leveraging anticipatory approaches to reduce immediate risks while strengthening systems to absorb future shocks. This requires a shift from reactive response to anticipatory, risk-informed action. Without this shift, predictable crises like El Niño will continue to drive avoidable and compounding impacts on childrens development, wellbeing, and future resilience. Save the Children is prioritising this shift in preparation for the 2026 El Niño by scaling child-centred, locally-led AA, alongside a dedicated research effort that will generate evidence to demonstrate impacts for children and inform more effective and targeted responses assessing what works, why, for whom, and how approaches can be scaled. 2. Rationale and evidence gaps Despite a growing momentum around AA and advances in climate forecasting, critical evidence gaps continue to constrain effective responses to predictable shocks like El Niño, particularly for children. Current analysis remains largely shaped by macro-level and sectoral perspectives (e.g. food systems, GDP impacts) and rarely include child-sensitive impact analysis, which tend to examine impacts in isolation. This limits understanding of how climate shocks translate into inter-connected, real-life outcomes for children across sectors, including health, education and protection. Existing research remains heavily concentrated on health impacts, while other critical domains of childrens well-being are comparatively underexplored (Mohamed et al, 2025). While evidence increasingly shows that AA can reduce the impacts of climate shocks, humanitarian systems remain largely reactive. Much AA has been undertaken on a pilot basis, focused on supporting agency systems and preparedness rather than enabling locally-led and community owned decision-making and action. Few AA initiatives have been child-focused or integrated within development or adaptation programming. There is still limited understanding of how to operationalise AA at scale particularly for children across different contexts, sectors, and types of predictable crises, including large-scale and compound events such as El Niño. Much of the existing evidence focuses on short-term or sector-specific outcomes, with less attention given to integrated, child-centred and system-level approaches, including how early warning systems effectively translate into timely, accessible and actionable responses for children and youth. In addition, important evidence gaps remain regarding the extent to which AA can contribute to longer-term resilience and adaptive capacity. While AA is increasingly framed as a means of linking humanitarian action, climate adaptation and development, there is limited empirical evidence on how anticipatory interventions influence vulnerability reduction, adaptive capacities, and resilience outcomes over time. In parallel, climate-induced loss and damage affecting children remains insufficiently captured. This includes not only economic losses (such as damage to homes, schools, health facilities, and livelihoods) but also significant non-economic losses, including impacts on education, psychosocial well-being, identity, and social cohesion. These dimensions remain largely under-measured and underrepresented in climate policy and financing debates (UNICEF and Save the Children 2025), particularly in the context of large-scale climate phenomena such as El Niño. Collectively, these gaps create a critical blind spot, constraining the ability of policymakers, donors, practitioners, and national and local actors to anticipate risks, act early, allocate resources effectively, and design initiatives that sustainably protect children in the face of escalating climate risks. 3. Research aim and objectives This research aims to generate actionable, child-centred evidence to inform more effective AA, preparedness, adaptation and responses to the 2026/26 El Niño event1 and similar climate shocks. The research is intended to inform programming and decision-making by governments, local and national actors, NGOs, donors and multilateral organisations, while contributing to wider policy and financing discussions on child-centred AA, resilience and loss and damage. It will document the loss and damage experienced by children in the context of El Niño and cumulative shocks and examine how AA can reduce the impacts on children, as well as avert, minimise and address loss and damage. The research is designed as a phased study that reflects both the anticipated progression of El Niño impacts and the time required to assess resilience and adaptation outcomes. Phase I, conducted in 2026, will focus on the immediate impacts of El Niño on children, together with an assessment of the effectiveness of anticipatory actions and early responses in reducing risks, losses and damages. While this phase will identify potential pathways to resilience and adaptation, it is not expected to generate sufficient evidence to assess longer-term resilience outcomes directly. Subject to additional funding, Phase II extending the research beyond 2026, would enable analysis of longer-term and secondary impacts, as well as the contribution of anticipatory action to resilience, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability reduction for children, households and communities. The research seeks to answer the following specific questions: What are the immediate and emerging impacts of El Niño on children? a) What impact does El Niño have on children across the most affected sectors in the selected contexts? b) What losses and damages do children experience as a result of El Niño and compounding shocks? c) Which children and contexts are at greatest risk? d) How do El Niño impacts interact with other climate, economic and conflict-related stressors? 2. How can anticipatory action effectively reduce the impacts experienced by children (including through actions that are timely, adequately financed, appropriately targeted, inclusive, locally led, and contextually appropriate to reduce risks, losses and damages for children)? a) Which AA actions, modalities, and interventions are effective in mitigating negative impacts and loss and damage for children? b) What governance, coordination/capacity factors enable or constrain national and local actors in leading/sustaining effective anticipatory action? c) Which children benefit the most from interventions (e.g. age, gender, vulnerability)? d) What affects or constrains the effectiveness of interventions and how do these vary across contexts? Tender Link : https://reliefweb.int/job/4230116/consultancy-el-nino-2026-research-anticipatory-action-children-bangladesh-and-somalia