The threats of climate change have become fundamental for the humanitarian sector. 305 million people—or every 26th person worldwide—will need humanitarian aid in 2025 comprising a funding requirement of USD 47.4 billion. Inserting climate change-related forecast information to compute sound economic decisions is a cutting-edge consideration for global humanitarian financing institutions, such as the United Nations and the European Union, to cope with the era of climate losses and damages. Thus, we asked an interdisciplinary question: How useful is climate change-related modelling for economic decision-making in humanitarian aid resource allocation? We ran an exploratory literature review on this specific question by taking a snapshot of 41 studies on the Web of Science, assessed to which extent the utility of the modelling for economic decision-making was examined, and ranked them based on their usefulness. The review indicates that there should be more efforts to improve the forecasting ability and the transformation of information from climate modelling fluidly to economic decision-making in the humanitarian sector to be actionable for effective resource allocation. We assessed that more than half (23/41) of our dataset had limited discussion on the utility or mostly challenges of further use for utility documented, the two least valuable ranks. By extension, similar allocation issues will exist in development and climate policy, where we adapt and build resilience before assistance is needed. To curb the problem, research on integrating the different communities is proposed.

As part of the Springer Nature Content Sharing Initiative, a publicly shareable full-text access to a view-only version of the paper is available by using the following SharedIt link: https://rdcu.be/d5Vcp