Conducting risk analysis during strategic planning exercises a) expands humanitarian focus from acute and urgent needs to chronic vulnerabilities and exposure to future risks, stress, and shocks, and b) helps integrate reduction of extreme vulnerability into planning to facilitate recovery, and therefore aims at preventing new and reducing existing risk, all of which contributes decrease future risks and strengthening community resilience. 

Managing the negative effects of a crisis through humanitarian assistance and peacekeeping is costly. In the Pathway for Peace study, the United Nations and World Bank produced a business case to show that conflict prevention, besides saving millions of lives, is also economically beneficial: preventing outbreaks of violence would create net savings close to USD 5 billion per year. Similarly, a study commissioned by USAID looking at Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, Economics of Resilience to Drought, quantified the savings from earlier responses: investing in more proactive responses to avert humanitarian crises could reduce the cost to international donors by 30%, as well as also protecting billions of dollars of income and assets for those most affected.

Ensuring the Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC) is risk-sensitive is therefore beneficial and essential for both the population and the overall humanitarian community. Although humanitarian crises cannot always be prevented, the suffering associated with the impacts of various shocks, crises, and disasters can be greatly reduced through strong, proactive, and collaborative risk-informed programming.