Part 1 Introduction
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Agriculture at the crossroads of crisis and innovation
The past two years have witnessed an unprecedented convergence of disasters that have profoundly impacted global agriculture, underscoring both the vulnerability of food production to multiple hazards and the urgent need for transformative approaches to disaster risk reduction. From devastating droughts that have gripped entire continents to catastrophic floods that have swept away decades of agricultural development, from transboundary pest outbreaks that have threatened food security across regions to conflicts that have disrupted global food supply chains, the agricultural sector has faced a relentless succession of shocks that have tested the limits of existing risk management approaches.
The year 2023 began with the continuation of a severe multiyear drought across the Horn of Africa, affecting over 36 million people and decimating livestock herds that represent the primary source of livelihoods for pastoral communities. In Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, consecutive failed rainy seasons led to the death of over 13 million livestock, destroying the economic foundation of millions of households and pushing communities to the brink of famine.1 The impact of the drought extended beyond immediate livestock mortality to disrupt entire pastoral systems, as traditional migration routes became untenable, water sources dried up and rangeland degradation accelerated beyond the recovery capacity of natural systems.
Simultaneously, South America experienced one of its worst droughts in recent history, with the Amazon basin recording its lowest water levels in over a century. The drought devastated crop production across Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, with soybean and corn yields falling by up to 40 percent in some regions.2 The effects rippled through global commodity markets, contributing to food price inflation and affecting food security far beyond the directly impacted areas. The drought also exacerbated forest fire risks, with millions of hectares of forest and agricultural land burning across the continent, releasing massive amounts of carbon and destroying the biodiversity that underpins agricultural sustainability.
Contrasting with these drought emergencies, 2023 also witnessed devastating floods across multiple regions. In Pakistan, monsoon floods affected over 9 million people and destroyed 849 000 hectares of crops, coming just one year after the catastrophic 2022 floods from which the country was still recovering.3 The consecutive flooding events have fundamentally altered Pakistan’s agricultural landscape, with soil erosion, salinization and infrastructure destruction creating long-term challenges for agricultural recovery. In Libya, Storm Daniel caused catastrophic flooding that not only resulted in thousands of deaths but also destroyed agricultural infrastructure and contaminated productive lands with debris and pollutants that will affect farming for years to come.4
The El Niño phenomenon that emerged in mid-2023 brought additional challenges to global agriculture, disrupting weather patterns across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic basins. In Southern Africa, El Niño-induced drought affected over 20 million people across Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, with maize production falling by up to 70 percent in some areas.5 The reduced harvests forced countries to declare states of disaster and appeal for international assistance to prevent widespread hunger. Meanwhile, El Niño brought excessive rainfall to East Africa, causing flooding that destroyed crops and infrastructure in areas still recovering from consecutive years of drought, demonstrating the growing volatility and extremes increasingly characterizing climate-affected agrifood systems.
The year 2024 has continued this pattern of devastating disasters in agriculture. Tropical Storm Filipo came just one year after Cyclone Freddy – the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record – traversed the Indian Ocean for over five weeks and ravaged several parts of Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi. The continuous cycle of disaster losses continued after the cyclone had already destroyed over 1.2 million hectares of crops, with smallholder farmers losing not only their current harvest but also their seed stocks for future planting seasons.6 The storm’s unprecedented duration and intensity overwhelmed coping mechanisms, as communities that might normally recover from a single cyclone impact found themselves facing repeated battering that depleted their resilience.
Biological hazards have added another layer of complexity to the disaster landscape. The continuing spread of ASF across Asia and into new regions has devastated pig populations, with Viet Nam, the Philippines and China reporting millions of culled animals.7 The impact of the disease extends beyond direct livestock losses to disrupt entire value chains, affect feed crop demand and alter global protein markets. Similarly, the fall armyworm (FAW) continues its relentless spread, with new invasions reported in previously unaffected regions and evolved resistance to control measures posing challenges to management strategies in areas where the pest has become established.
The locust situation, while improved from the 2019–2021 crisis, remains precarious, with favourable breeding conditions in traditional recession areas threatening new upsurges.8 Countries across the Sahel, Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia maintain vigilant surveillance, knowing that a failure to detect and control initial populations could lead to another devastating regional outbreak. The resources required for this continuous surveillance strain national budgets, which are already stretched by multiple concurrent disasters.
Forest fires have emerged as an increasingly severe threat to agriculture, with 2024 and 2025 witnessing record-breaking fire seasons across multiple continents. In Canada, 3.24 million hectares had already burned by June 2025. This is only rivalled by the record-breaking 18 million hectares that burned in 2023, with smoke plumes affecting air quality and agricultural productivity even thousands of kilometres away.9 The fires destroyed timber resources, affected wildlife populations that provide ecosystem services to agriculture and created long-term soil degradation in burned areas. In the Mediterranean region, intense heat waves combined with drought conditions create explosive fire conditions that destroy olive groves, vineyards and other agricultural lands that have been cultivated for centuries.10
The fisheries and aquaculture sectors have faced their own set of catastrophic challenges. Marine heatwaves have become more frequent and intense, with the Mediterranean Sea experiencing its highest recorded temperatures in 2024.11 These thermal anomalies have disrupted fish populations, caused mass mortality events in aquaculture facilities, and altered the distribution of species in ways that affect both commercial and subsistence fishing communities. In Peru, the warming associated with El Niño caused a 50 percent reduction in anchoveta catches, the world’s largest single-species fishery, affecting global fishmeal supplies and the aquaculture industry that depends on them.12
Conflicts and geopolitical tensions have added another dimension to how disasters affect agriculture. The ongoing conflict in the Sudan has displaced millions of farmers during critical planting seasons, destroyed irrigation infrastructure, and disrupted seed and fertilizer supply chains. The compounding effects of conflict and climate extremes have created conditions where existing coping mechanisms are failing, and humanitarian assistance is struggling to reach affected populations. Similarly, conflicts in the Sahel region have prevented farmers from accessing their fields, disrupted transhumance routes for pastoralists and created conditions where agricultural production collapses even in areas with favourable weather conditions.13
The cumulative impact of these disasters over the past two years has exposed fundamental vulnerabilities in global agrifood systems, while highlighting the inadequacy of current approaches to disaster risk management. The increasing frequency, intensity, and complexity of disasters is overwhelming response capacities that were originally designed for less severe and less frequent events. The simultaneous occurrence of multiple hazards creates compound impacts that exceed the sum of individual effects, while the rapid succession of disasters prevents recovery between events, leading to a progressive erosion of resilience.
Yet alongside these mounting challenges, the past two years have also witnessed remarkable advances in digital technologies that offer new possibilities for understanding, predicting, and managing disaster risks and impacts in agriculture and agrifood systems. The proliferation of satellite technology with new constellations that provide daily high-resolution imagery of the globe has transformed our ability to monitor agricultural conditions in near-real time. AI and ML algorithms can now process vast amounts of data to detect subtle patterns that indicate emerging risks – from early signs of pest outbreaks to predictions of yield impacts from weather anomalies.
The expansion of mobile network coverage and the declining cost of smart devices have brought digital connectivity to previously isolated rural communities, opening new channels for delivering information, services and support to farmers. Digital platforms that combine weather forecasts, agronomic advice, market information and financial services are empowering farmers with tools that were unimaginable just a decade ago. Despite the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, it accelerated digital adoption and demonstrated the potential for remote sensing, digital payments and virtual extension services to maintain agricultural support even when physical movement is restricted.
Innovations in financial technology have made crop insurance accessible to millions of smallholder farmers through parametric products that use satellite data and weather indices to trigger automatic payouts. Blockchain technology promises to enhance supply chain transparency and enable new forms of collective action for risk management. IoT sensors deployed in fields, storage facilities, and transportation systems generate continuous streams of data that enable precision management and early problem detection. Drone technology has moved from experimental to operational use, providing affordable high-resolution monitoring and even direct intervention capabilities for pest control and input application.
However, the potential of these technological advances remains largely unrealized due to persistent challenges in the implementation, adoption and integration into existing systems. The digital divide continues to exclude many of the most vulnerable agricultural communities from accessing these innovations. Questions of data ownership, privacy and control raise concerns about whether digital transformation will empower farmers or create new forms of dependency. The fragmentation of digital initiatives and lack of interoperability between platforms limit their collective impact, while the focus on technological solutions sometimes obscures the need to address underlying structural vulnerabilities.
This report addresses these critical challenges by providing a comprehensive analysis of disaster impacts on agriculture and the role of digital innovations in transforming disaster risk management. Part 2 offers a systematic examination of how disasters affect agriculture, moving beyond production losses to explore the complex pathways through which impacts cascade through infrastructure, markets, financial systems and ecosystem services. It highlights the importance of considering non-economic impacts, vulnerabilities of men and women, differentiated ecosystem effects, and long-term consequences that are difficult to measure but may be equally or more important for understanding total disaster impacts.
The analysis in Part 2 demonstrates that disaster impacts in agrifood systems extend far beyond the immediate and visible destruction of crops and livestock. Disasters disrupt the intricate web of relationships that sustain agriculture, from the soil microbiomes that maintain fertility to the social networks that enable collective action for risk management. The examination of slow-onset disasters reveals how gradual changes can cause greater cumulative damage than sudden events, yet often fall below the threshold for triggering response mechanisms. The exploration of climate as a risk amplifier shows how shifting baselines and increasing variability create new patterns of risk that challenge traditional knowledge and management systems.
The examination of current monitoring tools – including the Sendai Framework Monitor and Post-Disaster Needs Assessments – reveals both their value in standardizing impact measurement and their limitations in capturing the full spectrum of disaster consequences. The analysis shows how data gaps, reporting inconsistencies, and methodological constraints create an incomplete picture that can misguide policy and investment decisions.
Hazard Types Considered in Part 2
- HYDROMETEOROLOGICAL:
Flood, drought, cyclone, storms, extreme temperatures, marine heatwave
- GEOPHYSICAL:
Earthquake, volcanic activity, tsunami, landslide
- BIOLOGICAL:
Plant and animal pest and disease, Insect infestation
- ENVIRONMENTAL:
Wildfire and forest fire
Finally, Part 2 also provides a quantitative assessment of global losses in crop and livestock production, utilizing counterfactual methodologies that combine production data with disaster event records to estimate impacts across 191 agricultural commodities in over 200 countries and territories. The results reveal not only the staggering scale of losses – over USD 3.26 trillion over 33 years – but also important patterns in how disasters affect different regions, income groups and agricultural subsectors. The nutritional analysis adds a crucial dimension by showing how production losses translate into losses of essential nutrients, with implications for public health and human development that extend beyond economic metrics. The special attention to fisheries and aquaculture highlights how entire subsectors remain largely invisible in disaster assessments, despite their crucial importance for food security and livelihoods.
Part 3 pivots from analysing conceptual gaps and agricultural losses to exploring solutions, providing a comprehensive examination of how digital technologies are transforming disaster risk management in the agriculture sector. It begins by establishing the landscape of digital innovations, from remote sensing and AI to mobile applications and blockchain, showing how these technologies address specific challenges in risk assessment, early warning, response and recovery. The analysis moves beyond technical capabilities to examine implementation experiences, revealing both successes and failures that provide crucial lessons for scaling digital solutions.
The exploration of digital tools for risk knowledge and monitoring demonstrates how advances in data collection, processing and visualization are revolutionizing how we understand agricultural risks. Platforms that integrate climate data, soil information, pest and disease surveillance, and market intelligence provide decision-makers with unprecedented capabilities for evidence-based planning and response. The examination of digital advisory services shows how mobile technologies are democratizing access to agricultural knowledge, while delivering personalized recommendations that help farmers optimize production while managing risks.
Part 3 provides a detailed analysis of how digital innovations enable the shift from reactive response to proactive prevention and anticipatory action. Early-warning systems that combine multiple data sources with sophisticated predictive models can now provide alerts weeks or even months before disasters strike, creating windows of opportunity for proactive disaster risk reduction action. Integrating early warning with pre-arranged finance and pre-agreed anticipatory action protocols demonstrates how technology can catalyse systemic changes in disaster risk management. Case studies from Somalia, Rwanda, the Sudan, and other countries illustrate both the potential and the challenges of implementing these approaches at scale.
The examination of digital financial services reveals how technology is revolutionizing risk transfer and social protection in agriculture. Mobile money platforms enable rapid delivery of assistance to disaster-affected populations, while parametric insurance products make crop insurance accessible to farmers previously excluded from existing indemnity-based systems. The analysis shows how bundling insurance with advisory services and input provision creates synergies that enhance both risk protection and productivity improvement.
Part 3 concludes by examining the enabling conditions necessary for successful digital transformation in agricultural disaster risk management. It explores requirements for digital infrastructure, data governance frameworks, institutional coordination mechanisms and human capacity development. The analysis of implementation pathways draws lessons from country experiences to identify success factors and common pitfalls. The emphasis on human-centred design principles highlights how technological solutions must be grounded in understanding user needs, capabilities, and contexts to achieve sustainable adoption and impact.
The synthesis of findings from Parts 2 and 3 reveals a fundamental insight: understanding the full complexity of disaster impacts is a prerequisite to developing effective solutions, while digital innovations provide unprecedented capabilities for both assessment and response. The report demonstrates that the transformation of agricultural disaster risk management requires not just technological innovation, but systemic changes in how we conceptualize, measure and respond to agricultural risks. It shows that digital solutions achieve the greatest impact when they address the gaps and limitations identified through comprehensive impact assessment, creating a virtuous cycle where a better understanding enables better response, ultimately generating better data for continuous improvement.
This report comes at a critical moment when the convergence of escalating disaster risks and transformative digital capabilities is creating both urgency and opportunity for fundamental change. The window for building agrifood systems capable of feeding a growing global population while adapting to climate shocks is narrowing rapidly. Yet the tools, knowledge, and examples of success documented in this report demonstrate that transformation is possible when vision aligns with action and resources match ambition. By providing a comprehensive analysis of both challenges and solutions, this report aims to inform and inspire the collective action necessary to build resilient agrifood systems that can thrive despite mounting disaster risks.
The journey toward agricultural resilience in an era of mounting disasters is complex and demanding, but it is a necessity, not a choice. The lives and livelihoods of billions depend on our collective ability to transform how we understand and manage agricultural risks. This report provides a roadmap for that transformation, grounded in evidence, inspired by innovation, and focused on the ultimate goal of ensuring food security, prosperity and achieving better nutrition for all. The time for incremental adjustments has passed; what is needed now is transformative action that matches the scale and urgency of the challenge. Through the systematic analysis of disaster impacts and the strategic deployment of digital innovations that shape resilience solutions and interventions on the ground, we can build agrifood systems that not only survive but thrive in an uncertain future.
