Part 4 Disaster Risk Reduction Solutions in Agriculture
KENYA. Swarm of desert locusts in Isiolo County illustrate the gravity of the situation in East Africa. FAO is combatting this unprecedented threat by scaling up its emergency response.
©FAO/Sven Torfinn
©FAO/Sven Torfinn
Key messages
- Urgent action is required to foster the adoption of available innovations in disaster risk reduction, promoting the generation of more scalable risk management solutions, and enhancing early warning that leads to anticipatory action. Multihazard DRR approaches need to be mainstreamed into policy and decision making, with a view towards prioritizing disaster risk reduction across sectors and geographical scales.
- Technical interventions and farm-level good practices can proactively prevent and reduce risk in agriculture, thus building resilience. They are shown to perform on average 2.2 times better than previously used practices.
- The knowledge base for technical solutions that address risk in agriculture and protect livelihoods is limited. Efforts to expand and improve the base of knowledge on the returns of investment for resilience are needed for risk-informed policy and action.
- Anticipatory actions, especially when used in conjunction with early warning systems to mitigate the impact of disasters, show mostly favourable BCRs, up to 7.1 in a pool of countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
- A combined preventative control and anticipatory action approach has shown demonstrable benefits in the case of the desert locust 2020–2021 outbreak in the Horn of Africa. In this case, investment has averted losses of 4.5 million tonnes of crops and 900 million litres of milk, securing food for nearly 42 million people in the aftermath of this outbreak.
