Key messages

  • Defined as serious disruptions to the functioning of a community or society, disasters are producing unprecedented levels of damage and loss in agriculture around the world. Their increasing severity and frequency, from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year in the past 20 years, affect agrifood systems across multiple dimensions, compromising food security and undermining the sustainability of the agriculture sector.
  • Data for describing the impact of disasters on agriculture and agrifood systems is partial and inconsistent, especially in the fisheries and aquaculture and forestry subsectors. There is an urgent need for improving data collection tools and systems to support evidence-based policies, practices and solutions for risk reduction and resilience building in agriculture. Despite these limitations, this new flagship report presents the first ever global-level estimation of the impact of disasters on agriculture.
  • Over the last 30 years, an estimated USD 3.8 trillion worth of crops and livestock production has been lost due to disaster events, corresponding to an average loss of USD 123 billion per year, or 5 percent of annual global agricultural GDP. In relative terms, the total amount of losses over 30 years is approximately equivalent to Brazil’s GDP in 2022.
  • Over the last 30 years, disasters inflicted the highest relative losses on lower- and lower-middle-income countries, ranging between 10 and 15 percent of their total agricultural GDP, respectively. Disasters also had a significant impact on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), causing them to lose nearly 7 percent of their agricultural GDP.
  • Understanding interconnected and systemic risks and underlying disaster risk drivers is essential to build resilient agrifood systems. Climate change, pandemics, epidemics and armed conflict are all affecting agricultural production, value chains and food security. Therefore, gaining a better understanding of their interactions is essential for developing a comprehensive view of today’s risk landscape.
  • Research aimed at deciphering the impact of climate change on agriculture indicates that climate change is likely to lead to more frequent yield anomalies and a decrease in agricultural production. Global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing armed conflicts have impacted agricultural production as well as input and output markets, resulting in negative effects in the wider agrifood system and for overall food security.
  • Proactive and timely interventions can build resilience by preventing and reducing risks in agriculture. The available information indicates that there are quantifiable benefits to investing in farm-level disaster risk reduction (DRR) good practices. Anticipatory actions undertaken in several countries through early warning systems, such as combined preventative control against the desert locust outbreak in the Horn of Africa during 2020–2021, demonstrated favourable benefit to cost ratios for investing in disaster prevention and resilience.
  • Urgent action is needed to prioritize the integration of multisectoral and multihazard disaster risk reduction strategies into agricultural policies and programmes. This can be achieved by enhancing the available evidence, fostering the adoption of available innovations, facilitating the creation of more scalable farm-level risk management solutions, and strengthening early warning systems that lead to anticipatory action.

back to top
homepage