OT_200: FAO (2025) — Impact of Disasters on Agriculture & Food Security (digital solutions for DRR)

OT_200: FAO (2025) — Impact of Disasters on Agriculture & Food Security (digital solutions for DRR)

Source

doi:10.4060/cd7185en — original publication (opens in a new tab; the file is not redistributed)

Summary

FAO’s The Impact of Disasters on Agriculture and Food Security 2025 — Digital solutions for reducing risks and impacts is the second edition of FAO’s biennial flagship series on disasters, and the first to take digital solutions as its organising theme. It quantifies the toll disasters take on agriculture (USD 3.26 trillion in agricultural losses over 1991–2023, with damages escalating from an average of USD 64 billion per year in the 1990s to USD 144 billion per year from 2010 onward) and argues that digital technologies (satellite Earth observation, AI/ML forecasting, IoT sensing, mobile connectivity, parametric insurance and early-warning systems) are shifting disaster risk management in agriculture from reactive response toward proactive, anticipatory risk reduction. For the thesis it is an authoritative source on two of the project’s dimensions: community resilience to shocks, and the role of digital connectivity in enabling remote and rural communities to withstand them. It is equally clear-eyed that technology alone is insufficient: a persistent digital divide (2.6 billion people still offline, concentrated in the rural areas where most agriculture occurs and where connectivity, electricity and digital infrastructure are weakest) and the need for human-centred, co-designed solutions embedded in strong institutions are recurring cautions against techno-solutionism.

Key thesis insights

• Disasters are a large and escalating shock to agriculture and food security, the backdrop against which community resilience matters. FAO estimates USD 3.26 trillion in agricultural losses over 33 years (1991–2023), averaging USD 99 billion per year, with annual damages rising from roughly USD 64 billion in the 1990s to USD 144 billion from 2010 onward; cereals bore the heaviest physical burden at 4.6 billion tonnes lost, followed by fruits, nuts and vegetables (2.8 billion tonnes) and meat, dairy and eggs (0.9 billion tonnes), translating into an estimated loss of about 320 kcal per person per day globally (13–16 percent of average daily energy needs) (Key Messages, p. xii; Executive Summary, pp. xvii; Foreword, p. iv). This is the authoritative global evidence base for why shock resistance and self-sufficiency at community scale are salient. OT_200
• Disaster impacts cascade beyond production through infrastructure, markets, finance and ecosystems, and they isolate remote farming communities. FAO frames modern agrifood systems as so interconnected that a disaster affecting one component triggers cascading effects “often resulting in impacts greater than the sum of its parts”; when transport networks are disrupted, “farming communities become isolated from input suppliers and output markets”, cold storage fails within hours of power outages, and financial systems (credit, insurance) seize up, while non-economic losses (cultural heritage, Indigenous crop varieties, traditional knowledge, ecosystem services) go largely unmeasured (Executive Summary, pp. xv–xvi). This systems view of cascading, connectivity- and energy-dependent vulnerability speaks directly to the thesis’s concern with remote-community resilience. OT_200
• Digital solutions enable a shift from reactive response to proactive, anticipatory risk reduction, with strong returns. FAO reports that early-warning systems “save lives and assets worth at least ten times their costs” and that “every USD 1 invested in anticipatory actions [generates] up to USD 7 in benefits in avoided agricultural losses”; in Somalia during the 2023 El Niño flooding, evidence-based early warning through the SWALIM flood model enabled anticipatory action in which “ninety percent of at-risk populations were evacuated on time”, and digital parametric insurance now reaches 9.1 million farmers across 17 countries (Foreword, p. iv; Executive Summary, pp. xix–xx). This grounds the digital-connectivity dimension of the thesis: satellite EO, AI/ML forecasting and mobile platforms as resilience infrastructure. OT_200
• The digital divide is the binding constraint, and it is an energy-and-connectivity problem concentrated in exactly the remote communities the project studies. FAO states that 2.6 billion people remain offline globally (of these, 38 percent live within mobile broadband coverage but do not use it and 5 percent lack coverage entirely), and that “rural areas where most agricultural production occurs face particular challenges, including limited connectivity, unreliable electricity and inadequate digital infrastructure”; bridging the divide “requires energy solutions, connectivity expansion, device access” (Executive Summary, pp. xx, xxii). This ties the digital-connectivity dimension to the project’s off-grid/energy self-sufficiency focus, the two are inseparable for remote communities. OT_200
• Technology alone is insufficient: human-centred, co-designed solutions embedded in enabling institutions are decisive, a caution against techno-solutionism. FAO emphasises that successful transformation requires “putting farmers and fishers at the centre — designing solutions with them, not for them”, that human-centred design “dramatically improves adoption and impact”, and that the most effective interventions “combine technological innovation with sustained capacity building, participatory design processes and integration into existing institutional frameworks”; farming communities “must be recognized and empowered as primary agents of change rather than passive beneficiaries” (Foreword, p. v; Key Messages, p. xiii; Executive Summary, pp. xxii–xxiii). This corroborates the thesis’s community-agency framing and its scepticism of technology-first solutions. OT_200

Research targets

None opened and none resolved. This is a proactively-retrieved authoritative backdrop source for the thesis’s community-resilience and digital-connectivity dimensions; it does not fill a specific named backlog gap, and no matching target exists.

Notes

• Open access, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0); downloaded directly from FAO (https://doi.org/10.4060/cd7185en), so it is an authoritative primary download.
• Reading scope. Read verbatim: Foreword (pp. iv–v), Methodology (p. vi), Key Messages (pp. xii–xiii) and Executive Summary (pp. xiv–xxiii). The 144-pp body (Part 1 Introduction, Part 2 Impact of extreme events, Part 3 Digital solutions, Part 4 Conclusion) was not read; every figure quoted above sits in those front-matter sections.
• Scope. Global assessment. No NZ-specific data and nothing that feeds an NI calculation cell. data_quality: high (authoritative FAO flagship, single-source; not verified, which the project reserves for figures corroborated by an independent source).
• The report catalogues many named FAO digital tools (Climate Risk Toolbox, GIEWS, SoilFER, WaPOR, FAMEWS, PRISM, IPC, DELTA Resilience). These are noted as thematic context only.