Better Analytics for Reducing Disaster Losses and Increasing Resilience in Agriculture through FAO DataLab

Big data, data science and innovation are accelerators for agricultural transformation. The FAO Data Lab for statistical innovation was created in 2020 to promote non-official, unstructured data and geospatial data to fill data gaps to increase the timeliness and granularity of FAO statistics. The Lab developed a series of Big Data tools that analyze the impacts of extreme events on agriculture through news and social networks, now-cast food prices, produce vulnerability maps and dashboards that inter alia analyze the national pathways documents of countries. These are innovative information products for FAO based on text mining, web scraping, satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.

The Data Lab is collaborating with the loss and damage team in the Statistics Division (ESS) to complement the global level assessment of disaster impacts (as presented in the new FAO flagship report on The Impact of Disasters on Agriculture and Food Security) by validating outputs through country level analysis of agricultural losses. The Data Lab would use FVC funds to support three major endeavours.

The primary aim of the project is to develop a platform that records geo-coded hazards affecting agriculture at a country level and validate the assessment of disaster losses in collaboration with national stakeholders using agricultural and climatic indicators. To do so, the project will build country capacity and institutional capacity, and produce national level risk maps (e.g. in Vietnam and Kenya) by overlaying hazard maps of historical disaster events on crop maps to identify and monitor the effect of disasters on agricultural production. This will, in turn, support the measurement of development indicators (such as the SDGs and the C2 indicator on agricultural losses for the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction) through the construction of automated tools for calculating and recording disaster losses in agriculture.