Geospatial information for sustainable food systems

A rapid geospatial analysis of the flood impacts on crops in KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa in 2022

Year published: 10/02/2023

An analysis to assess the impacts of floods on cropland in KwaZulu-Natal province was performed using existing data, GIS and remote sensing. The crop mask was derived from the South African National Land Cover map (SANLC, 2018). The water mask was derived from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) water body data (2020). Sentinel 1 SAR was used to assess flood extent.  Sentinel 1 (SAR) and 2 (optical) data were used to delineate the flood extent. Regular water bodies were removed using long-term Joint Research Centre (JRC) water body data (2020), and outliers were removed using the slope based on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data. People's exposure to inundated cropland was calculated by superimposing a crop-mask extracted from the South African National Land-Cover map (SANLC, 2018), the flood extent layer, and World-population data. The statistics were computed using administrative boundaries from UNOCHA-HDX.