According to recent research, floods can compromise the food security of more than 5.6 million people in different African countries. The project is taking place at a time when floods have also damaged major portions of the European Union and the United States, as well as Pakistan, India, and other countries.
The study “The impact of flooding on food security across Africa” that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by former graduate student at the New York University Center for Data Science Connor Reed, “shows that floods can impact food security both immediately and in the months after the flood event.” “In several of the flood events we evaluated, there was significant damage to infrastructure, croplands, and animals, compromising food production and access, as well as water supplies and sanitation, which are also essential to food security,” the report reads.
In recent years, record rainfall and flooding have drawn more attention to the effects on the impacted people and highlighted the need for an urgent understanding of the extent of their destruction, particularly in terms of food demands.
Reed, Sonali Shukla McDermid, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at NYU, and other colleagues studied more than a dozen nations in western, eastern, and southern Africa, including Nigeria, Niger, Kenya, Mozambique, and Malawi, among others, to gain an in-depth understanding of the effects of flood disasters.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale is a separate measure of food insecurity that is used by the USAID-created Famine Early Warning System. The researchers looked at how it was affected by key flood characteristics over the study period (2009–2020), including location, duration, and extent. IPC uses a five-point scale to assess the level of food insecurity: low food security (IPC 1), stressed (IPC 2), emergency (IPC 3), crisis (IPC 4), and famine (IPC 5). The researchers used panel studies to quantify the effects of floods over long periods of time.
The findings indicated that between 2009 and 2020, flooding had a negative impact on food security for almost 12% of the people who were food insecure in the study locations. According to the time period and regional scale, these impacts included negative increases in food insecurity, as was to be predicted, but there were also some positive effects that reduced food insecurity.
According to study co-author Weston Anderson, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, “our results suggest that floods can have opposing effects on food security at different spatial scales, particularly at time periods after they occur.” “In a particular year, excess precipitation may instantly result in floods that obliterate crops in a specific location while also being coupled with favorable growth conditions that increase crop production on a national scale.”
The findings emphasize the significance of better data collection on flood and food security for disaster response and climate adaptation planning, but the researchers caution that any beneficial effects from floods are not assured.
What we emphasize in particular is that flooding affects food security in various ways and at various temporal and spatial scales. However, there hasn’t been a lot of research done on it, so it’s not well understood. It is imperative to increase knowledge of how, when, and where floods affect food security, especially for decision-makers in rural areas that are vulnerable to flooding and contribute to regional and global food supplies.
Notably, the findings also showed that, as opposed to consistently across entire nations, flooding had a major impact on food security in highly localized and diverse ways. According to the researchers, this suggests that the link between flooding and food security isn’t caused by country-wide changes (like changes in food prices) but by local effects on food production (like the loss of subsistence crops), food access (like the destruction of infrastructure or the loss of a direct source of income), and/or food use (like the loss of a direct source of income).
For the humanitarian community, understanding how floods affect food security is becoming increasingly important, according to co-author Andrew Kruczkiewicz of Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society. The results of the study help the humanitarian community decide which measures, like anticipatory, preparedness, and reaction, to prioritize — or not prioritize — in the areas we looked at.
This study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, “illustrates how cross-disciplinary teams can yield exponential increases in our understanding of social challenges,” says Jeffrey Mantz, a program director for the organization. Although we already knew that flooding has downstream effects, our study defines and quantifies those effects in ways that will be very helpful to individuals and communities who are dealing with more and more severe weather occurrences.
Dominy Gallo, a student at Columbia, Jennifer Nakamura and Richard Seager, both of whom work at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and Richard Seager are also authors of the work.
