Étienne Hainzelin, adviser at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development, will describe how researchers are taking a more systemic approach to assess risk and resilience in food systems. He will detail the failure of the traditional conception of food security, which focuses on food quantities and hunger, to account for factors and threats like climate change, obesity and social behavior. Hainzelin will detail the importance of local and regional solutions to tackle such risks. In fact, food systems are widely diverse and resilience factors are very specific. Hainzelin will present new findings on pastoral cattle-raising in Africa’s Sahelian regions, which reveals that traditional pastoral methods for raising livestock have a lower carbon footprint and may help mitigate climate change. Catherine Lilian Nakalambe will present findings on how the program, NASA Harvest, contributes to the international agricultural observation program GEOGLAM that harnesses Earth observation data to better assess food security in Africa. She will discuss her team’s recent efforts to leverage machine learning algorithms and data from NASA satellites and ground systems to study crop conditions in high-risk African countries. Take Mali, for instance, which can be too dangerous or inaccessible to study with on-the-ground methods. Nakalambe will detail the impact and lessons of her group’s work in East Africa. Mario Zappacosta, senior economist and team leader of the Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) at the Food and Agriculture Organization, will discuss how its team has been developing and refining the Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS), an online, easy-to-use tool that leverages remote sensing, Earth observation data to monitor drought conditions. Zappacosta will show how ASIS has recently been tailored to meet the needs of individual countries in central America and southeast Asia, as well as to expand the system’s utility in pastoral areas.
Étienne Hainzelin, counselor to the president at CIRAD, Montpellier, France
Food Systems of the World Facing an Unprecedented Combination of Risks
Catherine Lilian Nakalambe, assistant professor of research, Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park
Integrating Earth Observations in National Agriculture Monitoring for Food Security
Mario Zappacosta, senior economist, team leader, Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N, Rome, Italy
FAO Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture (GIEWS)