Natural hazards are striking agricultural systems more often and at greater cost. In 2024, recorded disasters exceeded the twenty-year average, at a direct cost of around US$242 billion (CRED, 2025). Direct damages, though, are only the costs that get counted. Once losses to health, education, livelihoods, ecosystems, and supply chains are added, the global toll rises to closer to US$ 2.3 trillion per year; UNDRR, 2025). A large share of that damage lands on farms: FAO estimates that disasters destroyed US$3.26 trillion in crop and livestock production between 1991 and 2023, an average of US$99 billion a year, or 4 percent of global agricultural GDP, with Africa bearing the heaviest relative burden at 7.4 percent (FAO, 2025). For the 3.8 billion people whose livelihoods depend on agrifood systems — especially for smallholders who rely on crops for both income and food — these losses are a recurring threat to consumption, nutrition, and long-term development.
Yet a meaningful share of these damages remains undercounted. Global inventories such as EM-DAT track major disasters well but apply reporting thresholds that exclude the smaller, more frequent shocks. These are not marginal: UNDRR reports an analysis of 104 countries finding that small and medium, localized and frequent disasters caused 68 percent of all economic losses between 2005 and 2017. In agriculture the same gap shows up directly: comparing survey microdata against EM-DAT, recent research finds that surveys capture USD 5.1 billion more in drought and flood damage across the same countries and years, affecting over four times as many people (Wollburg et al., 2024).
