Climate change is already increasing the intensity and variability of natural disasters, including a rise in pests and disease outbreaks. While the damage can be minimized with the right preparation, constant surveillance can be costly and it’s hard to know if the investments are worth it. A study by Harris Public Policy’s Eyal Frank, Amir Jina and their co-authors measures just how valuable early warning systems could be in limiting the damage caused by disasters.
The study evaluates one of the earliest and longest-running disaster monitoring systems: monitoring for the desert locust, one of the world’s most destructive agricultural pests. The authors first evaluate what happens when monitoring is impeded in some way, such as through armed conflicts that prevent field workers from surveying the land. This was the case during the last locust outbreak in 2019 when the Yemen civil war led to gaps in locust reporting. Reduced monitoring, combined with favorable locust breeding conditions like a lot of rain, leads to more locust swarms, the study finds. The authors use machine learning methods to construct the locust swarm migratory paths that connect conflict and rainfall in the locusts’ breeding areas to the human populations that experience the swarm outbreaks.
When locust swarms develop, they destroy the crops and pastureland in their path, leading to food shortages. With less food, the authors find that children exposed to locust swarms are more likely to experience stunted growth. Children exposed to locust swarms in utero are 18 percent more likely to experience stunted growth, and 21 percent more likely when exposed in the nine months after birth. For those children exposed before birth, their risk of dying before age five increases by 16 percent. This was the case during the Yemen civil war. Around 445,000 additional children saw their growth stunted due to locust monitoring failures, with 83 percent of impacted children living in neighboring countries.
Over the long term, a rise in people with stunted growth impacts productivity—decreasing a country’s GDP by about $25 billion per year, the study finds. In other words, the benefit of maintaining monitoring is $25 billion per year, while the monitoring system costs $37 million to $77 million per year to implement. This means that for every $1 invested, the surveillance returns $160 to $680 from improved childhood nutrition alone. There would be additional agricultural and other benefits.