# Introduction

In 2022, natural disasters led to over $220 billion in economic losses, affecting 185 million people.<sup>1</sup> Losses in 2023 are on track to exceed the previous year’s<sup>2</sup> and large-scale disasters, such as record extreme heatwaves, the violent monsoon in India, and a prolonged severe drought in the Horn of Africa have received widespread media and public attention.<sup>3–6</sup> The frequency and intensity of disasters and their impacts has increased over the last decades, a trend that is set to continue, and likely accelerate, due to climate change and global warming.<sup>7–12</sup> Reporting on disaster impacts relies predominantly on macro statistics. A key data source is the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), which is a publicly available global inventory of disaster impacts that is widely used in media,<sup>13</sup> research,<sup>14</sup> and policy reports, including recently the World Bank’s 2023 ‘Atlas of the Sustainable Development Goals’ and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2021 report on ‘The impact of disasters and crises on agriculture and food security.’<sup>15,16</sup> Here, we offer a different approach to studying disaster impacts, based on survey micro-data. We quantify the value of crop production losses due to adverse climatic events on more than 120,000 fields across six African countries and study the impacts of these events on African agriculture, rural populations, and the national economies. Agriculture is a key sector, on which many households in the region depend for their livelihoods, especially the poor and rural households.<sup>17</sup> Agriculture dependent households are thought to be particularly at risk of suffering the impacts of climate change and adverse shocks. Climate change and natural disasters are expected to be especially severe in rural areas in this region,<sup>18,19</sup> while smallholder agricultural production remains predominantly rainfed and the adoption of drought or heat resistant seeds or other such climate-smart technologies is limited.<sup>20</sup> We document that crop losses due to adverse shocks are common and costly both to individual farm households and to the economy at large, and that farmers often suffer multiple shocks in the same season. Taken together, production losses have a substantial aggregate impact. Importantly, these events and their impacts are underreported or undetected in common macro data sources for disaster reporting, such as EM-DAT.

Our analysis of micro-data offers an important complementary perspective to analyses based on aggregate statistics derived from disaster inventories. Aggregate statistics are critical to the study of disaster impacts, providing annual data at a global scale. They are less well-suited to capture the differential impacts of disasters on different population groups, especially poor and vulnerable people.<sup>21–</sup> 23 This is because they account primarily for damages to assets and losses in agricultural production whose value is greater and better documented among richer households and in richer countries. For instance, according to the most recent estimates of EM-DAT, about 70% of economic losses due to disasters occurred in the Americas, compared to just under 4% in Africa.<sup>24</sup> A recent study using the same data source concluded that disaster impacts do not affect poor people as much as the general population.<sup>25</sup> In contrast, evidence from survey micro-data suggests that poorer households and individuals are more exposed and less resilient to adverse climatic and environmental shocks and suffer disproportionately greater well-being losses than better-off households.<sup>18,22,26</sup> Our analysis suggests that production losses due to adverse climatic events are meaningful not only for the well-being of low-income households individually but, because of how many households are affected, they are significant also for the whole economies of our study countries and on a global scale.

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