# **Crop losses differ locally and between farmers**

Not all farmers and plots are equally affected. Some are less likely to experience a loss even in the face of an adverse climatic event. Here we show that shock exposure and impacts can differ even between neighboring plots in the same area. We limit this analysis to droughts. Given the nature of droughts, all plots in the same small geographic cluster should be faced with the same drought shock – but the impacts of that drought can differ. Indeed, in 41% of the geographical clusters in our sample, some but not all plots report being affected by a drought (Table 12). This finding holds also for plots growing the same crops. In 31% of clusters, some but not all maize plots suffer drought losses (32% for sorghum plots and millet plots). The result extends to plots with the same crops cultivated by the same households (Table 13): for farms that record a drought shock on one of their maize plots, close to two-thirds of other maize plots on the same farm also record drought-related crop losses.

These findings suggest that disaster impacts are highly localized, consistent with the high spatial concentration that meteorological events can have.<sup>28</sup> Further, idiosyncratic factors, such as land characteristics and management practices, and happenstance play a role in determining whether and how much production is affected. We find that plot elevation is negatively associated with the likelihood of experiencing losses and the size of the losses incurred (an effect almost twice as strong for floods compared to other disasters), while smaller plots are less likely to suffer losses but record higher losses when they are affected (Tables 7 and 8). Losses on intercropped plots are 7.5 percentage points lower than on mono-cropped plots, though intercropped plots are more likely to experience a loss in the first place (+3.6 percentage points). Plots farmed in more input and technology intensive ways appear more resilient to crop losses due to adverse events.

Disaster exposure and impact also vary according to who manages the plot. Plots managed by women are more often affected by disaster losses (+2.2 percentage points) than plots managed by men and these losses are also larger on average (+4.4 percentage points; Table 10). These differences are likely because plots managed by women are endowed and farmed differently than plots managed by men, which in turn may follow from differential access to inputs and land between women and men.<sup>27</sup>

# **Aggregate data sources underestimate impacts of extreme events on crop production**

How do disaster impacts as captured in the survey data compare to estimates from other commonly used data sources? Here, we contrast the results from the survey microdata with publicly available estimates of disaster impacts from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). EM-DAT aggregates reports from UN agencies, governments, insurance companies, research institutes and the media into a global inventory of disaster impacts.<sup>29</sup> EM-DAT is the preeminent and only publicly available data source of this kind, used widely in disaster reporting and research.<sup>30</sup> We focus on two disaster types, droughts and floods, and compare two estimates: the number of people affected and the total economic damages caused in the years which the survey micro-data covers. We create aggregate figures from the micro-data using population sampling weights.

On both metrics, and for both drought and flood impacts, the micro-data estimates on average exceed the EM-DAT estimates, that is, for years in which there is information from both sources, the survey microdata find more people affected and higher damages from droughts and floods (Figure 3 and Tables 14 and 6