Fighting Climate-Related Food Insecurity
The World Food Programme’s Amit Wadhwa combines public health, anthropology, and computer science to help the United Nations combat climate-born disasters
It was autumn of 2017 when Amit Wadhwa first heard of dzud—something that the people of Mongolia were all too familiar with. For the one-third of Mongolians who depend on livestock for their income, dzud means hardship. In the East Asian country, dzud is the term for an extraordinarily harsh winter that blankets the ground with thick snow, covering animals’ food and leaving them starving. Seven winters earlier, dzud (pronounced “zood”) had killed more than 8 million livestock in the region, damaging a major national food source and setting off a mass migration of nomadic herders to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, where many were unable to find work.
A Bangkok-stationed global manager at the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP), Wadhwa (CAS’99) had flown into Mongolia with investigators from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to assess the risk of another catastrophic dzud. Satellite data showed a baking summer drought—often a precursor to dzud. After meeting with local officials and partners, Wadhwa and his colleagues agreed that action was needed to mitigate the potential impact of a disastrous winter. The FAO moved quickly, providing herders with livestock kits that included supplementary vitamins and other essentials.
“Herder households received assistance before their livestock potentially perished—enabling them to purchase key inputs like hay and fodder, to build shelters to protect their animals, or to simply set something aside to provide a buffer if things got bad,” says Wadhwa, an expert on using technology and data to analyze climate hazards.
The outcome persuaded Wadhwa of the benefits of expanding a monitoring technology he had helped to pioneer in Indonesia to forecast drought. Platform for Real-time Impact and Situation Monitoring, or PRISM, pulls weather data from satellites and other remote sensors, including rain gauges and ground stations, to highlight potential climate hazards and their impact on the availability of food. It outputs the information to an easy-to-read, map-based dashboard indicating where and when trouble may arrive, and how many people will be put at risk. That information can then be used by the UN, as well as governments, disaster management authorities, and meteorological offices, to monitor risks and prioritize responses to climate-born disasters. The WFP, which feeds more than 100 million people worldwide and operates in 80 countries, has used PRISM not only in Mongolia for monitoring dzud, but to review the risk of floods in Sri Lanka and Cambodia.
Wadhwa’s journey to his current mission began in 1999. A biological anthropology major at CAS, he enrolled in Introduction to Computing, “driven by my interest in technology in general and how humans interact with systems.” That experience led to a first job writing code at an agency, then a technology integration consultant position at Deloitte. But he soon began thinking about careers that would provide more public-spirited fulfillment and enrolled in a master’s in public health. It was during his studies that Wadhwa first learned about the United Nation’s nascent effort to use statistics and geographic data systems to identify areas where food was scarce.
He signed on to a summer internship with the FAO in Rome, Italy, which eventually led him to the WFP’s Vulnerability Analysis & Mapping Unit.
“It checked every box for what I was interested in,” says Wadhwa. “I’ve had a very circuitous path to reach this point. It often seemed on the surface like the dots weren’t connected, but when you look at all of the things I did and learned, from software development to humanitarian work, the complete set of experiences was my guiding light.”
Soon after wrapping his degree, he joined the WFP as a consultant. His work has since taken him to dozens of countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
From 2014 to 2016, he was in Indonesia, where El Niño’s atmospheric chaos brought droughts that led to concerns about food shortages and worse—the kind of civil unrest that rocked the region during droughts in 1997 and 1998.
“That was when we realized that there really was a lack of objective information about the extent and severity of the drought, and especially where relief efforts were needed,” says Wadhwa. “So we used satellite data to come up with better measures.”
Wadhwa tapped a global precipitation data set called CHIRPS, Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation, as well as a NASA satellite system that tracks surface temperature and collects images of vegetation.
“With that, we could see all kinds of things,” Wadhwa says of the system that would become the precursor to PRISM. “We could assess the severity of the drought, we could see who will be most affected, like small farmers who depend on rainfall for their crops. Then we could make suggestions about the type of assistance that’s needed. It could be water, or it could simply be cash.”
The same kind of sophisticated exploitation of data continues to save lives. In October 2020, floods in Cambodia killed dozens of people and affected more than 175,000 families. The country’s government and the Humanitarian Response Forum used PRISM to map the areas most affected by floods, and target the delivery of emergency aid.
Under Wadhwa’s direction, PRISM continues its expansion to new countries, including Myanmar, Namibia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. Wadhwa is pleased, but he believes that far too much of the world still lacks access to the technological resources that could save millions of lives.
“Extreme weather events are not just predicted to be the new norm, they’re happening now on a regular basis,” he says. “But there’s quite a bit of hope. We’re getting better and better at monitoring these events, and we’ll get to better prediction soon too. The challenge will always come down to how can we ensure that the people most at risk benefit from our advancements. I firmly believe that focusing on vulnerable communities, developing the right tools to meet their needs, and bringing a lot of grit and determination to the work can get us there.”