Leveraging agricultural loss and damage data for post-conflict recovery: FAO’s 2023–2024 assessment in Lebanon
Lebanon’s agriculture sector experienced devastating impacts during the conflict between October 2023 and November 2024. The destruction of crops, livestock, forestry resources, and fishing infrastructure severely disrupted food production and rural livelihoods at a time when the country was already burdened by a prolonged economic crisis. To support national authorities in planning an effective recovery, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), working closely with the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Council for Scientific Research, carried out a comprehensive agricultural damage and loss assessment using FAO’s established methodology for assessing impact of disasters.
The assessment relied primarily on high-resolution remote sensing, supported by baseline agricultural datasets, production surveys, administrative records, and key informant interviews. This methodological approach was necessary because safe ground access was limited throughout the assessment period. Remote sensing provided detailed information on burned agricultural and forest areas, damaged orchards, changes in crop cover, affected livestock structures, destroyed aquaculture ponds, and status of fishing vessels. These spatial observations were combined with official baseline data, such as livestock vaccination records, the 2021 agricultural production survey, and sectoral registries, to quantify losses linked directly to the disruption of production and the destruction of assets. The combination of geospatial analytics and expert-validated assumptions enabled FAO to produce reliable estimations across the crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture subsectors within the assessment timeframe.
The results revealed a total of USD 704 million in damages and losses to Lebanon’s agriculture sector. Crop losses were by far the most significant, reaching USD 582.3 million, with olives, citrus, bananas, tobacco, and vegetables among the value chains most heavily affected. The livestock sector recorded catastrophic impacts, including the loss of 2.3 million animals among poultry, sheep, goats, and cattle, and the destruction of 49,850 beehives amounting to nearly USD 89.5 million. Forestry losses were equally severe, with 4,946 hectares of forest burned, resulting in USD 26 million in losses. Meanwhile, the fisheries and aquaculture sectors suffered the destruction of 26 fishing vessels and the temporary abandonment or destruction of numerous fish farms, leading to sharp declines in production and income, with an economic value of USD 6.3million.
One of the key strengths of the assessment was its district-level analysis, which clearly showed that the southern districts of Sour, El Nabatieh, Bent Jbeil, and Marjaayoun had absorbed the greatest share of agricultural damages. This spatial evidence provided government institutions and partners with a precise picture of where livelihoods had been most disrupted and where early recovery interventions would need to be concentrated. The integration of crops and livestock baselines, together with remote-sensed damage assessment, also clarified the degree to which perennial crops, irrigated fields, and intensive livestock systems had been affected, information essential for estimated changes in future economic flows (losses), identifying recovery needs and sequencing recovery investments.
Using this evidence, the government and FAO were able to design a USD 263 million agricultural recovery and reconstruction plan grounded firmly in the patterns of damage documented through the assessment. Early priorities included the restoration of perennial crop systems, livestock restocking, rehabilitation of greenhouses and irrigation systems, and support to fisheries and aquaculture operations. The assessment also informed the provision of essential agricultural inputs, such as seeds, fertilizers, feed, and small equipment, to enable farmers to resume production in the short term. Because the findings reflected actual losses by district and subsector, recovery measures were not generic interventions but tailored to the specific disruptions observed on the ground. These evidence-based decisions strengthened the MoA–FAO Emergency & Recovery Plan by ensuring that reconstruction addressed immediate needs while supporting longer-term improvements to agricultural resilience and value chain recovery.
Alongside recovery planning, the losses and damage data played a critical role in recovery-related resource mobilization and overall disaster risk reduction financing planning. In a global context of competing crises, donors increasingly require transparent, quantified, and verifiable information to justify financial commitments. The clarity of FAO’s district-level damage maps and subsector-specific loss estimates provided exactly this evidence, strengthening the government’s case for investment in agriculture and helping build confidence in the proposed recovery strategy.
The Lebanon experience demonstrates the indispensable role of high-quality losses and damages data in shaping risk-informed recovery and resilient sector development planning. Without reliable and systematic data, recovery plans risk misallocating resources, delaying assistance, and ultimately failing to reduce vulnerabilities. By contrast, FAO’s assessment enabled national authorities to design interventions that are both need-based and aligned with the structural realities of the agriculture sector while contributing to risk-informed future policies and interventions design. The case also underscores the importance of maintaining comprehensive national disaster losses and damages datasets, which allow governments to document impacts consistently across events, zones and sectors, an area at the core of UNDRR’s global work on disaster data governance, especially through the DELTA Resilience system. Furthermore, this assessment offers a practical example of how sector-specific disaster impact data can be used to inform coherent resilient recovery strategies. It illustrates how systematic disaster losses and damages tracking contributes directly to the Sendai Framework’s Target C on reducing direct economic losses and Target D on minimizing disruptions to agriculture and other productive sectors, by highlighting how evidence-based assessments can guide reconstruction in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.
The assessment provides a strong model for how disaster impact data can inform recovery planning and demonstrates the value of combining geospatial and sectoral analysis to support decision-making. Future applications of the methodology offer opportunities to further strengthen it - for example, by complementing remote sensing with expanded ground-truthing, increasing coverage across additional assets and geographic areas, and reducing the need for assumptions where field access is limited. These enhancements would help make similar assessments even more precise and comprehensive, further reinforcing the evidence base for risk-informed development.
The example also highlights the importance of systematically linking disaster impact data with baseline sector information - such as production surveys, agriculture census, or livestock vaccination records - to better interpret losses and damages and understand how impacts differ across sectors, economies and social groups. This type of integration will be further enabled through systems such as DELTA Resilience, which can connect hazardous-event, baseline and impact datasets and support disaggregated data collection on those who bear the greatest costs of losses and damages. By making it possible to identify population groups most affected - including marginalized farmers, female-headed households and persons with disabilities - DELTA Resilience can help improve the usability of data for targeted action, equitable recovery and risk-informed investment.
FAO’s methodology and analytical depth complement UNDRR’s global efforts to strengthen disaster losses and damages tracking and integrate impact data into policy and planning, together highlighting an effective model for resilience-building in complex settings.
Source:
FAO. (2025). Presentation delivered at Bonn Technical Forum 2025.
FAO. 2025. Lebanon: Agricultural damage and loss assessment on the impact of conflict – DIEM-Impact report, October 2023–November 2024. Rome
https://openknowledge.fao.org/handle/20.500.14283/cd5013en