Monitoring Desert Locust Outbreaks in East Africa with EO

The desert locust is among the world’s most destructive pests. A small swarm of 80 million can devastate crops. East Africa saw its worst infestation in 70 years (2019–2022), and climate change may fuel more outbreaks. Authorities are therefore stressing greater investment in monitoring and control.

The GDA Fragility, Conflict and Security activity implementing partner company Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek (VITO) has worked together with the World Bank and the East African Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD), to create a Desert Locust monitoring service. Using Google Earth Engine, they created two mapping tools: an early warning system for egg breeding, leveraging ML and hopper observations, and a crop damage mapping service based on Sentinel-2 time-series data from locust-affected areas. These tools are transferable and scalable to other regions.

Upon IGAD’s request, development then continued under ESA’s GDA Agriculture thematic activity, with a particular focus on monitoring hopper habitats, still under the Word Bank’s Emergency Locust Response Project framework. Using EO data from Sentinel satellites and environmental indicators, VITO mapped cropland damage and developed a Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model to identify hopper habitats, which are crucial for early intervention. Leveraging this information, a dynamic service providing updated hopper suitability maps every 10 days, dating back to 2017 was created and integrated into the East Africa Hazards Watch platform.

With its transfer to IGAD and integration into regional early warning systems, the initiative demonstrates how EO-based services can support proactive, data-driven responses to agricultural threats in fragile regions.

You can read more about this Case Study using the following links:

• Desert Locust Monitoring in East-Africa
• Building locust resilience in East Africa with EO data