Valuing Disaster Prevention: Desert Locust Monitoring and Control

Monitoring systems for disaster prevention are costly, and measuring benefits is difficult when monitoring effort is endogenous. We provide the first causal estimate of one such system’s impact using three decades of desert locust monitoring data. We document conflict-induced interruptions to monitoring in remote breeding areas, reconstruct how infestations spread to populated areas, and show that exposure to locust swarms around birth decreases child height-for-age, increasing stunting risk by over 7 percentage points. Eliminating the locust monitoring system would induce annual losses of US$25 billion, implying a benefit-cost ratio between 160:1 and 680:1 from child nutrition benefits alone.