Building a Roadmap for Agricultural Early Warning Systems
CASHEWS stands for ‘Collaborative Assessment and Strategic Horizon for Agricultural Early Warning Systems’ (EWS). Funded by ESA (the European Space Agency), this project will run for 1.5 years: it started in September 2025 and is expected to end in February 2027. CASHEWS aims to analyse existing global early warning systems for agriculture and build a strategic roadmap on how to enhance them to better meet user demands.
To meet this objective, the project team is heavily engaging with providers as well as users of these systems. They will perform a detailed inventory of the current systems in terms of functionality and methodology, compare Early Warning System outputs to increase our understanding of the causes behind observed discrepancies, and, based on these, formulate recommendations on how to strengthen agricultural Early Warning assessments.
The Impact of Crop Maps on Early Warning Systems
As part of the roadmap, the CASHEWS research team will study which additional inputs are needed in these systems to further finetune their early warning analyses. Initial community interviews quickly clarified that all current Early Warning Systems require dynamic and accurate cropland and crop-type masks as necessary additions. So far, these types of maps have not been integrated well since they are not sufficiently operational at a global scale. WorldCereal will therefore contribute by delivering maps in specific pilot areas plagued by food insecurity, allowing the CASHEWS team to demonstrate the potential impact of detailed, high-resolution crop maps on Early Warning Systems.
The CASHEWS Study Team
The CASHEWS consortium consists of three partners who carry the following responsibilities:
- VITO (Flemish Institute for Technological Research): project lead, EWS performance analysis, recommendations
- IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis): functional analysis, stakeholder engagement, validation
- GEOGLAM (Group on Earth Observations Global Agriculture Monitoring): community coordination
The consortium receives additional logistical support from FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) for stakeholder workshop hosting.
Learn More
Want to learn more about the CASHEWS project? Read these articles:
