The image was generated by the Geospatial Indicators Model from ISCIENCES. To build the image, ISCIENCES constructed a database describing all known food emergencies on the African continent by coding data from reliable sources: Food Supply Situation and Crop Prospects in Sub-Saharan Africa Special Report; Food Crops and Shortages Report; and EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database*. The year, database source, as well as the location, cause (i.e. drought, civil conflict, refugees, etc.), and total number of persons affected for a famine event was noted at the provincial level when possible. The resulting dataset contained 189 individual food emergencies from 1990 to 2001. These 189 food emergencies were then consolidated into multi-year events for a given region based on two criteria: (1) an event “ends” when there is one full year without famine and (2) the consecutive events occur in the same general area of the country. The magnitude for each consolidated event was the maximum of the total number of persons affected for all years of the event. Each consolidated event was then geocoded. In order to provide some conceptual uniformity, the famine classes were grouped into 3 broad categories: (1) crop failure, (2) migration, and (3) conflict. Each consolidated food emergency event could therefore be represented by a total of eight classes since a given emergency may fall into multiple categories. There were 91 consolidated multi-year events.

Geospatial Indicators is an exploration into the use of GIS and spatial reasoning methods to identify regions at risk due to inadequate food and water resources that are a result of inherent environmental scarcity, stress due to environmental dynamics and change, or inadequate social capital.