Like, first of all, what is it that you want to know from satellite imagery?

We want to understand what's growing where and how it's doing.

The other is the complexity of the agriculture system.

So when we're looking for crop fields, we're looking for shapes and then we're looking for some sort of seasonal pattern.

So if you had 10 images over a growing season, you should see something like it's cleared.

it browns it's like brown and wet and then something green pops up it matures and then it's harvested so it sort of like becomes you know dry and so we should be able to see that signal however how low the brownness might be like how dry something might be is contextual and um While a reduction might seem like minor in some places, it's actually a very serious problem.

And so the first thing was create a cropland map.

uh like if I were going to say Catherine's problem is this like what would the sentence be

The level of destruction

is so unbelievable.

So I thought about this a little while ago.

When we see maps of extremes, I have this image of Cyclone Idai that hits Southern Africa, I think, in 2019.

It's a huge area in Southern Africa that was flooded, covered in water.

If you look up the map, you could be like, wow, this is an incredible map.

But there are people under that map.

No matter where you look, whether it's fires here in Canada or those burning across Europe, we're seeing devastating news all around the world of ecosystems and communities pushed to their limits.

She explains what she views as the critical missing link between technology and real-world action that's keeping millions of farmers vulnerable, and what we need to do to break this cycle.

We can predict droughts, floods, weeks, even months in advance, yet we still see the same crises unfold.

Crop failure, economic and environmental devastation, and displacement.

The same crises that have trapped farming communities for generations.

This is obviously not a prediction problem, it's a translation problem, one that I came to realize painfully in 2015.

Equipped with the best tools available at the time, including that very expensive fancy drone, I spent August 2015 with my team in Karamoja documenting yet another failed cropping season, one that I predicted months earlier using satellite data.

This was part of the worst drought in East Africa in decades, affecting 30 million people in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.

After we hear from Catherine, stick around for her conversation with TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds.

If farming was your primary source of income, and if you can't grow anything, there's not much you can do.

It's very demoralizing.

It's very overwhelming.

A lot of the countries where I work, farmers face fires, pests, diseases, droughts, and floods.

If crops fail, no food is available for a lot of people who depend on what they produce.

It translates into, you know, sometimes an entire generation being undermined.

So what is something that is scaring you right now, and what is something that's giving you hope and excitement?