The Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA) enables the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to take rapid and effective action in response to food and agricultural threats and emergencies. This annual report provides a brief description of the major operations initiated with SFERA funds for the 12-month period ending 31 December 2021. The report contains financial data for this period, as well as data since the Fund became operational.

The Emergency Management Centre-Animal Health (EMC-AH) activity report reflects how through the core pillars of its strategic action plan: preparedness, response, incident coordination, collaboration and resource mobilization, EMC-AH contributed to strengthening resilience of livelihoods to animal health-related emergencies and zoonoses. The report addresses EMC-AH performance and actions for the twelve-month period of November 2020–October 2021 and illustrates EMC-AH’s commitment to transparency and accountability. Despite restrictions imposed due to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, EMC-AH continued to effectively and rapidly support FAO divisions, country and regional offices, and international partners, to reduce the threat of animal diseases to food security, agricultural development, social stability and trade.

The Flexible Multi-Partner Mechanism (FMM), as FAO’s main pooled multi-partner flexible funding instrument, enables resource partners to contribute voluntary and less-earmarked financial resources to support the delivery of programmatic results under FAO’s Strategic Framework. This report highlights the key achievements of the FMM in 2020, both in terms of its accomplishments as a funding mechanism and the delivery of transformative results on the ground through FMM-funded Programmes and Subprogrammes.

The INFORMED programme, implemented by FAO from 2015 to 2019, was designed to contribute to “increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises and contributing to the reduction of food insecurity and malnutrition”. The programme’s increased focused on Early Warning for Early Action (EWEA) was very relevant to fill existing gaps with a comparative advantage for FAO in slow onset and food chain crises contexts. Promoting the use of pre-agreed plans and pre-identified anticipatory actions, the project effectively improved risk analysis and decision making, including through the Global Report on Food Crises, and increased access to appropriate financing instruments, while the EWEA country toolkit initial positive spinoffs remain to be built on.Efforts to support resilience measurement and analyses by applying the resilience index measurement and analysis (RIMA) methodology are relevant given the significant investments in resilience programming and the continuing methodological gaps. However, although RIMA provides a basis for creating evidence on resilience investments, and FAO has been an important pioneer in resilience measurement, a wider system supporting resilience analysis is needed, based on a range of methodologies, responding to the information needs of decision-makers. Also, RIMA baseline lacks sufficient detail to allow articulating the feasibility of possible response options and have a practical impact on planning decisions; it has not demonstrated its added value over pre-existing food security, nutrition and risk indicators to help target interventions, and is not well adapted as an impact evaluation tool.Assessing INFORMED results against its intention to support knowledge production and sharing, to promote the replication of good practices and circular learning, the evaluation questioned the choice of creating a new knowledge management platform versus adopting a collaborative approach building on similar initiatives’ strengths. Poor strategic choices represented a fundamental constraint to reach intended objectives, such as, an insufficient understanding of users explaining the difficulty to trace the uptake and use of knowledge products. Nevertheless, the evaluation recognized the progressive investments in knowledge management and sizeable accomplishments of a relatively small team.The evaluation suggests strengthening capacities for the production and dissemination of forecast, scenario-based early warning as a basis for early action; developing a corporate strategy for partnering to strengthen early warning system capacities at various levels; promoting the use of a toolkit of approaches and investing in a knowledge management function dedicated to capturing and disseminating lessons on the effectiveness of EWEA and resilience interventions.

On the 15th January 2022 the underwater Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha?apai volcano, located in the north of Tongatapu (the main island of Tonga), erupted following several minor eruptions over the previous weeks. It was reported as the largest recorded eruption in the past 30 years. On 14 January 2022, the Tonga Geological Services issued an alert of the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcanic activity and a tsunami marine warning. The powerful eruption subsequently resulted in a tsunami in Tonga and the surrounding region, with effects reaching countries including Fiji, America Samoa and as far as Chile and Peru. With around 86 percent of Tongans engaged in agriculture, the impacts of the eruption and tsunami may have impacted all agriculture sectors, including fisheries, crops and livestock. The volcanic plume reached 30 km into the atmosphere, releasing volcanic gases and aerosols that were subsequently carried over neighbouring countries, potentially impacting public health and the environment. The Government of Tonga declared a state of emergency on 16 January 2022.