A consortium led by sarmap, in partnership with CGI and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has introduced CRISP, Consistent Rice Information for Sustainable Policy, a global digital mapping platform dedicated exclusively to rice production. The system leverages Earth Observation data to generate timely, spatially detailed production information, with the objective of strengthening climate resilience and food security across rice growing regions.
With rice feeding more than half of the world’s population, production stability remains central to both food availability and rural livelihoods. Yet conventional production datasets often lack regional consistency and spatial granularity, arrive long after harvest, and do not adequately reflect sudden climate shocks such as droughts or floods. CRISP has been designed to address these gaps by enabling seasonal rice mapping over large geographies and delivering data in time to support operational decisions.
From delayed statistics to dynamic monitoring
CRISP is funded by the European Space Agency and hosted on Insula, a cloud native platform developed by CGI. The platform moves beyond static reporting toward dynamic, user driven analysis.
It processes multi temporal data from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites to generate seasonal rice maps and integrates modules for satellite data processing, rice area mapping, yield modelling, and data visualization. Through this architecture, CRISP is positioned to provide governments, international organizations, and private-sector stakeholders with consistent, detailed, timely, and actionable insights into rice production.
During its first phase, the platform’s core architecture was designed and built, covering data processing and integration, map production, yield modelling, and visualization capabilities.
Built on more than a decade of field deployment
CRISP draws on the operational legacy of RIICE (Remote sensing based Information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging Economies), a rice monitoring service developed by sarmap and IRRI and initially co-financed by the Swiss Development Cooperation.
Over a period exceeding 12 years, RIICE was piloted and used across diverse rice ecosystems in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, including India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Mali, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uruguay. This experience provided the technical and institutional foundation for CRISP’s global scale deployment.
Validation across diverse agro-ecological zones
CRISP was tested and validated across five sites selected to represent a wide range of growing conditions: Andhra Pradesh in India, Luzon in the Philippines, the Senegal River Valley, Kano State, and the Mwea Irrigation Scheme.
Validation confirmed the system’s reliability for operational monitoring, with an average overall rice area mapping accuracy of 87 percent. In large scale, structured irrigation environments, accuracy exceeded 90 percent, reaching 94.2 percent in Srikakulam, India. In more complex and fragmented ecosystems such as Kano, mapping performance remained above 80 percent.
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Rice yield estimation in controlled irrigation settings, including the Senegal River Valley and irrigated areas in Kano, achieved high precision, with errors as low as 0.10 to 0.11 tonnes per hectare. In rainfed and more variable environments, the models captured key spatio temporal patterns such as drought related yield reductions, demonstrating relevance for applications including index based insurance and policy planning, even where absolute yield quantification remains challenging.
Transitioning from demonstration to operational deployment
“The next phase will involve the transition from a demonstration to full operational status,” said Giaime Origgi, Engineer and Project Manager at sarmap.
He explained that CRISP will be made available through ESA’s Network of Resources, enabling national agencies, development organizations, and other authorized users to independently generate monitoring products or request services for specific areas of interest. According to Origgi, generated datasets will be publicly accessible. He added that the technical roadmap prioritizes scalability and user autonomy, allowing stakeholders to convert complex satellite inputs into accessible, actionable intelligence to support decision making processes.
Implications for food security and climate risk management
Rice accounts for roughly 20 percent of global caloric intake, while climate variability continues to increase production uncertainty across Asia and Africa, where smallholder farmers form the backbone of supply. For policymakers, insurers, and commodity markets, delayed or inconsistent production data heightens exposure to food price volatility, supply chain disruptions, insurance mispricing, and slower emergency response.
By enabling consistent, near-seasonal monitoring of rice production at scale, CRISP provides a framework for improved transparency, more informed policy planning, and stronger alignment between climate risk assessment and agricultural decision making. As climate pressures accelerate, the ability to track staple crop performance in close to real time is increasingly being positioned as an operational requirement for global food system resilience rather than a technical add on.