FAO leads a series of four workshops in Pakistan to support geospatial activities and services

From 16 to 28 September 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) organized four workshops in Pakistan, involving more than 120 experts from national and international institutions, to contribute to the advancement of geospatial activities and services on two main projects: "Transforming the Indus Basin with Climate-Resilient Agriculture and Climate-Smart Water Management" (GCP/PAK/146/GCF) and  "Revival of Balochistan Water Resource Programme (RBWRP) (GCP/PAK/159/EC)."

The objective was to enhance capacities in geospatial data analysis and dissemination, engage with national stakeholders, and focus on the refinement of applied geospatial workflows, particularly in relation to crop mapping and agroecological zones. As part of this larger context, the Hand-in-Hand Geospatial platform and the Digital Service Portfolio were presented as tools to improve geospatial data collection, sharing, and access. 

The "Transforming the Indus Basin with Climate-Resilient Agriculture and Climate-Smart Water Management" project aimed to discuss methodologies, workflows, and tools for crop mapping to support the assessment of water productivity. Two one-day workshops were organized: one in Lahore to represent the province of Punjab and the second in Tandojam for the province of Sindh.

The "Revival of Balochistan Water Resource Programme (RBWRP)" aimed to review tools, techniques, and existing results of the agroecological zones of the province of Balochistan. A three-day workshop was organized in Quetta, the capital of the province of Balochistan.

“The utilization of the Hand in Hand Geospatial Platform during the workshop on agroecological zoning for the province of Balochistan enabled the integration of data generated by local experts into a unified analytical environment, with a comprehensive data catalog on climate, soil, and topography." said  Gianluca Franceschini, Information Technology Officer in the Agro-Informatics team of the FAO Digitalization and Informatics Division (CSI) that traveled from FAO HQ to provide the training. ‘This played a pivotal role in supporting the validation and calibration of accurate and coherent results’ he added.
Moreover, a one-day workshop was organized in the provincial FAO office of Peshawar to present the latest advances in geospatial workflows, open tools, and geospatial portals for rapid analysis and data sharing to experts from various national organizations and institutions.

Meetings with FAO Pakistan, World Food Program (WFP), and the Climate Change, Alternative Energy, and Water Resources Institute of the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (CAEWRI-PARC) were also organized in Islamabad, to share experiences on relevant GIS and RS workflows in the country.


Zooming into the activities

The first workshop was held at the FAO office in Peshawar to orient provincial stakeholders about the Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform, the Digital Services Portfolio, and other open and free tools for Earth Observation (i.e., Kobo Toolbox, Google Earth Engine, and SEPAL). 

‘This training will build provincial capacities and the capacities of our department to better analyze climate threats and data” said the Special Secretary of Forest and Climate Change in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Mr. Khuda Baksh, at the opening of the workshop, advocating for climate change as a global and not only national issue. 

The workshop allowed participants to familiarize themselves with the Hand-in-Hand (HiH) Geospatial Platform, providing hands-on examples of browsing data, showing information from different data channels, exploring multi-dimensional datasets, generating charts of time-series information, aggregating data by administrative levels, and creating story maps. The Digital Service Portfolio was also presented to demonstrate the use of advisory services that integrate existing geospatial information and local knowledge to improve farmers' and pastoralists' livelihoods.

FAO experts were also invited to visit the Geospatial Information System (GIS) laboratory and help strengthen capacities by assessing gaps and proposing recommendations.

The second part of the training focused on introducing participants to modern GIS tools for quick and easy data processing, thus enhancing national capacities in the use of geospatial technologies. This included an introduction to GIS and Remote Sensing, as well as an introduction to Google Earth Engine and SEPAL- a system for earth observation, data access, processing and analysis for land monitoring- for cloud-based data processing.

Two workshops were then organized in Lahore and Tandojam to share results with national experts on mapping crop types following the field data collection campaign organized in June. Details of the applied methodology were discussed, including constraints and limitations during the fieldwork, applied scripts in Google Earth Engine, and results, along with a comparison with existing statistics.

A practical session on Agro Ecological Zoning  (AEZ) was also held in Quetta, Balochistan, to present, review, and discuss the raster-based agroecological zoning of Balochistan. After covering all aspects of FAO AEZ participants were asked to upload different GIS layers in QGIS on soil, land cover, terrain, and raster-based agroecological zoning and manually edit boundaries of AEZ zones according to the input data and their own specific knowledge of the province. They were introduced to the theory and tools of land cover and crop-mapping, particularly using Google Earth Engine and SEPAL for cloud-based workflows. 

At the end of the workshops, which were positively received by the participants, several recommendations and follow-up activities were identified to continue supporting geospatial services in the country. They included, among others, the organization of follow up meetings with FAO Pakistan to discuss the definition and implementation of a Hand-in-Hand data portal to store and disseminate geospatial data and metadata, considering existing national data portals, as well as further potential collaborations with WFP and CAERWI-PARC.  Support is planned to continue in Pakistan to enable capacities at the national level and use  geospatial tools and services for actionable results, leaving no one behind.