Regional Climate Workshop
Bangkok, July 15th — The Division of the Climatology and Agro-meteorology of the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) and the Division of Agricultural Land Management (DALAM) of the Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) have travelled to Bangkok, Thailand to participate to the Climate Week, an Asian level event organized by FAO on 15th -18th July 2019 and chaired by Ms Hang Thi Thanh Pham, FAO Regional Office for Asia and Pacific. With participation of multiple countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Iran, Lao PDR, Indonesia, Philippines, Nepal, Pakistan, Papa New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Thailand, and Vietnam. This activity has been realized in collaboration with the project Strengthening Agro-climatic Monitoring and Information Systems (SAMIS) Project of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Lao PDR. Information about the SAMIS project is available at http://www.fao.org/in-action/samis/en/. This event is also important to increase the capacity of government officials that are exposed to many important innovations in Asia and that are linking with other government experts of nearby countries.
The week is composed by a first event about strengthening agro-met services for pests and diseases risk management. The DMH presented the new online system and mobile phone app called Laos Climate Service for Agriculture (LaCSA). The LaCSA system is outstanding achievement of SAMIS project. In addition, it is a new challenge for Lao PDR as one of the most innovative systems in Asia. The LaCSA system is providing rainfall and temperature seasonal forecast as well as crop calendar to farmers on near real-time (with monthly and weekly bulletin), which will be very influential for making their decision on seasonal agriculture production such as selection of suitable crop species for cultivation in difficult condition of climate change. This will be able to ensure on more stable and sustainable production, higher productivity, improve food security, reduce the risk of disease and pest in Lao PDR. In addition, MAF representative will present field level activities helping farmers to have access to the data. Information about LaCSA are available at the web page https://www.facebook.com/samisdmh .
The second part of the week will be related for Advanced assessment and planning technologies for Transformative Agriculture Adaptation and Mitigation. At this meeting, the DALAM will present multiple forthcoming activities. In fact, the Land Resources Information Management System (LRIMS) will map present and future distribution of the main crops including rice, maize, fruits crops, cassava and others. The project will calculate crop distribution in 25, 50 and 100 years. In this way, the MAF will be able to better plan the use of the land based on present and future climate change. In this