First project mission in Southern Laos
The GEF full-size Project (FSP) “Strengthening agro-climatic monitoring and information systems (SAMIS) to improve adaptation to climate change and food security in Lao PDR” has conducted a mission in Savannakhet, Saravan and Champasak Province jointly with the FAO and DMH staff from the 21 to the 27 January 2018.
The manual weather forecasting station in Lao Ngam District, Saravan Province, has soil and air thermometers, wind speed and sunshine duration not useable. The manual weather forecasting station in Kong District, Champasak Province, has only wind speed and direction and sunshine duration useable sensors. Since those equipment’s from both districts have been used for several years and very old condition, this mission therefore suggests that the project replace them and, as requested by DMH, to also install new automatic equipment.
The mission has also explored the awareness raising and training capacity of the DAFO level in order to establish the best system to share climate service to farmers at the large scale. In the area, a limited number of farmers’ group is in place and can be used by the project. Information sharing based on cooperative structures (coffee areas), speaker’s messages and temple gathering organized every fifteen days.
High level meetings and technical meetings have been also conducted in order to present the project and to identify the best authority processes, the most important farming systems, the accessibility of inputs and crop varieties, the monitoring and evaluation skills and the main administrative requirements.
In addition, SAMIS team has visited the CAWA project in Savannakhet Province. The target area of the CAWA is located in quite remote zone to be functional a pilot case of SAMIS projects. This mission therefore express doubts about testing the climate services on the CAWA project areas only as foreseen in the SAMIS project document. Instead, the opportunity of choosing other testing areas should be discussed at the higher project level, such as the Steering Committee.