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The Laos Climate Services for Agricultue (LaCSA) tool demo version is online since May and is been used by farmers in five provinces. However, a new version of the tool will be developed in 2020 including a tool for farmers to identify climate smart agriculture interventions for the next seven days. In order to prepare this, the description of best practices needs first to collect in a standard format. In addition, a questionnaire to real-time detection of crop phases has to be developed. The questionnaire will be used by the field offices at station level.

 A financing agreement has been established between the SAMIS and the CIAT project De-RISK. The project “Applying seasonal climate forecasting and innovative insurance solutions to climate risk management in the agriculture sector in SE Asia”, otherwise known as De-RISK SE Asia, is implemented by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) together with International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and University of Southern Queensland (USQ). It is financed by the International Climate Initiative of German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (IKI-BMU).

 In the framework of this collaboration, CIAT has organized a meeting at the Rice Research Center of the National Agriculture and Forest Research Institute (NAFRI) in Naphok hosting experts from a multiplicity of other similar centers around the country. In addition, data users such as from the Department of Agricultural Land Management (DALAM) and the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) were invited. The meeting has foreseen one full day of data compilation and a second day a field-testing of the questionnaire. This constitute a science-policy interface success story between CIAT/NAFRI and SAMIS/DMH/DALAM. The first are research entities working at experimental level. With the collaboration with SAMIS, their scientific knowledge became applied to real applications by DMH and innovation can reach the farmers through DALAM.