A four day-intensive training course on “Agro-ecosystem Resilience in a Changing Climate” started off in Kathmandu, Nepal (June 5-8, 2018) organized by The Small Earth Nepal (SEN), Nepal and Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), Thailand. This ongoing training program is a part of the project “Mainstreaming Weather and Climate Information Application for Agro-ecosystem Resilience in a Changing Climate” implemented by ADPC and its collaborating partners. The project is supported by Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), Japan under its Capacity Development Programme (CAPaBLE). The project aims to enhance capacities of scientists, policy-makers and other relevant stakeholders in the Asia and Pacific region and to identify and assess global change issues at local, national and regional levels. With this objective, it has successfully conducted the training in Srilanka, Vietnam and Thailand to impart knowledge on agro-ecosystem resilience and enhance the better knowledge sharing among scientific committee, academia, government bodies and the relevant stakeholders.
Dr. Senak Besnayake, ADPC, started with an opening remark in the training. He opined that climate change is becoming more pronounced over the years and the impact of climate change is substantially high on agro-ecosystem. He added dry spells, glacier lake outburst flood (GLOFs) are posing serious threat to agriculture. Similarly, Dr. Madan Lall Shrestha, Advisor of SEN and academician of National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) mentioned agriculture sector has more burdens of loss and damage due to changing climate. “The shift in withdraw and early onset of monsoon is making monsoon longer impacting agriculture sector, at large in Southeast Asia”, he said. Mr. Atiq K. Ahmed, Program Specialist at ADPC also highlighted the threats of climate change on agriculture and plummeting Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is one of its adverse impact. He pinpointed that to cope with this burning issue tools of climate science, early warning system, among others in a collaborative way to facilitate farmers who are still following traditional farming system is pivotal in the context of climate change. Furthermore, Dr. Rishiraj Dutta, the project leader, briefly talked about the contents of the training and thanked SEN and ADPC for this platform.
This course adopts a broader paradigm where resilience of agro-ecological systems is entwined with concepts of sustainable livelihoods and food security. The training program is divided into four modules viz. Module 1: “Relevance of Disaster and Climate Risk Management for sustainability of Social Ecological Systems”, Module 2: “Generation and Application of Weather and Climate Related Information”, Module 3: “Planning for Vulnerability Reduction and Resilience Building of Agro-ecosystems”, and Module 4: “Synthesis of learnings through a scenario-based exercise”. The training is moderated by Mr. Susantha Jayasinghe, ADPC and facilitated by Dr. Senak Basnayake, Mr. Mr. Atiq K. Ahmed and Dr. Rishiraj Dutta.
The training is designed to provide hands-on-experience with an intensive and interactive group exercises comprising of diverse expertise. By the end of the training session, it is expected that know-how on analyzing factors that influence sustainability and resilience of agro-ecosystems and development of interventions to sustain productivity of this systems in the face of climate change by integrating weather and climate information is well disseminated. Altogether 28 participants are attending the program that includes academia, government agencies, INGO, NGOs and the humanitarian organizations etc.
