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With a predominantly rural population, Vanuatu’s agriculture sector is perhaps the country’s most significant sector both in terms of participation, and because it supplies the majority of the nation’s food.
The Climate Information Services for Resilient Development Planning in Vanuatu Project (known locally by its Bislama acronym, VanKIRAP) is making Vanuatu’s agricultural sector more resilient to climate change by creating new ways for Vanuatu’s agriculturalists to access climate information.
Chief of these is the OSCAR system that VanKIRAP partner, the APEC Climate Centre (APCC), has been developing with the assistance of the Vanuatu Meteorological and Geohazards Department (VMGD), the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD), Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and farmers from across the country.
OSCAR stands for ‘tailOred System of Climate services for AgRiculture’. The OSCAR system uses a combination of computer climate models and locally-recorded climate data to generate agricultural meteorological bulletins (‘agromet’ bulletins for short), and assessments of how climate is affecting crop yields throughout the country.
OSCAR gives DARD field extension officers and individual farmers access to a tailored climate information-based decision support and extreme climate early warning system. It allows DARD and farmers alike to make informed decisions based on what is happening in the climate at the local level.
Once complete, OSCAR will be available as a mobile phone app and will be part of the VMGD website, vmgd.gov.vu and will be available in Bislama, English and French. Additionally, the Agromet bulletins will be disseminated via email, social media, national television and radio, in print, and through VanKIRAP’s network of community climate centres.
This week, a team from APCC travelled from their headquarters in Busan, South Korea, to Port Vila to present a series of workshops with VMGD and DARD officers and farmers from Tanna and around Efate.
APCC is running the ‘train the trainer’ workshops to enable DARD officers and farmer ‘champions’ to train their peers on how to use the OSCAR system and the Agromet bulletin to improve the climate resilience of their crops. They are also gathering feedback that they will use to further refine the OSCAR system further before its official release in August.
Attendees have been trained in using OSCAR in decision-making about farming. Some examples include reviewing rainfall data to make recommendations about optimal crop planting conditions, and estimating crop harvest yields under different climate scenarios such as drought or above-average rainfall.
APCC’s principal investigator for the OSCAR system, Dr. Jong Ahn Chun, says the training workshops have exceeded APCC’s expectations.
“We initially trained the stakeholders, then they trained the ‘champion’ farmers. Now today, the champion farmers are training other local farmers. I never expected how beautifully this strategy would work! I'm sure this workshop has been really useful and very successful. I’m also confident that the Vanuatu government will be able to take over and run this kind of workshop by themselves once the VanKIRAP project is complete.”
Ms Rebecca Sam Naiu, a farmer from Tanna Island, is likewise enthusiastic. “Before attending the training, I would just go ahead and plant my crops,” she said. “If the ground was too wet or too dry, I wasn’t completely confident about what planting strategies I should use. But at these workshops, I’ve learned to use climate information to plan for different conditions.”
The APCC team moves to the Vanuatu Agricultural College in Luganville, Espiritu Santo next, where they will hold the train-the-trainer workshop series again for DARD officers and farmers based on Vanuatu’s largest island.
The Vanuatu Klaemet Infomesen blong Redy, Adapt mo Protekt (Van-KIRAP) project is a five-year, USD 22 million project which aims to increase the ability of decision-makers, communities, and individuals in Vanuatu to equip people with the information they need to respond to climate variability and change, using climate information services (CIS). It is funded by the Green Climate Fund and implemented by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme in partnership with the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-hazards Department, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and APEC Climate Center.
For more information, please contact Mr Sunny Seuseu, VanKIRAP Acting Manager, at [email protected]
