Lao PDR Climate Atlas Launch Event - Geoinformatics Center

From FAO’s project “Strengthening Agro-climatic Monitoring and Information Systems (SAMIS) to improve adaptation to climate change and food security in LAO PDR”, an Atlas of Climatology and Agro-climatology for Laos is born. This atlas is a study of climate and agroclimate in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for the period 1990–2019 based on the downscaling of long-term observation data. It is the first Agro-climatic Atlas ever produced for South-East Asia!

The launch event for the Atlas took place on the 3^rd of May 2022. The aim of the event is to present the Atlas to partners, doners, and potential users such as government departments (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE – Laos), and Ministry Agriculture and Forestry). The launch event is also intended to raise awareness for the project, as well as the data availability, among Laos’ policy-making units.

Dr. Manzul Kumar Hazarika, Director of the Geoinformatics Center at AIT (GIC-AIT), gave a presentation on “Institutional Capacity Building in Climate Downscaling under SAMIS Project” at the event, which showcased GIC’s contributions towards the capacity development training which enabled Lao government officials to carry out climate downscaling processes (dynamical and statistical) on their own. The GIC team also helped optimize the model and carried out both statistical and dynamical downscaling of 30 years’ worth of historical climate data. Laos’ future climate projections (60 years: 2031-2090) of 5 variables were carried out using statistical downscaling method, under IPCC Assessment Report 5 ‘Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)’ scenarios.

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