Proposed Outline for ASEAN Climate-Smart Agriculture Guidelines to be reviewed in SEARCA co-organized Regional Workshop

  • By Elson Ian Nyl Ebreo Galang
  • 21 September 2021

Proposed Outline for ASEAN Climate-Smart Agriculture Guidelines to be reviewed in SEARCA co-organized Regional Workshop

A Regional Consultation Workshop will be held virtually on 23 September 2021, 09:00 – 13:00 (UCT+7), to review and discuss the proposed structure and content of the third volume of the ASEAN Regional Guidelines for Promotion and Adoption of Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). This is the second of the consultation workshops co-organized by the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) to develop a third volume (Volume 3) that would complement the previous volumes by providing ASEAN Member States (AMS) with tangible guidelines on how to implement the CSA practices.

On 7 July 2021, the first regional consultation workshop was conducted to set the directions for the development of the Volume 3. Specifically, outputs and outcomes of the first workshop underlined two things: (1) there is a need to identify important assessment guidelines and implementation principles for CSA adoption and practices; and (2) highlight systems-level approaches to CSA.

Taking off from the first workshop, SEARCA prepared an outline that proposes approaches for AMS to assess and prioritize CSA practices and the principles for implementing them. The outline complements the regional-wide survey on relevant Systems-Level Approaches for CSA (CASA) that SEARCA spearheaded from 5 to 25 August 2021. These CASAs from the survey will be highlighted in Volume 3 for their responsiveness during this pandemic, aligned with the implementation of the ASEAN Recovery Framework.

Under this purview, this second consultation workshop will:

  1. Validate CSA Systems-Level Approaches based on the survey.
  2. Present the annotated outline of Volume 3 and get feedback from the AMS.
  3. Determine national or regional policies for implementation and scale-up of CSAs in the region.

It will be participated in by ASEAN-Climate Resilience Network (CRN) members, national focal points from ASEAN Technical Working Group on Agricultural Research and Development (ATWGARD) and other selected ASEAN sectoral bodies, representatives of development agencies, and research institutions.

Similar to the first consultation workshop, this activity will be hosted by the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute, also acting as this year`s Chair of the ATWGARD, on behalf of the ASEAN-CRN. This development process, including the conduct of these workshops, is supported by the project “Climate-Smart Land Use in ASEAN” (CSLU), financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by GIZ.