ISARC hosts workshop to develop plan on climate change adaptation

Varanasi: The IRRI South Asia Regional Centre (ISARC), Varanasi organized a two-day multi-stakeholder workshop on Prioritizing Agronomy in Changing Environments (PAiCE) with the objective of prioritizing interventions that will have the highest impact and address the climatic challenges and production constraints faced by smallholder farmers in the region using the PAiCE tool.
The workshop was a collaborative effort by the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), a regional program of Excellence in Agronomy (EiA), and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (ICAR-CRIDA), Hyderabad.
Addressing the event, VK Singh, Director, ICAR-CRIDA, emphasized the significance of the eastern IGP, which contributes to 50% of the total food grain production. He observed that the rice-wheat system in the Eastern IGP region encounters substantial challenges, including floods, droughts, and heat waves, which have severely impacted the rice-wheat system, resulting in considerable yield losses. He delineated three crucial aspects of the PAiCE tool, out of which two have been accomplished: system productivity characterization and losses caused by production constraints and climate hazards in the region, while adaptation/responses were deliberated in these two-day workshops.
“PAiCE is an interactive tool developed to facilitate the prioritization process of mitigating climatic hazards and identifying adaptation options," said ISARC Director Sudhanshu Singh. Virender Kumar, regional lead of EiA & deputy head, sustainable impact department, IRRI, highlighted the eastern IGP's low productivity, limited mechanization, and vulnerability to climate change, stressing the need for scalable solutions that address both mitigation and adaptation strategies and the applicability of PAiCE in tackling these issues.