Lamjung, December 2, 2016: Youth for Agriculture and Development(YAD) recently organized a workshop on ‘Climate Change & Agriculture: Impacts and Adaptation’ at the auditorium hall of Lamjung Campus, Lamjung.
Held for the first time in the district, agriculture-students, farmers, government officers and the agri-professors occupied the platform together, sharing their experiences and knowledge on how they can play their roles against climate change and come together with a solution.
The programme had various guest speakers including Deepak Ghimire, Community Manager for Asia - CliMates, who shared the achievements of COP22 Morocco. Listening to his speech, the farmers participating in the programme seemed quite surprised to know that climate change is a huge global issue concerned to all the developed and developing nations as well.
Later on, there was a session by Agri- Professors Dr. Bishnu Bilash Adkhikari and Mr. Ram Kumar Shrestha from Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science, lecturing on climate change impacts on agriculture productivity and how adopting of managed farmer’s practices like drip irrigation, rainwater harvesting, intercropping with different crops, etc. can reduce the hazardous impacts of climate change.
On behalf of District Agriculture Development Office, Lamjung, Agri-Extension officer Mr. Rajeshwar Silwal spoke about the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA), Local Adaptation Programme of Action (LAPA) and Community Adaptation Programme of Action (CAPA) working on national, local and community level adaptation programmes.
Speaking on the occasion, Vinod Kumar Barai, former project officer at UNDP shared how we need to make our agriculture system smart according to the changing climate by adopting Climate Smart Agriculture.
Similarly, Sunita Panthi from World Vision Nepal, stressed on the need to carry out some more works on ground level to include more marginal farmers to get effective results.
After the whole session, all the participants were divided into four groups, with the involvement of farmers and students, and each group was provided with a topic to discuss and make presentations. The group discussions brought farmers and students together, benefiting both the parties as one got to know about the new adoptions methods and other about the Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITK) according to the evaluation.
The organizers were pleased to get encouraging feedback from participants on how this event was fruitful for them as the event brought different professionals together, and provided answers to their queries.
The workshop directly benefited more than 80 participants.
