Extreme droughts, floods and tropical storms influenced by erratic patterns of climate change will hit a life of farmers and their family, unavoidably.
In Thailand, agriculture employs 49 per cent of the population and contributes 10 per cent of Gross domestic product (GDP). Imagining what would be happening to the nation and the individual households when half of the country’s population get effected by the unpredictably intense disasters.
Without plans and preparation, Thai farmers will be doomed and so does Thailand.
Recently, Thailand’s Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MoAC) launched the Agriculture Strategic Plan on Climate Change (ASPCC) 2017-2021 which aims at overcoming the challenges from climate change impacts by increasing people’s awareness on and resilience to climate change and enhancing collective participations in climate change actions.
The strategic plan involves four working areas in climate change field which are 1) database development, 2) adaptation actions, 3) mitigation actions, and 4) capacity building. This wide range of strategies is a consequence of Thailand’s Twelfth National Economic and Social Development Plan 2015-2021, which integrated climate change actions into the national plan and therefore, requires the proposal of climate change actions from all the sectors.
In short, Thai farmers will be trained to cope with the climate change impact. They will need the abilities to be adaptive and recovering quickly to continue their income earnings for their families and also for the nation.
On behalf of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), through a vast project on climate change, namely Thai-German Climate Programme, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH supports Thailand’s MoAC to develop the action plan for its climate strategies with the purposes of ensuring the achievement of the strategic plan’s objectives and of improving its implementation and coordination that actively encourage all concerning parties to participate in planning and implementing processes.