Among natural disasters, droughts get relatively less attention from policymakers, even though they have serious long-term socioeconomic impacts. Drought adversely affects sustainable development and exacerbates poverty for millions who depend on land as a source of livelihood. Asia has had the largest number of people globally affected by droughts in the past three decades. Many Central Asian countries suffer from frequently occurring droughts, which are related to water resource availability and management and result in crop failures and increase in food prices.
As a slow-onset disaster, the use of space technology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications can be particularly effective in drought preparedness and impact mitigation. However, despite the significant progress achieved in this region, space technology and GIS applications continue to be underutilized, primarily because of the lack of capacity in terms of human, scientific, technological, organizational, and institutional resources.
The Central Asia Drought Information System (Pilot project) initiative, implemented by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and sponsored by the Russian Federation, aims to address the "monitoring and prediction" component of the drought management cycle. The project's key objective is to strengthen the capacity of target Central Asian countries to use satellite data and geospatial information for effective drought monitoring and early warning so that those countries can access the pilot drought information system. This capacity-building training is being organized to intensify building the pilot Central Asia drought information system, which contains the development of a conceptual framework of the system, a geoportal, a database, awareness and a digital drought map through research on model building, field data work and analysis.
This training continues events dedicated to operationalizing CADIS. Specifically, it aims to affirm that a regular drought analysis process has been established and further enrich CADIS with data-sharing capabilities.
