ECE Phase I
PEER-REVIEW MEETING
5-6 October 2000
Bangkok, Thailand

Report

Pilot Demonstration Projects

The future implementation of the ECE project envisages the establishment of pilot demonstration projects in a few selected climate-sensitive zones in the target countries. The session was devoted to discussing issues related to establishing pilot demonstration projects in light of the Indonesian experience.

Presentation Highlights

Iwan Gunawan gave a presentation on the East Java Pilot Demonstration Project, which focused on identifying a framework for operationalizing ECE climate forecasts. The objectives of the project were to:

• Establish an institutional arrangement between upstream climate forecast researchers, local weather forecast specialists, national decision-makers, and local end-users of various sectors.
• Formulate a natural resources inventory and establish methodologies for assessing climate impacts with or without using climate forecast information.
• Replicate the practices to other sites.

The project area covers five districts and three municipalities inhabited by 13.7 million people. The project has been designed for "downstream application" of longer range models to ensure that management decisions are accurate. For instance, rice crop demand modelling can estimate water demand based on the growing stages of rice, so that managers can make proper decisions.

The case study focused on a methodology trial for numerous specific applications, and the development of an institutional framework for sustainability, thus minimizing resources needed from outside the region.

In the perceived institutional framework, the ECE research network serves as a bridge between BMG and the Department of Agriculture, the latter of which communicates directly with farmers. There is a need to share this experience of an optimal institutional framework. In terms of current technical progress, by using the data, the team has been able to show the differences between ENSO and non-ENSO years, so that watershed managers can see what will happen to water supply and agriculture, for example, during certain ECEs.

The tools can be used for decision-making at local level, and integrated into one system (a website) so that users just have to go to one place. For watershed management systems, scenarios can be input to show management the likely impact in terms of flooding; if you put the upstream end in the climate models, you can have more knowledge downstream.

What does the user need from an ECE forecast? Present knowledge is limited and we are constantly gaining insights from research so that we can increase the available knowledge in the future. We can discuss the anomalies in terms that people can understand, but there is still a need to be able to show the anomalies by region.

As a follow-up agenda, there is a need for a climate information system, ENSO forecasting at watershed scale and integrated water management decision support systems. Questions remain as to how such pilot projects can be "franchised" so that it becomes a global approach.

Discussion Points

The East Java Project provided a framework that linked climate forecasters with communities of users and decision-makers. From this project and from othersØ experiences, it has been observed that users need information presented in an understandable format. For example, users want to see the patterns of anomaly, to identify likely impacts, and to hear levels of confidence expressed understandably.

In the Philippines, pilot projects have already been developed but they need better documentation. The pilot demonstration project should cover smaller, manageable areas to ensure focused attention and to gain deeper insights. The details of these projects will be important to record as the lessons learned should be shared and used to develop additional small-scale projects linking climate impacts with the communities who can use the information.

From a social science perspective, institutional constraints may be more problematic in the ability to adapt frameworks developed in the pilot projects. The mechanisms in each country for dealing with the impacts of extreme climate events and forecast information are different, and therefore, may not be amenable to the framework presented from the Indonesian experience.

Dealing with the length of events and the lead-time needed to develop actions and responses to the event is difficult. Within the scope of the project, the lead-time was considered; however, in the initial phases of an event, it may not be known immediately how long prolonged events will be. Decisions must be made instantaneously, and these do not necessarily deal appropriately with the event length. Therefore, it is important to document and record impacts, and try to apply lessons learned with flexibility for changes and differences experienced in events of varying time lengths.

Recommendations

The participants recognized the importance of developing pilot projects that ascertain the decision-making structure and institutional support for using climate information within user communities. They recommended several actions to deal with current uncertainties in applying forecast information to the needs of user communities.

• Develop institutional monitoring and feedback arrangements to capture changes over time during the course of pilot project implementation to share the experiences of the implementation process. Detailed documentation of experiences of pilot demonstration projects would be useful for exploring replication options elsewhere.
• Within replication plans, take into account the climatic specificities, the uniqueness of natural resource management profiles and the peculiarities of socio-economic conditions and policy environments of successful or failed demonstration projects.
• Develop a regional information system to report continuously on the progress of pilot demonstration project implementation.
• Organize an integrated decision support system.
• Develop a mechanism to look at changes over time.
• Integrate climate forecasts into watershed models, as methods become available.
• Maintain the momentum and interest in the pilot projects in order to franchise them. The development of concrete useable products will help market the pilot project.
• Translate information into understandable impact scenarios. Since there are problems with data, such as gaps in information, this will help improve the understanding of the utility of the models.
• Document and show links between climate and water resource management communities. It would be worthwhile to develop a similar framework among countries.
• Develop an international approach to compare similar types of projects.