(MENAFN - Tribal News Network) ​ISLAMABAD: Agriculture in Pakistan is most affected by natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, droughts and landslides. With a 20% percent share of the national GDP and a 43 percent share of Pakistan's total workforce, it is crucial that the sector is able to prevent and mitigate the impact of disasters.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed a tool to assist countries in monitoring agricultural drought and in managing its risk. This tool uses satellite data to detect agricultural areas where crops could be affected by drought.

The 'in-country' version of the tool is based on the general methodological principles of the Agricultural Stress Index System
(ASIS).

In order to promote institutional ownership of the agricultural drought monitoring system, at the national level, FAO in collaboration with with
Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) conducted a training workshop in Islamabad.

Highlighting the importance of this collaboration Ms Minà Dowlatchahi, FAO Representative in Pakistan said 'ASIS-Pakistan and the partnership
with PMD is a cornerstone in the efforts towards an early warning systemvto support the transformation of the Indus Basin agriculture through innovative climate resilient agriculture practices and climate smart water management'.

27 technical staff members from PMD Islamabad, PMD Punjab and PMD Sindh took part in the training where they were informed of ways to monitor the drought in agriculture properly and in turn enable decision makers to implement drought mitigation activities in agriculture on a timely basis.

ASIS aims to simulate the analysis that would be performed by a remote sensing expert, and simplify the results in the form of maps for
end-users.

The country-level ASIS was created to help countries strengthen their agricultural drought monitoring and early-warning
systems.

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