Improving assessment of drought and its impact on food and water resources in South Asia

Recent declining agricultural production has depressed rural economies and increased widespread hunger and urban migration in many south asian countries like Nepal, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Moreover, due to the changing climatic condition, extreme precipitation events like drought has emerged as a source of vulnerability particularly in rainfed agriculture. Drought monitoring and assessing tools could be used to predict drought as well as deliminate the drought prone areas so that mitigating measures of drought could be applied for minimizing impact of drought on food production and water resources. However, scientific drought monitoring tool for regional scale, which can detect and prdict drought using available climatic parametes are not available in most of these above mentioned countries. This project aims to develop a suitable drought monitoring method in a regional scale using freely available satellite data sets and products in  Nepal, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This project will be fulfilled in collaboration with Center for Climate Research and Development (CCRD), Pakistan; Nepal Water Conservation Foundation (NWCF), Nepal; Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), Nepal; Tribhuvan University (TU), Nepal; Sikkim University, India; Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG), India and Khulna University, Bangladesh with supervision from Nagoya University, Japan and GEOGLAM Asia-Rice Project, Japan. Furthermore, in this study we will investigate the impact of drought on crop production for the last thirty years. Within the duration of this work we also proposes for the capacity building of local communities, stakeholders, students and policy makers with our outcomes and results. This is a two-years project funded by Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN).