Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 3–4
Preface
On the threshold of the 21st Century, the world population had reached 6 billion and it is projected that by the year 2025, global population will exceed 8 billion. A large majority of this growing population lives in the low-income food-deficit countries in the developing world. The demands for increased food production will continue to grow and scientific and technological advances to sustain and increase food production must continue to be made to meet these demands.
In the past decade, the scientific community had wit-nessed a number of significant developments. These include the adoption of Agenda 21 at the UNCED, the ratification of international conventions including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Di-versity (CBD), and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as well as the adop-tion of the World Food Summit Plan of Acadop-tion. All of these have renewed the interest of the global research community in issues of environment, agricultural de-velopment and sustainable use of natural resources. One subject, which has been identified for increased emphasis, is the area of climate and natural resource interactions.
Climate has a major impact on soils, vegetation, water resources and land use. Growing concerns regarding population increase, the degradation of nat-ural resources and sustainable development call for greater efforts to design future strategies of land use on a sound understanding of the relationships be-tween climate and agriculture. Climate change and variability, drought and other climate-related natural disasters have a direct influence on the quantity and quality of agricultural production. They in many cases adversely affect it, especially in developing countries, where adoption of adapted technology is too slow to
counteract the adverse effects of increasingly varying environmental conditions. For example, inappropriate management of agroecosystems, compounded by se-vere climatic events such as recurrent droughts, tend to make the drylands increasingly vulnerable and prone to rapid degradation and hence desertification. In the high rainfall areas, increased probability of extreme events causes increased nutrient losses due to excessive leaching and water logging. Projected climate change influences pest and disease dynamics and resulting crop losses. Improved adaptation of food production, particularly to current climate vari-ability and to observed climate change holds the key to improving food security for the global population.
The interdisciplinary nature of these issues requires a more substantial role for agrometeorology in the efforts to promote sustainable agricultural develop-ment in the 21st Century. This includes developing agrometeorological adaptation strategies to increas-ing climate variability and climate change, especially in vulnerable regions where food and fibre produc-tion is most sensitive to climatic fluctuaproduc-tions. Equally, there is a need to promote studies and applications of agrometeorological services needed to cope more successfully with a range of extreme events. Ques-tions of scaling and space-time variability demand re-newed emphasis in fundamental agrometeorological research. Rapid advances are being made in the ap-plication of new technologies such as remote sens-ing, spatial techniques and geographical information systems in agrometeorology. It is important to ensure that benefits of services reach the many potential end users of operational information in agrometeorology in the farming communities, particularly in those coun-tries with less developed communication and exten-sion systems which have little or no access to such information.
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It is with this background that WMO had organized the International Workshop on Agrometeorology in the 21st Century: Needs and Perspectives. The work-shop was co-sponsored by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), the Tech-nical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation (CTA), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Fondazione per la Mete-orologia Applicata (F.M.A.) and the Laboratory for Meteorology & Climatology of the Tuscany Region (La.M.M.A.), the International Center for Agricul-tural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the Inter-national Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the Joint Research Centre (J.R.C.), the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), the West African Regional Program of the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (SANREM) Collab-orative Research Support Program (CRSP), and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The enthusiastic and willing support provided by all these co-sponsors greatly contributed to the success of the workshop.
The workskop examined the needs and perspectives for agrometeorology and its applications to agriculture in the 21st century and made far reaching proposals for meeting the challenges ahead for the improvement of agrometeorological services and their support sys-tems of research, data, policies, education and train-ing. I hope that the papers presented in this special issue will serve as a significant source of information to all agencies and organizations involved with de-signing and implementing appropriate programmes in agrometeorology in the 21st century.
G.O.P. Obasi (Secretary-General)
World Meteorological Organization 7bis, Avenue de la Paix, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel.:+41-22-7308200; fax:+41-22-7308181.
