Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Climate experts meet with Philippine partners

Members of the Philippine Climate Change Adaptation Project (PhilCCAP), led by  Wilbur Dee from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, visited IRRI on 18 November 2013.

"The main crops covered by the project are rice and corn, and we learn a lot about rice technologies during the discussions we had here," said Norman Cajucom, acting senior vice president of the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation and a member of the PhilCCAP team.

Roland Buresh, IRRI soil scientist and a member of PhilCCAP, and his team are developing decision-support system tools that aim to enhance the Rice Crop Manager, an IRRI-developed tool, by providing rice as well as corn farmers information on crop management practices adapted to a changing climate. The tools are developed and tested at PhilCCAP pilot sites in Cagayan and Iloilo provinces in the Philippines.

"IRRI is important to us because there is a lot of research that we can benefit from. IRRI is looking at, for example, the water requirements of rice and how this specifically affects the crop," Dr. Cajucom explained.

Dr. Cajucom said that PhilCCAP and the Department of Agriculture-Philippine Rice Research Institute (DA-PhilRice) are currently working on a way to determine the water requirement of a rice variety at a specific stage of growth. "In the future, we can link with IRRI for that kind of information," he said.

IRRI experts Julian Lapitan, head of partnerships; Reiner Wassmann, climate change coordinator; Joel Janiya, senior associate scientist; and Dr. Buresh gave presentations to brief the PhilCCAP group.

The visit included stops at o the Ecological Intensification Platform, the Long-Term Continuous Cropping Experiment, and the International Rice Genebank.


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