Luanda — The Angolan Government plans to launch, in the first half of September, an Agricultural Drought Monitoring System, with a view to improving the capacity to respond to the impacts of this natural phenomenon in the country.
The project named Agriculture Stress Index System (ASIS) is an initiative which will be launched at a National Workshop, part of the financing mechanism of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and has the technical support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
In a press release, the Ministry of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Social Communication (MINTTICS) clarifies that the ASIS implementation process is in the final phase, whose tool is being adapted to local conditions and the level of administrative units of municipalities across the country.
For this purpose, a specialized inter-institutional technical team, made up of representatives of the National Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics (INAMET), under the supervision of MINTTICS, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MINAGRIF), is monitoring the process that will be completed with the installation of the ASIS tool on the INAMET Server and then its launch.
The document also states that the Government is since January 2021 committed to the implementation of the Agricultural Drought Monitoring System in the Republic of Angola, whose objective is to produce information that monitors agricultural drought and manages its risks in the country, using satellite data to detect cultivated areas that may be affected by this phenomenon.
According to MINTTICS, through this system it is also possible to monitor the vegetation indexes in the cultivation areas during the phases of the phenomena, through the detection of critical points called “Hotspots” in zones where the crops can be affected by drought.
It adds that, from the point of view of end users, the results produced by this tool are specifically intended to support decision makers in monitoring agricultural droughts in order to assist in risk management in the event of the occurrence of the agricultural drought phenomenon.
According to the ministry, the ASIS is based on the Vegetation Health Index (VHI) from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which indirectly measures primary production through its relationship to photosynthetically active radiation.
The implementation of the Agricultural Drought Monitoring System in Angola is a collaborative initiative between INAMET (MINTTICS), the Ministry of the Environment (MINAMB) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MINAGRIF).
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