ASEAN is rising to the climate-change challenge facing agriculture and forestry

Participants of the meeting. Photo: ASEAN-Swiss Partnership on Social Forestry and Climate Change

At a meeting in Lombok, Indonesia, representatives of ASEAN working groups agreed to strengthen their collaboration to reduce risks and maximize security in the food, agriculture and forestry sectors

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is made up of 10 member states with a total population of around 650 million people. In most of the states, agriculture and forestry are major sources of livelihoods, food and material production for large percentages of their populations yet measures to address climate change in the land-based sectors have been slow to achieve regional coherence.

This is being changed through the ASEAN Multi-Sectoral Framework on Climate Change: Agriculture and Forestry towards Food Security, the ad hoc steering committee of which held its sixth meeting on 18–19 January 2018 in Lombok, Indonesia. Bodies represented were the ASEAN Sectoral Working Group on Crops, ASEAN Technical Working Group on Agricultural Research and Development, ASEAN Climate Resilience Network, ASEAN Working Group on Forest and Climate Change, ASEAN Senior Officials of Forestry, ASEAN Sectoral Working Group on Fisheries, ASEAN Senior Officials on Environment and the ASEAN Working Group on Social Forestry. The meeting was chaired by the Senior Officials Meeting of the ASEAN Ministers of Agriculture and Forestry.

‘Climate change is extremely important for social forestry, food security, agriculture and other sectors’, said Pham Quang Minh, assistant director of the food, agriculture and forestry division at the ASEAN Secretariat, in his opening remarks. ‘And the role of this group is also increasingly important’.

While efforts to coordinate climate-change responses across the region began as early as 2009 with initial development of a multi-sectoral framework on climate change, food, agriculture and forestry towards food security, that framework has yet to be made fully operational. Nevertheless, authority has now been added to the urgency of addressing climate change in the land-based sector through the inclusion of agriculture into global climate-change planning at the Twenty-third Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held November–December 2017 in Bonn, Germany. Concomitantly, ASEAN’s response has also been taking on a greater urgency, as can be seen in representatives of the bloc in strong support at the Conference for the inclusion of agriculture.