For strengthening climate-sensitive plans and decisions in finance and planning, agriculture, disaster risk reduction and management, hydro-meteorological early warning, livestock, roads/transport, and water resources/irrigation, RIMES undertakes sectoral needs assessments in Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan for identifying capacities and gaps, and requirements to underpin capacity-building in these sectors.
The user needs assessments evaluate the technological and information demands of planners and decisionmakers at various levels in each sector for climate-informed plans and decisions across timescales.
Designed to collect both secondary (i.e. from relevant policies, project and technical reports, standard operating procedures, websites, and other relevant literatures) and primary data (i.e. from key informant interviews, focus group discussions and surveys), the user needs assessments evaluate the technological and information demands of planners and decisionmakers at various levels in each sector for climate-informed plans and decisions across timescales. These demands are then fed into the System Development Team of RIMES to ensure that the development direction for the Decision Support Systems (DSSs) caters to the current and potential information requirements, enabling dynamic sectoral decision-making processes that respond to climate variability and change.
The available data from initial activities undertaken are already contributing to the early stages of the development of the DSS prototype.
While the user needs assessments across the beneficiary countries are expected to be completed by June 2022, available data from initial activities undertaken are already contributing to the early stages of the development of the DSS prototype.
These DSSs are tools that dynamically integrate climate information of different timescales vis-a-vis sector-wise exposure and vulnerability, analyze potential impacts, generate advisories and other information per required by stakeholders, and disseminate these advisories via preferred and sustainable platforms like mobile applications and web portals/dashboards, among others.
The user needs assessments and the development of DSSs for strengthening climate-sensitive decisions in the above-identified sectors in Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan are undertaken by RIMES as part of Component 1 of the World Bank-funded CARE for South Asia project. On the other hand, the interventions under Component 2 of the project are implemented by ADPC.