Telangana government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) announced Data in Climate Resilient Agriculture (DiCRA) as the latest addition to the Digital Public Goods Registry, a move aimed at equipping farmers with information on impact of climate change.
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Using remote sensing and pattern detection algorithms, DiCRA is able to identify farms resilient to climate change and those highly vulnerable. It harnesses open-source technologies to facilitate analysis and insights sharing on climate resilience, based on empirical inputs crowdsourced from hundreds of data scientists and citizen scientists on best performing farms. The platform, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), is geared towards strengthening food systems and food security, Industries and IT Minister K.T.Rama Rao’s office said in a release.
The DiCRA platform will put vital data and analytics in the hands of farmers, enabling them to mitigate the effects of climate change on their crops and livestock thus boosting resilience of their livelihoods and wider food security, UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said.
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“With UNDP Accelerator Labs and partner organisations, we are proud to facilitate this first-of-its-kind digital commons to drive climate action not only for Telangana but for the entire world,” the Minister said.
Describing DiCRA becoming a part of Digital Public Goods Registry as an important milestone in Telangana’s commitment to open data policy, service delivery to farmers and anticipatory governance to combat the global challenge of food security, he said in partnership with the vibrant innovation ecosystem in the State it provides intelligence on climate resilience at the farm-level.
Within a period of three months, DiCRA gained more than 500 citizens and scientists from local digital ecosystems to support climate action in 112,077 square km of land in the State. DiCRA provides open access to both data as well as analytics derived through open software, allowing it to be replicated across the world.
The impact of climate change on agriculture is multifold, affecting crop yield, nutritional quality and livestock productivity. UNDP Resident Representative in India Shoko Noda said “digital technologies hold immense potential in building resilience as we fight climate change. With DiCRA, we are happy to combine new-age data-driven technology for informed decision making to boost agricultural productivity. We look forward to scaling the use of the platform across India.”