Villagers give advice on countering climate change
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REPRESENTATIVES of communities from across the country attended a forum last week to show ways of using local wisdom to adapt to the shifting climate and prevent natural disasters caused by global warming.
Chutima Noinard, from Klong Jinda Farmer Group in Nakhon Pathom’s Sam Phran district, said the best preparation for unstable climate patterns needed to start at the local level.
Speaking at the Climate Change Expo 2015 at TK Park, Central World Bangkok, she gave the example of her community’s successful project to start a native fruit species seed bank.
Because of the threat of losing local varieties of fruit from devastating floods, Klong Jinda Farmer Group started the seed bank network more than a year ago with farmers in nearby provinces to distribute seeds of local fruit in order to let everyone plant and save them.
“Our community is a fruit farmer community in Tha Chin River flood plain, so we face floods regularly. Due to climate change, severe floods will occur more frequently in the future and it is more likely that our native species of fruit plants will die out because of floods,” she told the “Community and Climate Change” forum.
By letting farmers in the seed bank network save native fruit varieties, she said, it reduced the chances that some of fruit varieties would become extinct.
“Furthermore, growing native varieties of fruit also has many |benefits such as more tolerance to pests and weather. Despite the |fact that native varieties produce smaller and less beautiful fruit |than commercially-grown varieties, they still taste good,” she said.
Somkid Tummoon, from Mae Win Organic Farming Enterprise in Mae Wang in Chiang Mai, said climate change already affected the livelihood of the local Karen people.
“The environmental degradation as a result of deforestation and the changing of the weather pattern has led to frequent landslides in the mountainous area after heavy rain. This is a major problem for the Karen community in the area,” Somkid said.
Due to the landslide problem, he said a campaign has begun to re-grow the forest to hold the soil. This also ensured that locals could make a living from the forest and protect the forest.
“We encourage locals to grow four types of cash crops that can grow alongside big trees in the |forest. These four plants are avo-cado, plum, coffee and lucy grass. And coffee is the most profit-|able crop,” he said.
The farmers have implemented this method of farming for two years and the results have been positive as coffee production provides a good income and makes local people willing to protect the forest from wildfire and illegal logging, which would also destroy their coffee crop.
“The outgrowth of coffee planting in the forest is also amazing, as we can preserve the forest in our area and keep the temperature much lower and have better air quality than our neighbours, the majority of whom grow corn in their fields,” he said.
His group is currently encouraging this method to be practised in other areas of the North in order to convert the vast cornfields into economically worthy forests.
“This is just the first step to proving that ordinary people can make a difference to our environment and the world,” he said.
