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The National Climate Risk Information System, is a digital database service which serves as the official data center for all climate-finance entities that support projects, research and technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change. It's a system that can help to save lives and provide all the necessary info for the development of projects. And today these 20 participants were trained on how they can use and contribute to the system. The training was coordinated by UB Lecturer Kieran Ryan.

Kieran Ryan, IT Lecturer, UB
"So this the CRIS part 2 the CRIS is the climate risk information system that UB built in 2022 for the national climate change office and this is now to integrate tourism data and agriculture data into the system as well."

"So we have participants from many organizations and they have data that is mandated to be publicly accessible so the CRIS provides a system to do that so they have to learn how to create an account and how to upload and label files that are then available to the public."

"A lot of the participants have data and they are mandated to share it but they don't have a system to do that so we are facilitating that so when they return to their organization they can collect more data that is mandated so individual trainees today were asking me every time someone asks him he has to send an email with this data but now he can just share a link on the website to the data there."

So who all can access this data and why is it important for these stakeholders to take an interest in learning more about the database and its functions? Ryan says the more data the better

Kieran Ryan
"Basically we have from ministry of agriculture and we have from BAHA and we have from SIRDI and then from tourism we have the immigration and then what they really need to know is the URL how to create a username and password and how to upload the data and how to label the data correctly. When they get back to their organization, if they get permission from their department they can add more users and use the system to disseminate data."

"Today is pretty good. Everybody learned how to create an account and learned how to upload. We did have a little bit of issues right here with the locking mechanism that's being worked on but they all know how to do it. We had over I think 400 files we uploaded in addition to the training they are actually putting the data up there so that's a nice thing. The tourism sector got over 200 uploaded and we got about half way with agriculture but as soon as the system is functioning they can do this when they get back to their organization. And if they have more data they can continually use it."

For the ministry of Agriculture the CRIS plays a huge role in keeping farmers up to date with the climate change conditions across the country

Fredo Roches, Agriculture Officer, Corozal
"Well basically this training is very important for the ministry to share information to its farmers especially with the issue of climate change and how is it that the agronomic information can help them to become productive farmers. And the ministry has its own research on it in Central Farm that research is being conducted and information that is gathered from that can be used to share with farmers in the issue of soil fertility and management. The issue of plant health, the issue of new varieties that can be adapted to the current drought conditions that we are facing so information like this is very important to share to our farmers. That's basically what the ministry of agriculture should be doing so that at the end of the day our farmers can utilize the information."