Climate change and extreme weather can cause increased weather hazards and natural disasters, posing a serious threat to humanity. In response to this, government organizations similar to the National Emergency Management in Korea are being operated around the world. Globally the United Nations (UN) established the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) to encourage inter-governmental cooperation as a means to reduce disasters (UNISDR, 2001).

Disaster management is generally divided into crisis management and risk management. As it is impossible to avoid weather crisis such as storm and torrential rainfall, the focus is on post-analysis and recovery after a disaster. Risk management, on the other hand, puts emphasis on prevention and protection through prediction and preparation (Wilhite et al., 2000). The UNISDR adopted a framework for action from 2005 to 2015, focusing on prevention and preparedness (UNISDR, 2005). To this end, it emphasizes the implementation of an early warning service system for identification of potential risks.

A disaster occurrence and its size depend on the probability and strength of weather risk and vulnerability of the exposed targets (human and plant community). An early warning system is one of effective tools that can contribute to the reduction of vulnerability. Around the world, government units have already developed early warning systems that cater to their own purposes such as urban settings, agricultural environments and forests, and the provision of related services. Recently, climate change has made the dependency of agriculture to weather more critical. Climate change has increased the frequency of weather extremes, led to serious damages to the agricultural sector in some region. While climate extremes occur at a variety of levels, alleviating their damaging effects is only possible at a limited scale.

In this context, the Agrometeorological Early Warning Systems are effective, only when the systems are firmly built based on accurate and site-specific agricultural information. However, the existing systems often lack site-specific data on adverse weather events. The particular circumstances of farmlands are generally neglected in the system. Furthermore, the mechanisms do not consider the ‘chronic long term effects’ of adverse weather events or the combined effects of two or more weather elements.

In this regard, the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences (NAS) under the Rural Development Administration (RDA) in South Korea has designed a risk management framework for individual farmstead that is threatened by the detrimental impacts of climate change and its variability.

The early warning system started with the Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1975 to respond to the global food crisis in the early 1970s. The goals of GIEWS is to reduce suffering from famine by collecting accurate data on the supply and demand of food in various venues such as continents, nations and areas, and deliver them to the corresponding policy makers at the right time (FAO GIEWS, 2017).

Another example of these systems is the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) established by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). It predicts the status of supply and demand in specific areas or nations, and issues a warning report in advance to prepare for any forecasted food shortage (FEWS, 2017).

Unlike aforementioned systems, the early warning system for weather risk management in agriculture sector needs to be designed and serviced on an individual site (field, farmstead) level. It is also required to predict faster, improved information accuracy and delivery methods (the Internet and mobile phone), provide the right information to the right people at the right time at the right place, and personalize information (with countermeasures) (Gunasekera, 2004; Jagtap and Li, 2004; Stone et al., 2004).

The purpose of the Early Warning System for weather risk management in agricultural sector is to develop custom-made risk management recommendations for individual farmstead threatened by climate change and its variability. This service system quantifies weather conditions into a “weather risk index” that is customized to the crop and its phenology (growth stages).

When the risk reaches the condition that can cause any damage to the crops, the Early Warning System is activated and the warning messages are delivered to the farmer’s mobile phone. The messages are sent with proper recommendations that farmers can utilize to protect their crops against potential damage. The early warning system has been developed, based on comprehensive technology including the scaling down of weather information to the field level and crop specific risk assessments for operational service. The system has been integrated into a cloud based service system.

A framework has been developed to make the early warning system for weather risk management more practical since 2014, by integrating several techniques including forecasting real-time weather conditions, scaling down of weather data to the individual farm level and weather risk assessments of specific crops. Furthermore, the scientific know-how has been integrated into a web-based warning system (Fig. 1). The detailed framework is as follow.

Fig. 1. 
Information flow of the farmstead-specific agro-meteorological early warning system for weather risk management.

The empirical studies have been conducted since 2014 under a 4-year (2014∼2017) plan to make the system fully operational by a NAS cooperative research program. Under this plan, the system will be implemented in the Seomjin river basin (6,000 km²), which accommodates over 60,000 farms and orchards. In addition, the evaluations of volunteer farmers will also be continuously fed back to NAS and reflected in the system. The diverse experience obtained through this study will be highly useful in planning and implementing a nation wide disaster early warning system for the agricultural sector. The system is a great leap forward in protecting agriculture exposed to weather extremes under climate change and its variability. This service system will be promoted nation wide starting 2018.