In the context of agriculture and food security, science innovations on mitigating and adapting
to climate change are available, but these are not well shared with next users and end users
(especially farmers) and the public due to inadequate coverage by the mainstream media, a
powerful partner in communication and engagement. The urgent need for media practitioners
to have an accurate, science-based understanding of climate change and enhance their skills
on environmental reporting gave CCAFS-SEA the impetus to conduct a series of inter-Center
media seminar-workshops for key Southeast Asian media practitioners in collaboration with
NARS and national media partners. Overall, the media seminar-workshop series was
participated in by 149 media professionals and 39 government information officers in SEA.
The journalists came from print, broadcast (radio-TV) and web-based media outlets. This
initiative was a critical first step in implementing CCAFS-SEA’s regional engagement and
communication plan, pursued as a CGIAR inter-Center activity in collaboration with NARS
and national media partners. The content of the two-day seminar-workshops focused on two
major areas: science innovations in climate change, agriculture and food security and
communicating climate change. Complementing the plenary sessions was a story ideas
marketplace which primarily served as a venue for dialogue among participants and resource
persons on possible stories to be developed and released in their respective media outlets. A
half-day field tour exposed participants to climate change and agriculture R4D either by a
CGIAR Center or a NARS partner and/or climate smart agriculture practices of a farming
community. One of the outcomes of the SEA media workshop series in the Philippines is the
forging of partnership with a private company, Metro-Pacific Investments Corporation
(MPIC), which provided volunteer funding a proposal of the Philippine Agriculture
Journalists, Inc. and the Department of Agriculture (DA) to replicate the initiative in strategic
regions in the Philippines. This is an unprecedented public-private-civil society partnership in
communicating climate change, agriculture and food security in the Philippines. With six
media seminar-workshops completed in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Vietnam and the Philippines,
the next step for CCAFS-SEA would be to move the engagement process further with
partners in the region
