Weather Water Climate Services for Tajikistan

Boris Orlowsky
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  • July 22, 2025
  • 2 min read

Summary

Caritas Switzerland’s Weather Water Climate Services (WWCS) initiative is transforming climate resilience in Tajikistan through a circular value chain that empowers farmers as active participants while strengthening Tajik Hydromet capacity. By shifting from a top-down approach to a community-driven system farmers now host and maintain low cost, open-source weather stations, providing critical data that enhances forecasting and decision making. This model not only improves agricultural productivity and disaster preparedness but also creates a self-sustaining system where local actors play a central role in securing climate resilience and food security.

With less than 10% of Tajikistan’s land suitable for agriculture and its rugged topography, rural communities remain highly vulnerable to impacts of weather, water and climate change. After 25 years of working with rural communities in Tajikistan, Caritas Switzerland (CACH) has in fact identified weather as the most significant factor influencing rural livelihoods. In response, CACH recognises a clear and growing demand for Weather, Water, and Climate Services (WWCS). However, without government endorsement or public subsidies, these services necessarily depend on a fee-for-service model. To address this challenge, a new circular value chain approach has been co-developed between CACH and a wide range of stakeholders in Tajikistan as well as with international scientific and public institutions. In this circular approach, farmers and other users host and, together with the Tajik Hydrometeorological Agency (TJHM), maintain low-cost, open-source weather stations that transmit data via national telecom networks. Received and processed within an open-source system, these data allow for country-wide weather forecasts of unprecedented local specificity and accuracy. They furthermore provide the base for targeted WWCS such as warnings for heat and cold waves, advice on optimum planting and harvesting dates, and for optimizing irrigation (when to irrigate and by how much). These WWCS come back as a benefit to those who enabled their provision in the first place, by hosting low-cost weather stations. The resulting profit from employing WWCS to increase agricultural productivity shall in the mid-term feed into the provision of WWCS, closing the circle economically as well.

The entire system has been conceived balancing simplicity and sophistication, achieving the necessary accuracy while keeping maintenance feasible even when involving non-technical persons. The open-source approach implies affordable running operational that are not inflated by subscriptions and license fees.

Within Tajikistan, this approach has now found broad endorsement, both at community and governmental levels. It closes a persistent data gap in an affordable manner, and targets a productivity gap in agriculture which results from Soviet norms and practices which have become obsolete under changing climate and production conditions. Initial skepticism on the side of farmers was overcome by demonstration on several trial sites, which evidenced significant yield and crop quality improvements from employing WWCS.

CACH’s WWCS initiative collaborates with reputable international institutions, including MeteoSwiss, ICARDA, WMO, the Swiss WSL institute for snow and avalanche research SLF, BOKU University Vienna and Oregon State University. The initiative is co-funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC and CACH.

Overview

Location:
Implementation sites:
  • Single country
  • Single location
Mountain region:

  • Pamir Mountains

Site locations:

  • Tajikistan

Solution scale:
Ecosystem type(s):
Solution type(s):
Sector(s):
Climate impact(s) addressed:
Climate impact time-scale(s):
Main benefit associated with the solution:
Co-benefit(s) associated with the solution implementation:
Implementation timeline:
  • 2021
Sendai targets:
SDGs:

Solution details

Main beneficiaries & outcomes

  • Farmers (In this solution they become clients instead of beneficiaries helping increase local agency)
  • The national agency for hydrometeorology, Tajik Hydromet (TJHM) (They have been stretched thin and are in need of a more economically feasible system)

Planning and implementation

Caritas Switzerland (CACH)

  • CACH sees a clear demand for WWCS
  • Unless the government acknowledges the potential of WWCS and without public subsidies for their provision, WWCS must rely on a fee-for-service model
  • The approach that has emerged from these considerations can be described as a circular value chain. Farmers and other users of WWCS host and (to some extent) maintain low-cost and open-source weather stations, which transmit their data through cell-phone networks of national telecom providers to TJHM.

Further national-level stakeholders include the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and the Committee on Emergency Situations and Civil Defense (CoESCD). Of direct relevance to WWCS in Tajikistan are Rural Advisory Services, overseen by the MoA, which support farmers in applying WWCS on the field. Currently persisting inefficacies in coordination and access to these services for farmers will require support to enable broad uptake of WWCS for decision making. Similarly, CoESCD and its branches at district level, coordinating their networks within communities, are critical entry points for leveraging WWCS for management of risks from natural hazards.

Finance

Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), World Food Programme, Government of Liechtenstein, Leopold Bachmann Foundation, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), European Union*, Deutsche Zusammenarbeit (BMZ)

Circular dependence contains necessary economic elements: TJHM ultimately pays the farmers for hosting stations and providing citizen observations, but equally receives income from the farmers that subscribe to relevant WWCS to improve their agricultural productivity.

For CACH the way that farmers are approached within this circular value chain is quite different from the traditional concept of a beneficiary who due to circumstances does not have access to resources required for a decent life and receives support from development projects. Being approached as a client rather than as a beneficiary in need, the traditional and to some extent colonial perception becomes obsolete and prepares the ground for sustainable scaling of WWCS in support of rural livelihoods.

Innovation

Circular value chain:

In the absence of useful services, no amount of brokering can possibly create any added value. Three main constraints emerged as critically limiting the provision of targeted WWCS:
– Insufficient availability and density of weather observations
– Lack of resources at TJHM to operate and maintain a denser network of weather stations
– Lack of technical capacities at TJHM to process weather data for forecasts and WWCS

A system that overcomes these constraints needs to be cost-effective, leverage resources outside of TJHM for operation and maintenance of weather stations and allow for delivery of services with minimized additional efforts for TJHM.

Performance evaluation

MeteoSwiss is carefully observing the project’s progress and resulting learnings, to benefit ongoing developments in Switzerland.

Capacities for design and implementation

Knowledge

The start of the project in April 2021 was preceded by an extended pre-project phase (July 2020-March 2021), which benefited from knowledge gained through consultations and scoping missions since early 2019.

Technology

The solution and the overall project is based around the technological approach of WWCS

Political / Legal

While TJHM is naturally central to the envisaged WWCS system, other stakeholders at national level are indispensable as well. Collaborating with all of them within one project turned out to be more demanding than individual cooperation, as power relations between them have become relevant. Understanding sufficiently well how to navigate these relations required continued consultations over extended periods of time.

Institutional

Unlike traditional cooperation with governments, WWCS does not hand over finances. If support in terms of financial support or equipment is provided (of negligible value when compared to investments from multi-lateral bodies such as the Worldbank), it is tied to a specific active role of the governmental partner within the project, and usually involves a contribution of resources from the partner. This approach threatens a prevailing rule and expectation in Tajikistan that 85% of funds invested in projects of international cooperation go into hardware and infrastructure. The path towards the Memorandums of Understanding that CACH now holds was long and required a constant and committed push from the team in country together with the Swiss Cooperation office in Tajikistan.

Outlook & Scalability

Transformation and future outlook

First impacts of WWCS on agricultural productivity are highly encouraging and will be investigated systematically over the coming years to guide adoption at scale.

Potential for upscaling and replication

Much of the technical tools and architecture will be straightforward to transfer to other contexts and countries, provided that the project team ensures matching skills and capacities – a first opportunity now opening up in neighboring Uzbekistan. The socio-economic and political part and partnerships with related governmental agencies need to be either in place or newly built. Depending on context, this may take significant time, a necessary investment for system innovation. CACH staff installing a low-cost weather station CACH’s experience suggests that provision and uptake of WWCS is not a low-hanging fruit. However, its potential in terms of sustainably strengthening rural livelihoods and public services alike is tremendous. This potential is not limited to Tajikistan: MeteoSwiss is carefully observing the project’s progress and resulting learnings, to benefit ongoing developments in Switzerland. As WWCS push for sustainable management practices of ecosystems and natural resources, they by design support approaches and processes that are adapted to current and future climate conditions.