Timor-Leste · Dili · See the Timor-Leste profile
FAO and Timor-Leste's government built an XGBoost-corrected seasonal drought index that triggered the country's first Anticipatory Action protocol in October 2023, matching observed drought conditions over 80% of the time (2011–2022) across five high-risk municipalities.
In 2023, Timor-Leste's Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Forestry and National Directorate of Meteorology and Geophysics, working with FAO, built a Combined Drought Index (CDI) to trigger the country's first formal Anticipatory Action protocol for agricultural drought. The index blends the Standardized Precipitation Index, a soil-moisture anomaly index, a vegetation health index and El Niño/Indian Ocean Dipole indicators.
An XGBoost regression model, trained on monthly data from 1993 to 2023 (n=369, 70/30 train-test split), bias-corrects ECMWF SEAS5 seasonal rainfall forecasts for the country's data-sparse municipalities. The Anticipatory Action protocol was formally activated in October 2023 during an El Niño event, covering five high-risk municipalities: Baucau, Covalima, Liquiçá, Viqueque and Oé-Cusse Ambeno.
Backtesting against 2011-2022 records found the CDI matched observed soil-moisture-based drought classifications more than 80% of the time, with Heidke Skill Scores of 0.82 for no-drought conditions and 0.65-0.68 for moderate drought at a three-month lead time (falling to 0.33-0.46 for milder categories). A comparable 2016 El Niño had cut Timor-Leste's maize and rice production by 40% and 57% respectively, in a country where 79% of households depend on crop production.
FAO's 2024 technical working paper is candid about the system's limits: no historical ground-based rainfall or soil-moisture observations existed in the pilot municipalities, forcing reliance on satellite (CHIRPS) proxies, and the model 'will require regular testing, revision and calibration.' Donor rules requiring formal disaster declarations before funds can be released are flagged as a structural bottleneck. In May 2026 the government and FAO launched a successor Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS) portal, financed by the Green Climate Fund, extending drought monitoring nationally.
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