Situated in Southeast Asia (SEA), Vietnam and Cambodia are developing nations where agriculture plays a pivotal role in the economy. Recently, the SEA region has faced challenges in sustaining the production system of its food and water systems due to climate fluctuations. The use of big Earth data has demonstrated significant potential in providing essential operational parameters for agriculture at a very high spatial resolution.

In the 2023 APN Call for Proposals under the Collaborative Regional Research Programme, the full proposal “Strengthening Food Security via Strategic Agricultural Water Management: A Case Study on Assessing Water Demand from High-Resolution SAR Remote Sensing for Enhanced Operational Plans in Water Works Systems of Vietnam and Cambodia” with objective is to create a tool for assessing agricultural water management using the water-demand index (WDI) derived from high-resolution data has received the seed grant funding offer from APN Steering Committee to conduct an initial pilot exercise for improvement for resubmission of the proposal in November 2025.

Under the seed grant project, the WDI index will undergo development and validation by ground truth data to assess its ability to integrate with irrigation system operations, ultimately yielding valuable operational plans and policy recommendations for regions facing with water stress, particularly in Ninh Thuan (Vietnam) and Kompong Thom (Cambodia) provinces (Priority Topic 5).