 In an effort to combat weather and climate shocks such as droughts and floods, the Water Resource Management Agency, WRMA, and St Lucia Meteorological Services have engaged hydro-meteorological engineering companies to update the existing stations in St Lucia, with the aim of increasing the capacity for data analysis. The upgrading of the stations will enable St Lucia to improve its technical capacities, allowing it to better calibrate and integrate flood warning systems, improve numerical weather prediction use and forecasts, and have an overall quality management system. According to the director of the WRMA, Jason Ernest, the month-long intervention is critical in ensuring better forecasting of a drought or flood, allowing communities, particularly farmers, to better prepare and reduce some of the economic and material losses. The benefits of doing the optimization of the network, where we're doing the upgrade change in components that don't work, stations that don't work, is one, we're looking to standardize the network so that we have similar equipment from the similar manufacturers around the island, and two is to reduce our data gaps, because every time a station stops working, that means we're not collecting data, and it is very important that we have continuous data in order to do the analysis that is needed. Now, with under this optimization regime, what we're looking to do is to get the information, as much information as we can in real time, and that information now will be fed into early warning systems that we have up and running on The WRMA currently manages 25 stations on the island. Mr Ernest explains, staff of the WRMA have undergone several training sessions in maintaining hydro-meteorological networks. One of the good things is that we already have a structure in place where every month our officers go out to the stations, so now that the suppliers are here, and they're going to give some level of training, right, so now we're going to increase the competency of our officers in terms of when they go to the station, what it is that they need to do to ensure that those stations continue to function optimally for the life of those stations or the components within those stations. Mr Ernest emphasizes the importance of ensuring early flood warning detection to better assist farmers with preparedness as the Ministry of Agriculture continues to mitigate the effects of climate change on the Saint Lucia economy. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anisia Antoine reporting.