The Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) & Africa programme Southern African regional stakeholder workshop, held on June 17 and 18, highlighted the progress of leveraging Earth observation for wetlands management, as well as oceans and coastal management, for the region.

“The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) views this workshop as pivotal to ensuring that Africa’s Earth observation community is responsive to global environmental and security challenges, and also drives economic growth and resilience across the continent,” CSIR e-government impact area manager Matthew Chetty says.

The workshop was co-hosted by Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (Sasscal) and the CSIR under the theme of ‘From data to impact: Earth Observation and Space Technology Solutions as a Catalyst for Enhancing Africa’s Policy and Economic Transformation’, says CSIR Spatial Information Systems research group leader Sives Govender.

The workshop also addressed key regional priorities while highlighting the achievements and impacts made to date to support citizens’ livelihoods, he says.

The CSIR is an anchor organisation of the Africa Marine and Coastal Operations for Southern Africa project, under the auspices of the GMES & Africa.

The CSIR has focused on the marine and coastal thematic priority area, including the monitoring of oceanography variables, coastal area monitoring, ship traffic and pollution monitoring and marine weather forecast.

Meanwhile, Sasscal, under the Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Service for Transboundary Basins in Southern Africa, has focused on inland wetlands in the region, targeting the river basins of the Cuvelai, the Okavango, the Zambezi and the Limpopo, says Govender.

Further, GMES & Africa aims to promote the development of local capabilities, institutional capacity and access to technical resources to develop Earth observation-based services for sustainable development in Africa.

The GMES & Africa programme is in its second implementation phase, and is co-funded by the African Union Commission and the European Commission.

The programme, which focuses on Earth observation systems, seeks to respond to the global need to manage the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure civil security by providing information to policymakers, scientists, the private sector and the public, Govender explains.

One of the key priorities of GMES & Africa is cross-fertilisation of information and expertise regarding innovative Earth observation technologies developed under the programme to ensure the consortia work together on diverse thematic domains with the Southern African region.

Alignment with the region’s sustainable development strategies will be the focus of the applications developed, he adds.