The European Space Agency (ESA) and the World Bank (WB) have agreed to increase their collaboration for the purpose of mainstreaming the use of Earth Observation (EO) in the World Bank. With this goal in mind the World Bank and ESA jointly reviewed and elected 12 projects to be used as test cases for demonstrating the utility of EO-based information in Bank’s operations, called the ‘eoworld’ joint initiative. The main aim of the eoworld initiative is to demonstrate the value of European and Canadian satellites, both ESA and national missions, and the capabilities of specialized value-adding companies that can provide information services to benefit the World Bank’s operations.
EUROSENSE is a partner in 2 of these projects, namely “Satellite Tools for Building Flood Defense Systems in Guyana” and “EO to Multi-Hazard Vulnerability assessment in Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) and Yogyakarta (Indonesia)”. The projects started in March 2011 and will have a duration of 10 months. Our main part is the production of an urban map and a flood risk analysis of the specific region.
A two-day event took place in April at World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, that brought ESA, the World Bank and Earth observation information companies (including EUROSENSE) together to get the projects started.