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UN-SPIDER’s goal is to ensure that countries as well as international and regional organization can fully benefit from the opportunities that space-based information offers for risk and disaster management.

The world of disaster management and space-based technology is complex and potential users are still struggling to fully capture all information about the existence, availability and accessibility, quality, costs and timeliness of space-based data. Disaster management experts, national institutions and governments are sometimes not aware of the full potential of satellite technology and the benefit it offers for disaster and risk management. Therefore, the UN-SPIDER Programme was founded as a platform to bring institutions and practitioners together to share their knowledge and expertise, and to improve access to space-based information for disaster management.

The successful implementation of UN-SPIDER’s mandate benefits from the support and voluntary contributions in cash and in kind of our partners: Member States, national institutions, governmental institutions and non-governmental institutions. Four projects to build partnerships have been identified on the sidelines of the 55th session of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in June 2012:

The United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) has furthermore announced partnership projects in the areas of Space Applications for the Management of Natural Resources, Space Applications for Health, the Basic Space Technology Initiative, the Human Space Technology Initiative, Navigation Satellite Systems and Space Law. Find out more.

Interested in building a partnership with us?
Get in touch, we’ll tell you more:
United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs
Telephone: +43-1-260 60 4950
Fax: +43-1-260 60 5830
E-mail: oosa@unoosa.org
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UNOOSA

A MapAction team is responding to widespread and repeated flooding in western Paraguay attached to a United Nations’ assistance group. The worst floods for more than a decade began in April.

They have left thousands of families in scattered rural communities in urgent need of emergency food and other help after the floods devastated crops and livestock. A complication of the emergency is that the affected communities are spread across two rural departments with a combined area somewhat larger than England and Wales. Many villages have remained cut off by road for weeks, requiring aid to be flown in by helicopter. On 29 June MapAction received a request from the UN to support a group travelling to Paraguay to assist the government and international agencies in coordinating assistance.

The non-governmental organisation (NGO) MapAction is a volunteer group of geographical information systems (GIS) professionals. It has the capacity to deploy its humanitarian mapping and information management team anywhere in the world, often within a few hours of an alert. MapAction delivers information in mapped form, from information gathered at the disaster scene. Paper maps, updated daily, are issued to aid agencies at the scene. The information is also distributed electronically, for upload to websites and as data feeds for other GIS users.

Read more: MapAction

Over a dozen radio signals that have hindered data collection on ESA’s SMOS water mission have been switched off. ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite was launched in 2009 to improve our understanding of our planet’s water cycle. In order to do this, it measures the microwaves emitted by Earth in the 1400–1427 MHz range.

Radio signals in this frequency range render some of its measurements unusable for scientific purposes. With the support of national authorities, ESA was able to pinpoint the origin of these unlawful emissions.

At least 13 sources of interference have now been switched off. This has significantly improved SMOS observations at high latitudes, which were previously so contaminated that accurate salinity measurements were not possible above 45 degrees latitude as the satellite headed north. One of the largest areas of contamination in the northern hemisphere is over the North Pacific and Atlantic oceans, primarily from military radars. The efforts to reduce interference will benefit other missions carrying similar detectors, such as NASA’s Aquarius satellite, which was launched last year and which measures ocean salinity at the same frequency.

Read more: ESA

Millions of people from the world’s most vulnerable and poorest communities will benefit from new disaster preparedness programmes funded from the European Commission’s Disaster Preparedness Programme (DIPECHO).

This year € 35 million has been allocated to improve the capacities of the communities at risk from natural disasters. The funds will go to the following regions particularly vulnerable to natural disasters: € 10 million to Central America, €11 million to South East Asia, €8 million to Central Asia and the Caucasus region and € 6 million in Southern Africa.

The DIPECHO programme seeks to limit the negative impact of natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, droughts, landslides, earthquakes and cyclones, tidal waves/tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, flash floods, forest fires, cold waves and storms by strengthening the response capacity of local communities and national authorities. The projects can include reinforcing infrastructure, training, awareness-raising, establishing or improving local early-warning systems and contingency-planning.

Read more: European Commission

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At the 47th Annual General Meeting of the Institution of Surveyors in Ilorin, Nigeria, Nigeria’s Vice President, Muhammad Namadi Sambo said the Nigerian federal government would do everything possible to map its geographical landscape to address disaster management in the country.

For this purpose, the vice president said, the office of the Surveyor-General of the Federation has been positioned for the task. Sambo called on state governments to also take up the challenge. “This essentially is what maps and its attribute products enable us to do.
The government of Nigeria will do everything possible to ensure that our geographical space is properly and comprehensively mapped”.

Read more: AllAfrica.com

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Paris, 28 June 2012 – The revised launch date for the Metop-B satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome has been set for 19 September 2012.

The launch campaign will resume in early July. The Metop-B satellite is being stored in a controlled environment in the Starsem facilities in Baikonur and will be subject to a set of tests and preparatory activities until its fuelling which is currently planned for August,.

Metop-B is the second of three Metop polar-orbiting satellites procured on behalf of EUMETSAT by the European Space Agency from a European industrial consortium led by Astrium.

The satellite includes instruments delivered by the French space agency, CNES, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. The Metop satellites form the space segment of the EUMETSAT Polar System.

Source GeoConnexion

(July 2012) DigitalGlobe, a global provider of high-resolution earth imagery solutions, has once again met commitments for its EnhancedView contract by completing a series of upgrades to its ground systems.

The upgrades were conducted in a collaborative effort with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) over a two-year period and more closely align DigitalGlobe’s security capabilities with those used by the U.S. Government. This will enable DigitalGlobe to participate in a broader range of government projects in support of the NGA’s mission. To date, DigitalGlobe has met every major EnhancedView milestone commitment on time.

Internet: www.digitalglobe.com

RIO+20: The “landscape approach”

It is “landscape science/ agriculture/ approach”, which now embraces “eco-agriculture”, “forest landscape restoration”, “territorial development”, “model forests”, “foodsheds”, “participatory watershed management”, “community-based natural resource management”, “biological corridors”, and many other connected concepts.

This is no fringe effort – its collaborators are the UN Environment Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Resources Institute, and Conservation International, among others.

What is it?

As higher temperatures and erratic rainfall affect the lives of rural dwellers, this approach helps them develop and use their land and water resources more efficiently to earn a livelihood, produce food, maintain livestock and take care of other needs. But they do it in a manner that causes minimum damage to the environment while helping to restore and maintain biodiversity, according to Sara Scherr, president and CEO of EcoAgriculture Partners, a co-organizer of the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative, a US-based non-profit organization.

The initiative hopes to use spatial technology, for instance, to advise rural communities on which portion of the land in their village should be put under agriculture, or left alone to revive, to ensure the ecological balance is maintained.

It falls under the broader ambit of sustainable development. The Rural Futures programme of the African Union, launched in 2010, is based on a similar approach, better known as integrated rural development.

How is it different?

But unlike the integrated rural development models from the 1970s and ‘80s, where a lead organization devised and financed a “top-down” plan within a defined project period, landscape initiatives are led by local stakeholders, said Scherr.

“There are several such initiatives where communities, pastoralists, farmers, the private sector, people from agriculture, water and other sectors, conservationists, have come together – we have found more than 300,” she noted.

These efforts are known by different names, but the initiative’s collaborators thought it would be useful to band them under a single umbrella, which would help not only to create awareness but also funding, “otherwise these initiatives struggle to raise money sectorally.”

Lindiwe Sibanda, head of the Food Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, a think-tank based in South Africa, said: “It doesn’t matter what it is called – we are interested in its motives and results. Any initiative that helps reduce hunger and improve rural lives should be welcomed.”

The landscape approach is a bit more than integrated development, said Tim Benton, the UK Champion of the Global Food Security Programme, who teaches at the University of Leeds. The use of remote sensing, resource monitoring, and spatial analysis are part of landscape science and provide the tools to communities to assess the impact of their actions on a rural landscape.

Benton said the expansion of mobile phone technology could help make such information available to communities at their fingertips.

Source: IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

For more information visit:www.irinnews.org

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The Institute of New Imaging Technologies of the Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain) has taken part in the design of a tool that integrates all the information on forestry, drought and biodiversity produced by different European systems of Earth observation.

The new tool – EuroGEOSS Broker – offers open access to vast amounts of environmental data. Developed as part of the EuroGEOSS Project and funded by the Seventh Framework programme of the European Commission, it combines official sources and interactions from the Web 2.0 communities and aims to offer relevant multi-disciplinary data that will improve environmental monitoring and land management.

Millions of sensors continuously record parameters such as air quality, light pollution, noise, vegetation density, biodiversity or water quality. This data provides valuable information on the state of our planet both to the scientific community and to society and is used for sending alerts and promoting research projects and public policies.

Given the proliferation of such sources, GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) was launched in 2003 as an international attempt to deveolp an open register of all existing systems. However, until now there was no connection between these different systems.

The European Commission considered the added benefits of interoperable systems and applications that would provide a wider picture of complex issues such as the effects of climate change or natural disasters. Joaquín Huerta Guijarro, Professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the Universitat Jaume I (pictured above) explains the relevance of this interoperability: “If we integrate systems related to weather, soil quality and water, we may develop an efficient agriculture or reforestation project.”

EuroGEOSS, therefore, aims to contribute to GEOSS with an inventory of European systems, resources and environmental monitoring services, focusing especially on the three strategic areas of Forestry, Drought and Biodiversity. The partners have developed the search engine EuroGEOSS Broker and hope it will contribute to better decision-making, especially for the prevention and management of natural disasters.

“Interoperability between Earth observation systems allows us to assess an area’s forest fire risk and loss of biodiversity. This may encourage corrective measures to avoid such a scenario,” says the Spanish researcher. The initiative has also contributed to a better understanding of the research developed by the different European experts in the three strategic areas and will help to avoid duplicities and promote partnerships.

The multidisciplinary team that participated in the project included users of Earth observation systems and experts in software engineering. The researchers at the Institute of New Imaging Technologies of the Universitat Jaume I dealt with the quality of the heterogeneous data, a key task to ensure that the different information was interoperable.

The centre also addressed the use of contributions from Web 2.0 users. “GEOSS includes a list of official sources but we have incorporated the possibility of using additional data from the Web 2.0,” says Joaquín Huerta. In this sense, Tweets or Flickr photos are extremely useful for early detection means and for analyzing the impact of disasters such as earthquakes or fires, for example. The same can be said about entries on Facebook, Wikipedia articles, and other services such as OpenStreetMap or Meteoclimatic, which shares the information collected on home weather stations.

EUROGEOSS (European environment Earth observation system), adds Prof. Huerta,“has served to test the efficiency of GEOSS and demonstrate that the benefit of this programme far exceeds the investment, as well as the intangible benefits it poses to the environment and sustainability.” An extension of the project is already underway through GEOWOW (GEOSS interoperability for Weather, Ocean and Water).

For more information visit:www.eurogeoss.eu

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The European Space Agency (ESA) and China have been cooperating through the Dragon Programme since 2004 to encourage the use of Earth observation in China. Building on the success of the past years, the programme is taking on more momentum as it enters its third phase.

The Dragon Programme started in 2004 as a joint undertaking between ESA, the National Remote Sensing Center of China (NRSCC) under the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China.

The aim is to promote the use of ESA, Third Party Missions and Chinese Earth observation satellite data within China for science and applications.

Since its conception, the programme has grown from strength to strength.

In 2004, Dragon focused on 16 projects to exploit satellite data for scientific research and different practical applications.

Under Dragon 2, which started in 2008, more than 400 scientists from 165 research institutes in Europe and China were involved in 25 joint Chinese–European research projects covering land, ocean and atmospheric themes.

This week, some 400 scientists gathered in China to discuss the results of Dragon 2 and mark the opening of the programme’s third phase, Dragon 3.

Prof. Cao Jianlin, Vice Minister of MOST, addressed the symposium stating the importance of the collaboration between ESA and China to advance science through Earth observation.

“The Dragon Programme has become a model for scientific and technological cooperation between China and Europe.

“Through collaborative research, advanced training courses and sharing Earth observation data, not only have applications of remote-sensing expanded, but also high level results in scientific research have been achieved.”

One of the largest areas of research has focused on land applications.

For example, radar data from ESA’s Envisat have been used to monitor forests in northeast China.

Using the technique of hypertemporal imaging, scientists were able to map changes in forest cover along the Chinese–Russian border in 2005–10.

The usefulness of flood monitoring has also been demonstrated through the programme. For example, 2010 proved to be a particularly bad year for floods in China but radar imagery from Envisat meant that they could be carefully monitored.

In fact, using data from a range of satellites, teams were able to reconstruct changes in the dynamics of Lake Poyang in east China in the period 2003–08.

Dragon has also focused on using Earth observation for monitoring air quality and water quality.

Under this next phase of cooperation, some 50 projects have been selected for joint exploitation of Earth observation data. These projects involve 170 institutes and 700 researchers from both Europe and China.

ESA’s Maurice Borgeaud added, “The Dragon Programme is a perfect example of cooperation between MOST and ESA.”

“It not only enables the promotion of Chinese and European Earth observation data, but it also stimulates the collaboration between Sino–European science teams and the training of a new generation of young scientists.”

Dragon 3 will continue with advanced training courses on the exploitation of remote sensing of land, ocean and atmosphere. The first course, focusing on land, will take place in Beijing on 15–20 October

For more information visit:www.esa.int