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ESA explore potential collaboration with Asian Development Bank

ESA was invited to visit the Asian Development (ADB) on 13+14 June, to promote awareness of European EO capabilities and discuss potential collaboration. The ADB expressed an interest in knowing more about what Europe could offer in the domains of Ecosystems/Agriculture, Forestry/Mining, Urban, GeoHazards/Risks, Maritime Surveillance, Climate Resilience & Proofing.

The first day (13 June) consisted of seminars that addressed these themes. For these seminars, ESA took representative EO service providers specialised on these domains to present the capabilities of European and Canadian Industry. These companies comprised : GeoVille (A), GAF (D), GISAT (Czech), TRE (I), CLS (F), and Hatfield Consultants ©. In addition, the Secretary General of EARSC gave a broader overview of the European EO service sector.

On the second day, ESA had separate meetings with senior ADB personnel. These included the Directors of all 5 geographic operating regions of ADB, together with the Director of Policy and Strategy, and the Deputy Director General of Regional Sustainable Development. The visit was extremely positive and concluded with ADB expressing strong support to further collaborate with ESA to assess the value of European EO capabilities for ADB activities.

For further details on the discussions held, please see 20130613_ESA_ADB_visit_notes_FINAL.pdf

Dialogue continues between ESA and ADB staff regarding requirements for EO-based information in support of bank activities. Some 38 candidate bank projects are being investigated across all 6 geographic regions of bank operations, with the types of information required falling in the following basic categories :

  • urban development (13),
  • water resources (10),
  • climate change (8),
  • agriculture and rural development (5),
  • forestry (4),
  • disaster risk (4),
  • marine and coastal environment (6),
  • energy and natural resource extraction (4)

Given this large interest from ADB, the aim is to finalise the requirements for 10 ADB projects that can be supported by EO-based information. The geo-information requirements of the selected Bank projects will form input to the ITT that ESA will release for the European and Canadian EO service suppliers to respond to in December of 2013.