Addis Ababa
Ethiopia

8th International conference of the African association of remote sensing and the environment AARSE 2010

Organizer(s) UN Economic Commission for Africa African Association of Remote Sensing of the Environment
Venue
United Nations Conference Center in Addis Ababa (UNCC-AA)
Date
-

Today, Africa faces major pressing issues: climate change impact, water scarcity, energy shortage, environmental stresses and food crisis, which affect citizens, business and the community at large. Efforts were made by African countries to work out strategies and policies coordinated in the fields of the environment and the sustainable development. On all these challenges, constitution of coherent seamless and up-to-date spatially enabled information is an essential precondition for setting up coordinated policy and strategy.

As the institution responsible for harnessing information for an African Information Society and knowledge economy, as well as developing capacity for the formulation, adaptation, implementation and evaluation of appropriate information, science and technology policies and programs, ECA is provided with exciting opportunities to champion the use of space technology and information services to drive Africa to become more spatially enabled.

Whilst the organization is developing appropriate responses to the growing demand from users - for simple, convenient access to online information, products and services, it does not forget that to fully leverage the "enabling" capabilities of Earth Observation for development, it still has to encourage and continually increase the use of geospatial data in the decision making processes for sustainable development, economic growth, resource exploitation, environmental protection, exploitation and management, and social progress and to make appropriate geospatial data and information available and easily accessible to the entire community of users.

The central theme of the conference is earth observation for Africa’s development agenda. The four major scientific sub-themes of the conference are:

- Food and water security (mapping production zones), yield forecast, agricultural and pastoral systems, assessing (quality and quantity) of water resources in Africa, surface water body monitoring, seasonal hydrological characteristics assessment, Flood forecasting).
- Energy resources (mapping, monitoring and management of energy resources, power infrastructure management, etc.)
- Disaster risk reduction (risk assessment for sustainable development, provision of geo-information on hazards and risks, disaster risk reduction in national policy, strengthening community level capacities to reduce disaster risk at the local level, disaster mitigation, vulnerability to compounded disasters, predicting vulnerability to urbanization and to climate change)
- Marine and costal management (resources & sustainable development; marine ecosystem; coastal, marine, and oceanography resources management; assimilation, modelling and forecasting: towards ocean and coastal products and services in Africa; quantitative indicators of risk and resilience of coastal populations; impacts of coastal inundation on coastal ecosystems; monitoring and modelling coastal lagoons).

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Hazards Flood
Country and region Ethiopia Africa
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