The overall objective of the AMESD programme in the SADC region is to empower the REC and its member states to manage their agricultural and environmental resources in a sustainable way.

Based upon the user needs requirement, the THEMA will develop 3 operational services by making use of Earth Observation data:

1. Agricultural Service (for monitoring the state of the crops and rangelands)

2. Drought Service

3. Fire Service (for monitoring the fire-risk, the active fire and the burnt area after the event)

An underlying LRF (Long Range Forecasting) support service will give a seasonal outlook to the 3 main services. These developments are further supported by activities to build up and maintain the capacity, to interact with the users and activities to improve the access to the data.

The SADC Member states that participate to the SADC THEMA are Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South-Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The services will directly target the Ministries of Agriculture and the Ministries of Environment in the 9 participating SADC Member States. 

Agriculture in Southern Africa

Crops are the most important natural resource for the people of Southern Africa. With 70% of the people living on small-scale, unproductive farms, the crop production is responsible for 60-70% of export earnings and employment. Also livestock constitutes an important natural resource of the Southern African Region, with over 60% of the region’s total land area suitable for livestock farming. Food is a basic human need, but being unable to afford enough to eat is still a reality for too many people in Southern Africa.

Still today, many Southern African citizens live continuously in the uncertainty to have sufficient food supply at their household level. There are not sufficient jobs in Southern Africa to bring in financial means to buy food; so many families rely on their own food production through farming or livestock keeping for most of their livelihood. Outside South Africa, agriculture is dominated by small-scale farmers, which most often have less than ten hectares of land. Those small-scale farming provides most of the food produced in Southern-Africa, as well as employment for 60% of working people. If all goes well, selling agricultural resources is the main generator of savings for the people and constitutes the backbone of most African economies. This situation puts the population at a high risk as more than 95 per cent of African agriculture is rain dependant.

And the situation for the people and the farmers is worsening due to (i) the adverse effects of climate change, (ii) soil erosion, (iii) food prices increases, (iv) reduced life expectancy and the productive capacity of farming households and (v) the impacts of economic liberalization and globalization.

If this evolution continues, the consumers in Southern Africa will have to spend an even higher share of their income on food, linking poverty and hunger. Southern Africa is still very vulnerable to food insecurity. Agriculture remains a key critical issue for the population of Southern Africa.

The Governments in Southern Africa are well aware of the risk, making Agriculture a National priority. They recognize the importance of the role of their Ministries of Agriculture to monitor the agriculture (both the crop and the rangeland), to ensure food security and to promote the sustainable utilization of natural resources. Many MoA also already use satellite data to assist them with their work. Monitoring of crop development and grazing capacity, and the provision of seasonal forecast can further improve the existing agricultural monitoring systems.

Drought in Souhthern Africa

The definition of drought is varied, but they usually involve a deficiency of precipitation and diminished plant growth and development. In this document we define drought as a period of reduced plant growth, vis – a - vis the historical averages caused by reduced precipitation. Droughts continue to occur over many parts of the globe, notably Eastern-Africa, many areas in Sub-Saharan Africa including West - and Southern Africa, Indonesia, Australia and North-Eastern Brazil in varying degrees of severity and duration. Observations from the 2007 IPCC assessments signal an increasing trend in the frequency of drought in Southern Africa since 1970s, which has been linked to changes in the patterns of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) due to global warming.

Drought is one of the fundamental problems in SADC region. For instance, the 1994/95 rainy season was reminiscent of 1991/92, when a devastating drought crippled agricultural production. Consequently national drought emergencies were declared in Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

During drought years nations experience considerable distress, mass starvation, famine and cessation of economic activity – particularly within the developing world where economies are mainly tied to their natural resources. Disasters caused by drought are also strongly affected by such diverse factors as poor agricultural practices, increase in population density and the country’s inability to provide alternative supplies of food, water and employment. Droughts related disasters also include fire hazards and outbreaks of disease epidemics e.g. cholera. It impacts negatively both agricultural production and environmental resources with negative consequences on overall development process.

It is against this background that the Drought service was proposed for the AMESD SADC Thematic action: “Agriculture and Environment Resource management.” These particular services are relevant for the SADC THEMA and provide an opportunity to use satellite remote sensing technology to quantify the photosynthetic capacity of the terrestrial surface. Remote Sensing can help to warn the decision-makers well in advance and allow them to take the necessary decisions (e.g. water restrictions including water allocation with restrictions in accordance with water resources masterplans or water budgeting, dam management, agriculture and livestock subsidies, …). As a result, the occurrence of drought shall not be such a shock to communities. The increasing availability of these services will help mitigate the negative effects of drought in the SADC participating member states.

Fire in Souhthern Africa

Fire is prevalent throughout Southern Africa, due to a climate characterised by the distinct dry and wet periods and the widespread poverty necessitating the use of fire as a land use tool. Bushfires occur every season, destroying vast environmental resources. Anthropogenic climate change coupled population growth and ineffective land management systems has lead to burning practices that are uncoordinated in terms of timing, location, and frequency with negative impact on local to regional land use, productivity, carrying capacity and biodiversity. Large parts of the territory are burned every year and this is expected to increase in future as a result of an increase in climate variability in the region due to climate change.

Fire occurs due to lightning and because of people. Humans have exercised significant control over fire regimes in southern Africa for at least 10,000 years. Fire has been used as a management tool - in hunting, pasture management and crop production. Uncontrolled fire can threaten lives and property, and damage natural resources, something that can be devastating when followed by periods of low rainfall. Wild fires contribute significant amounts of greenhouse gases and particulates to the atmosphere, potentially influencing climate change.

To promote positive, and mitigate negative impacts, fire needs to be managed wisely. This in turn requires access to reliable information on fire. Fire managers at the MoE need different types of information before, during and after the event. Fire managers want to assess the risk before the event, they want to detect the fire and follow-up the movement of the fire during the hazard and they want to assess the damage after the event and monitor the recovery process. Remote sensing and field observations can provide them with a lot of this required information. The big advantage of using Remote Sensing for the detection of active fires is the timeliness. A satellite can scan the region every 15 minutes, and broadcast this information in real Time. The Fires could then be detected at a very early stage of development, which would ease the control of them.

More detailed Description

The overall objective of the AMESD programme in the SADC region is to empower the REC and its member states to manage their agricultural and environmental resources in a sustainable way. This will be achieved by

(i) developing operational geo-information services,

(ii) facilitating access to Africa-wide environmental information derived from Earth Observation technologies, and

(iii) strengthening the information management capacity of regional and national institutions in order to support decision and policy making processes.

Based upon the user needs requirement, the SADC partners proposed to set-up 3 main-services within the SADC THEMA:

1. Agricultural Service

2. Drought Service

3. Fire Service

The Agricultural Service will monitor the state of the crops and rangeland.

The Drought Service will monitor drought during the whole year and deliver a decadal “Drought map” and a “Drought Outlook” in support of both agriculture and environmental issues.

The Fire Service will provide a daily fire risk indication (before the fire), continuous active fire maps (in real time during the fire season, refreshed every 15 minutes) and monthly burnt area assessments (after the fire).

These 3 main services monitor the current status of the Agricultural production and Environment and give us a picture of the “situation of today”. But the decision makers also want to look forward and have an idea what the future will bring. Will it get worse or better in the coming months? The main-services are all weather dependant, so a common “Long Range Forecast” service will complement the 3 main services and provide them with a longer-term dimension. It will enable the main service producers to include a seasonal forecast outlook in their reports and bulletins.

With those services the RIC covers the hot topics in Southern Africa, which are the condition of the crop and the rangeland and the two major events that threaten the availability of environmental resources being drought and bushfire.

The AMESD THEMA serves 2 user communities, the agricultural community (with in general the Ministry of Agriculture as the focal point) and the Environmental community (with in general the Ministry of Environment as the focal point).

In order to maximize the impact and the benefit for the end-users, the SADC THEMA has been conceived to start from existing capacity that is available in one of its participating member states. All the proposed services have already successfully gone through validation exercises and are currently running in an operational mode in a certain country or area. The AMESD THEMA will build upon these achievements and improve and expand them towards all participating SADC member states. This enables us to have all services operational within the first year. When the users have had the opportunity to explore and give feedback on the services, some budget is foreseen to implement small improvements (quick win adaptations). This “service upgrade” is foreseen after 1 year of operation.

This approach enabled us to spend the majority of the budget on user related activities, such as Capacity Building (27%), User Interaction (18%) and improving Data Access (12%). These activities are emphasized as AMESD really aims to support the users to embed the SADC THEMA services in their regular reporting activities to make a difference in the daily life of its people.

The SADC THEMA improves the access to data by:

1) Installing the EUMETCAST station (provided by the SuCR1 Contract at continental level and supported by BDMS and its partners) in the Agricultural Focal Point of each participating country (The exact location is to be defined by the individual member country in cooperation with the AMESD partners, it can be expected that it will be the MoA in many countries); and

2) Installing extra EUMETCast stations, devoted to receive information on Fire and drought, in the Environmental Focal Point of each participating country using SADC THEMA Grant funding (The exact location is to be defined by the individual member country in cooperation with the AMESD partners, it can be expected that it will be the MoE in many countries); and

3) Disseminating essential datasets (CBERS2B country mosaics, LandSAT, …) and historical EUMETCast datasets (e.g. SPOT-VEGETATION radio + NDVI archive, VGT4Africa datasets) on a 1TB hard disk to each MoA and a collaborating University in each participating country; and

4) Providing free VHR and HR data and advanced products (the output of the services) to the end-users.

The Technical capacity both at Regional and National level will be strengthened by:

1) Creating and distributing stand-alone training packages of the SADC services. (both in English and Portuguese).

2) Trainings on receiving station management and maintenance for the new EUMETCast receiving stations established in the Environmental Focal Point of each country.

3) Following the on-the-job training of the E-Station for BDMS staff at JRC.

4) Organising on-distance courses on GIS and Remote Sensing (EO techniques and its applications) to first ensure a basic level of GIS & RS knowledge of our users.

5) Organising a dedicated training program towards the 3 THEMA services in a “train the trainer” concept, first at Regional level followed by training at National level. It consists of:

a) Regional training: 2 sessions of 2 weeks in Pretoria (4p/country)

b) National training: 2 sessions of 1 week in each participating member state.(‘unlimited’ participation of National stakeholders)

These are the most important training that consumes most of the effort and the budget. (i.e.

6) Supporting the development of relevant curriculum at Universities for building up capacity on the long term (both via ready to use modular training packages as well as via the delivery of relevant datasets).

7) Establishing links and collaboration with the higher-learning Institutes in Africa and support and promote R&D activities (e.g. validation) with the aim to enhance the operational SADC THEMA services on the long term.

The BDMS will perform in general the production at a Regional level. In order to empower member states to build up monitoring capacity at a National level, the Nations are stimulated to use this methodology and production systems for country wide Agricultural and Environmental Resource management.

The “Service Oriented Training” consists of:

· Stand-alone training packages of the SADC services, as explained in (1).

· Regional training, as explained in (4a)

· National training, as explained in (4b)

The focus of the SADC THEMA capacity building is on these “Service training” activities. They all together consume 87,4% of the overall training budget. (i.e. 396k€).

Policy makers will be sensitised via the “Policy Dialogue Open Day” during the workshops, via the distribution of promotional material, and most often via the direct contacts via their MoA and MoE.

Each National and Regional workshops will include a “Policy Dialogue Open Day”, where Regional and/or National policy makers will be invited to discuss the role of EO in decision support.

 

 

Masego Nkepu, one of the trainees in Botswana