Promoting Climate Services Through Earth Observations in Africa

With the advent of remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the call for open data, there has been massive development around the concept of Earth Observation. To this end, various institutions and governments are investing greatly to ensure that we have sufficient data to monitor, measure and predict the health of our earth. Africa has been beneficial to this stage with the springing up of various national space agencies to develop, monitor and understand environmental fluxes better. Notwithstanding these developments, there still exists a gap between how all these innovations can translate into services that add the value needed to provide for urgent needs on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) radar. The technological divide in Africa also differs from East to West and North to South, contributing to the question: how can connecting platforms – such as machine learning, IoT, big data, cloud computing, etc – dialogue together with open data earth observation products, systems and even services to provide crucial support? There is a need to improve climate services, their scalability and their integration into a daily footprint for decision and planning purposes in Africa, therefore propelling sectors like Agriculture, Water, Health, Energy, Biodiversity, Transportation, which will contribute to the managing of emerging complex disasters. Hence, this Research Topic call is looking for innovations within Africa or elsewhere that can help to promote climate services as an integral part of societal development and ultimately provide a transparent window for improving our understanding of all other sectors of Africa’s economies.

Thematic Areas
The following thematic areas are to be covered under this Research Topic, relevant for application towards the African continent:
1. Climate Innovations
2. Climate Policy
3. Climate Communications
4. Climate Services & Entrepreneurship
5. Climate Extremes and Early Warning Systems
6. Artificial Intelligence and Climate Services

Rationale
A lot of data and products are being developed using Earth Observation open sources, and these are available for the African continent. There have been some efforts in translating these into climate services in some cases in Africa. However, a comprehensive collection that takes into consideration innovations against lack of reliable internet, electricity and hardware infrastructure, including sometimes manpower skills required to harness, pose a challenge. This Research Topic is an attempt to pull these various pieces of work together as a contribution towards providing a knowledge hub for improving, promoting and developing climate services as an integral part of providing answers to the SDGs.

Proposed Contributors
Contributors will come from:
● AfrIGEO community
● National Space Agencies
● Space Industries
● Entrepreneurs
● Group on Earth Observation
● Community on Earth Observation of Satellites
● Scientists
● Engineers
● Scholars