Search

Despite the increasing openness and democratisation of satellite data and associated processing tools, the use of these data and the information derived from them remains relatively limited in the Southern countries. For several years now, initiatives have been launched to improve access and use by local actors. This paper presents the results of 3 successive projects funded by the French Development Agency in Central and West Africa between 2010 and 2020. These projects, led by IGN FI and the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), have provided some answers to the main challenges identified by local partners such as: access to data, improving data processing skills, raising awareness among decision-makers and land managers of the information and services that can be derived from it, reference land cover maps production by local teams, and the development and structuring of user networks. This paper presents the actions and results in three areas of intervention, namely (i) the free provision of recent high-resolution data, (ii) the local production of forest cover and land use change maps and (iii) the promotion of the use of images through training and scientific activities. The results of several projects supported within the framework of these actions are published in this special Africa issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can sustainable agricultural development be reconciled with the fight against climate change and the preservation of biodiversity? To reach such a challenge, political, technical, and socio-economic decision-makers now have access to accurate and valuable environmental information. These include satellite images and environmental data produced from these images. In Guinea, in order to carry out public policies for the sustainable management of territories and natural resources, the government must be in a position to have reliable, consistent, precise, and as recent as possible information on the state and dynamics of its territory (soil artificialisation, agricultural extension, deforestation, mining...) and on the evolution of certain features of the biosphere (forests, savannas, wetlands, mangroves...). To this end, the Guinean Ministry of Agriculture has relied on the French technical expertise to draw up an agroecological zoning for the country, aimed at identifying and quantifying current agricultural areas, assessing agricultural potential, and mapping land cover and land cover change over a 10-year period (2005-2015). This project was implemented over two years in a partnership framework between a team of French thematic experts and a team of Guinean technicians and experts involving a specific organisation and procedure, to ensure a complete transfer of skills on all project activities, from the realisation of a land cover layer to relevant applications in the field of agriculture and the environment, with the aim of providing decision support tools to multiple Guinean actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]