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Africa stands to gain from Earth Observation (EO) science, products and applications. However, its use and application remain below potential on the continent. This article examines how EO can better serve the needs of African users. First, we argue that a successful uptake of EO services is conditional on understanding the African context and matching EO development and deployment to it. Using reference cases, we find that actors outside Africa drive most EO initiatives, whereas country-level expenditures on EO remain low. Recent developments, such as the African space policy and strategy, and initiatives in partnerships with Africa-based organisations to develop a community of practice on EO hold the potential to fill the identified gaps. The analysis indicates that most EO users are either government organisations or researchers, with very few cases involving other types of users. It is generally assumed that users at the local levels are educated and digitally literate, or that the transmission of EO-based knowledge is achieved by government officers and researchers. Although still very few, potentials are emerging for the private sector to deploy EO products and services such as crop or index-based insurance directly to farmers. These private initiatives have prospects for further developing indigenous EO capacity as envisioned in the African space policy and strategy. We then formulate recommendations for a transdisciplinary approach that integrates user contexts, attributes and needs to enhance the uptake of EO products and services in Africa. We conclude by proposing actions to close some of the identified gaps and seize emerging opportunities., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10712-022-09724-1., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

Urban development will likely continue to increase in suburban areas to cater for the growing human population. In Nigeria, the relevant analysis of these urban developments is not well documented. This article presents spatiotemporal datasets for analysing urban developments in a suburb of Kuje, an Area Council within the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria. Data from Google Earth (GE) historical imagery of 2005 was used as a baseline for analysis and was compared with a UAV digital orthomosaic of 2019 to quantify urban developments. This data provides useful information on the status of urban development that has taken place in the Kuje suburb over 14 years. The data will be of great importance to town planners and urban development authorities for future planning, and for making informed decisions about urban development issues in the area., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 The Author(s).)

Food systems must become more sustainable and equitable, a transformation which requires the transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge. We present a framework of food sustainability that was co-created by academic and non-academic actors and comprises five dimensions: food security, right to food, environmental performance, poverty and inequality, and social-ecological resilience. For each dimension, an interdisciplinary research team-together with actors from different food systems-defined key indicators and empirically applied them to six case studies in Kenya and Bolivia. Food sustainability scores were analysed for the food systems as a whole, for the five dimensions, and for food system activities. We then identified the indicators with the greatest influence on sustainability scores. While all food systems displayed strengths and weaknesses, local and agroecological food systems scored comparatively highly across all dimensions. Agro-industrial food systems scored lowest in environmental performance and food security, while their resilience scores were medium to high. The lowest-scoring dimensions were right to food, poverty and inequality, with particularly low scores obtained for the indicators women's access to land and credit, agrobiodiversity, local food traditions, social protection, and remedies for violations of the right to food. This qualifies them as key levers for policy interventions towards food sustainability.

Enjoying the potential climate benefits of restoration requires linking key forest-water and land-atmosphere interactions to the existential benefits provided on the ground. We apply what we call the "forest-water and land-atmosphere interaction lens" to current strategies for improving landscape resilience in the West African Sahel and the concept of the Great Green Wall (GGW). The severe and extensive drought of the 1970's-1990's led many to assess future climate and promote strategies to counter the gradual southward expansion of the Sahara. The idea for the GGW, a wall of trees intended to slow desert encroachment, grew out of this period of tremendous upheaval and human tragedy. Despite partial recovery in the local rainfall regime, we know far too little about whether the GGW strategy can even work. Further, it seems disingenuous to ignore the climatic envelope, which sets the boundaries within which forest-water and land-atmosphere interactions occur. Applying the "forest-water and land-atmosphere interaction lens" to landscape restoration as a tool for achieving improved resilience and human welfare in the Sahel provides meaningful input for re-thinking the GGW strategy. We upgrade current knowledge with the specific biophysical conditions likely to better support appropriate forest-water and land atmosphere interactions in the region and further fit such approaches within the context of the climatic envelope. The principal components of an improved strategy include a focus on large scale precipitation recycling all the way from the West African coast on into the Sahel, as well as improved tree, shrub and forest cover in the Sahel proper to promote infiltration, groundwater recharge, rainfall triggering potential and land surface cooling. Agroforestry can further broadly promote landscape resilience in the greater region. Strategies broadly focused on increasing rainfall recycling, water availability and the promotion of landscape resilience appear more likely to steer future efforts in useful directions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

One Health (OH) positions health professionals as agents for change and provides a platform to manage determinants of health that are often not comprehensively captured in medicine or public health alone. However, due to the organization of societies and disciplines, and the sectoral allocation of resources, the development of transdisciplinary approaches requires effort and perseverance. Therefore, there is a need to provide evidence on the added value of OH for governments, researchers, funding bodies, and stakeholders. This paper outlines a conceptual framework of what OH approaches can encompass and the added values they can provide. The framework was developed during a workshop conducted by the "Network for Evaluation of One Health," an Action funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology. By systematically describing the various aspects of OH, we provide the basis for measuring and monitoring the integration of disciplines, sectors, and stakeholders in health initiatives. The framework identifies the social, economic, and environmental drivers leading to integrated approaches to health and illustrates how these evoke characteristic OH operations, i.e., thinking, planning, and working, and require supporting infrastructures to allow learning, sharing, and systemic organization. It also describes the OH outcomes (i.e., sustainability, health and welfare, interspecies equity and stewardship, effectiveness, and efficiency), which are not possible to obtain through sectoral approaches alone, and their alignment with aspects of sustainable development based on society, environment, and economy.