Prf David Wield

The increasing length (in time) and coverage (in area) of remote sensing or Earth Observation (EO) data and EO products is having a large impact on the way we understand and offers the potential for new ways of managing our environment. Much of this data and information is now freely available and increasingly accessible to the global population, providing immense new opportunities for developing countries. Ongoing global warming, which is likely to reach 1.5°C in the next decades, will have significant impact on the rural communities of sub-Saharan Africa, which are reliant primarily on rain-fed crop and livestock farming, typically on small plots of land. However, these communities have limited knowledge of, and adaptive capacity for, climate change scenarios, and therefore are at risk of chronic food insecurity and disproportionate suffering from climatic variability, despite having probably contributed least to global warming. The ultimate goal of the project we wish to develop is to make more effective use of the vast amounts of increasingly accessible EO data to underpin the early-warning, planning, and management of climate extremes in some of the most vulnerable regions of Africa. We will use the network grant to a) develop a network of researchers in sub-Saharan Africa, and b) identify the requirements and needs of, and methods for communication this information to, the relevant rural communities. We will hold a project scoping and network building workshop in Botswana, where will bring together potential project partners to identify the key agro-ecological/livelihood zones in the Kalahari Basin region; the requirements in terms of information that will help resilience planning for these communities; and effective methods of communicating this information to the communities. Preliminary data collection ahead of the scoping workshop will involve some region-specific stakeholder participatory workshops (2-3, budget depending). The information and outputs from the above activities will be drawn together to start bid development, which will be possibly included as an activity in the networking grant. Identified institutions that will be invited to participate in the project include: University of Botswana, Botswana; University of Kinshasa, DR Congo; University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Economic and Social Research Foundation, Tanzania; Midlands State University, Zimbabwe, and the African Technology Innovation Hub Initiative (AfriLabs), Nigeria. In each we have already made contact with relevant individuals.

Extension of funding Stream