On 5 and 6 March, invited by the European Space Agency, GMV went to ESA-ESRIN’s site in Frascati, Italy, to present the AfriCultuReS project (Enhancing Food Security in African Agricultural Systems with the support of Remote Sensing) at the second “EO for Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture” congress.

Funded by the Horizon 2020 (H2020) program and coordinated by GMV, AfriCultuReS aims to design, implement and demonstrate an integrated agricultural monitoring and early warning system that will support decision-making in the field of food security in Africa. To do so it will apply geospatial science to sustainable agricultural development, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation in Africa.

The project brings together seventeen prestigious African and European organizations that are benchmarks in various fields of specialization: climatology, meteorology, crop yield monitoring and modelling, information technologies, social sciences and earth observation.

Project presentation fell to Juan Suarez, Project Head in the Service Division of the Earth Observation Exploitation Platforms. During these opening remarks he set out the framework of activities for the upcoming years of this project, which is set to play a key role in the ongoing Europe-Africa dialogue and is considered by the European Union as one of the keystones of its strategy for intensifying cooperation and development of European Union-African Union policy. In the context of earth observation this cooperation crystallizes in the GMES and Africa program, tied in with the European Union’s Copernicus program. AfriCultuReS will also contribute towards initiatives under GEO (Group on Earth Observation), an intergovernmental organization working to improve the availability, access and use of Earth observation for the benefit of society. In particular the project will contribute to the European and African GEO initiatives, EuroGEOSS and AfriGEOSS, as well as the global crop monitoring program GEOGLAM.