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2\12 ESA - TUBE-ing with TESEO- Treaty officials assess how space could help
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European Space Agency

Press Release

TUBE-ing with TESEO: Treaty officials assess how space could help
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12 February 2003

One international treaty official offered to a recent ESA workshop his 
motivation to participate in a pilot project to see how satellite
imagery could monitor international treaties. 

There is a perception that the world is losing its quality wetlands
through ecological deterioration," said Nick Davidson, Deputy
Secretary General for the Ramsar Convention, a treaty on wetlands
conservation. "In practice, we have little idea of what is really
going on."

The practice and potential of using ESA satellite imagery in treaty
applications was the focus of the third TESEO Users Brainstorming
Event (TUBE 3), held 23 January at ESA's ESRIN facility in Frascati,
Italy. ESA established TESEO, for Treaty Enforcement Services using
Earth Observation, two years ago to open a dialogue with the
secretariats and others involved in this international community to
see if, and how, satellite imagery could be of help.

The international conventions either involved in the TESEO effort, or
exploring the opportunity to work more closely with ESA in using Earth 
observation data, cover a wide range of activities, from monitoring 
wetlands and ensuring compliance with Kyoto Protocol emission targets 
to combating desertification and preserving World Heritage sites and 
protecting gorillas in east and central Africa.  For ESA, TESEO 
represents a means to establish a dialogue and determine the 
requirements of these important players on the global scene for 
practical, useful EO products. 


TESEO pilot projects
--------------------
In the TESEO project, ESA assisted the Ramsar Convention to see "what'
s really going on" by funding a demonstration project to use radar
imagery in creating maps and studying the changes in test wetlands
areas in Canada, Spain and Senegal. A team of remote sensing companies 
headed by Canada's Atlantis Scientific worked ecological authorities 
and research institutes in the countries in seeing what Earth 
observation products could be developed and applied to local user 
requirements.

For wetlands applications, reported Don Ball, project manager with
Atlantis, satellite data won't provide all the answers. "Data must be
integrated from several sources," he observed. "Including Earth
observation, other geospatial sources, ground observations, chemical
and biological information." 

As a follow-on to the pilot project for the Ramsar Convention, ESA
will fund the €1 million Globwetland program to produce wetlands
inventory maps and digital elevation models covering both wetlands and 
surrounding catchment areas. Users in the project, according to
Olivier Arino, head of the Projects Section within ESA's Earth
Observation Programmes, will include the Convention's national points
of contact, wetlands managers, non-governmental agencies and
scientific researchers engaged in local wetlands studies. 

The service definition phase of the program will start next year,
Arino said, with the formulation and assessment of potential EO
products for the effort scheduled to run through 2005. 


Forest inventories for Kyoto
----------------------------
Another project arising from the TESEO initiative is the Kyoto
Inventory, a €1 million commitment to produce forest inventory and
change maps for users including the Finnish Forest Research Institute, 
the Italian Ministry of Environment, the Norwegian Ministry of 
Agriculture, and the Swiss Agency for the Environment.

The project will be undertaken to support the United Nations Framework 
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted in 1992 and which, in 
turn, led to the adoption five years later of the Kyoto Protocol that 
broke new ground with its legally binding restraints on signatories 
concerning greenhouse gas emissions.

The UNFCCC secretariat has participated in TESEO for the past two
years to determine whether satellite imagery could be beneficial to
signatories in developing their Kyoto-mandated national greenhouse
inventories,” including details on their forest areas, along with
other crop and agricultural areas, that act as natural "sponges" in
soaking up carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.

Providing this annual report on national greenhouse inventories
requires accurate data on national and regional scales concerning
changes in land uses and forest areas, according to Claudio Forner, an 
official with the Convention's methods, inventories and science
programme. 

Unfortunately, he added, it's not an easy requirement to meet. Of the
41 leading industrialised nations that comprise the so-called "Annex
I" categories of Kyoto countries, only 27 provided their annual
greenhouse gas inventories in 2001, Forner said. 

"Measuring carbon and identifying land-use change on an annual basis
is a very difficult task," he added. "It's simply too costly." 

A lack of information on a supra-national scale, as well as
differences in how land use and forest inventories are calculated also 
compound the difficulties in providing a common national inventory of 
land use and how it changes. For instance, only half of Italy's 
regions have prepared estimates on their forest inventories.  Of those 
completed, said Lucia Perugina from the University of Tuscia, sharp 
differences were evident in the datasets and measurements. "It makes 
consistency difficult," she said. 

For Forner, addressing these shortcomings in national and regional
reporting makes the use of satellite data attractive. The benefits to
EO data from space include lower costs, and the prospects of a
consistent and effective standard of reporting the data, the UN
official said.

Despite his optimism, widespread use of satellite observation to
assist in the development, or verify the accuracy, of national
greenhouse inventories will raise some ticklish political questions
concerning the external monitoring of a country's sovereign resources
from space. 

"The use of satellite data (for monitoring compliance) has not been
considered by my Convention," he said. "We still have a long way to
go." 

(continued)

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