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2\12 ESA - TUBE-ing with TESEO- Treaty officials assess how space could help
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Fighting desertification with better information
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While the spread of desertification and the effects of drought have
clear global implications, from contributing to 50 armed conflicts in
1994 to creating potentially 50 million environmental refugees by
2010, Rui Zheng, Programme Officer with the UN Convention to Combat
Desertification (UNCCD), told the workshop.

National and international efforts to combat desertification have been 
hampered by the lack of reliable desert inventories and the capacity 
in developing countries to utilise fully the analytical tools offered 
by remote sensing technologies, he added. To help address these 
shortcomings, Zheng outlined one of UNCCD's initiatives to assist 
countries monitor and assess desertification and drought, "so as to 
provide reliable information to the governments and people, as well as 
the international community, for wise solutions." 

Pointing to the China in particular, Zheng noted that two
desertification inventories have been conducted in the past ten years
to identify the dynamic changes of land and ground vegetation, with a
third one currently underway. Earth observation officials from ESA,
together with representatives from UNCCD, the Chinese Academy of
Forestry and other national research organisations will meet in
Beijing in May to discuss ways that ESA's satellite imagery and
expertise could assist in producing desertification maps and other
efforts to combat desertification. 


TESEO as a catalyst
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TESEO was intended as a catalyst, a way to bring together separate
communities that ordinarily do not talk with each other. It
established a two-year-long forum in which to define what information
shortfalls exists, define the EO products needed to address them and
establish some short-term study projects to validate their accuracy.

The effort succeeded at focusing what types of satellite data are
needed and which forms of analysis are useful in addressing users'
needs for the Conventions that participated in the process, including
Ramsar, UNFCCC, and UNCCD. Secretariats from other Conventions,
including the World Heritage Convention (WHC) and the UN Convention on 
Biological Diversity (UNCBD), sent representatives attended the TUBE 3 
workshop after hearing about the program from their colleagues.

Some of the individual pilot projects developed under TESEO, including 
the wetlands and the Kyoto inventory, will continue as independent 
activities. ESA currently is assessing whether the TESEO effort will 
go forward, according to ESA's Arino, with a possibility that the 
initiative will be folded into the upcoming Global Monitoring for 
Environment and Security (GMES) initiative sponsored by ESA and the 
European Commission. 

One new project, the €1 TESEO-MATRIX initiative, will see how the
Earth observation requirements from the five Conventions present at
the workshop - UNFCCC, Ramsar, UNCCD and UNCBD, and WHC - could be
pooled to take advantage of the synergies among the Conventions'
requirements and offer economies of scale for new EO products and
services. For its part, ESA will assist in the development of common
EO products for analysing land cover and changes, land use and
changes, and digital elevation models. 

Representatives from the Conventions are expected to meet soon to
discuss further the MATRIX project and agree on common test sites
suitable for all.

The clear message coming from participants at the TUBE 3 workshop was
that the effort to explore how data from space could help monitor
international agreements is just at the starting point.

"A couple of years ago three or four communities came together,
talking different languages, and we were a bit baffled how this would
all work," Ramsar's Davidson said. "Now we realize we where talking
the same thing and the challenge now is - where does it go from here?"

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