Understanding the Potential of Earth Observation Data for Africa

Can you imagine the endless opportunities we can unlock by effectively analyzing satellite imagery and earth observation data for the African continent? And apparently, we have over three decades of satellite imagery that can help address critical challenges. Well, I think it's not the time to imagine if that data is available. Let's hear from an expert, Dr. Lisa Rebelo, who's a Lead Scientist at Digital Earth Africa. Dr. Lisa, tell us, what are the possibilities that can be unlocked from this data? Well, we've been collecting these data for, as you said, now almost 40 years, over all of our land surface, our oceans, some of them every week. And we've captured these changes over the past decades, and the data are actually freely available. And the challenge we have across Africa is that while they're freely available, they're not being effectively utilized simply because of the challenge of accessing those data. And so we've been looking through a program called Digital Earth Africa at how we can do this more effectively, and how we can address the gap and stimulate the economic development around the use and supporting structures to access the data more effectively and consistently. And now also with climate change awareness and acceptance, as well as the seen challenges of what it means for those on land, where is the potential impact that solves this really earth-defying challenge? Yeah, well, given that we can look at trends over the past 30, 40 years, and the data updated on a regular weekly basis, we can start to understand what the impacts are that we're having, the impacts of the climate, changing climates, increasing variability on our land surfaces, on water, on agriculture, on our coastlines. And so by combining these data, making them available through the cloud, using big data processing technologies, we can actually really exploit the density of this information source to understand how we can support countries across the continent to put in place national adaptation plans, disaster monitoring, and how to respond to the changes we're seeing occurring at the moment. And this is business, right? This is actually a huge multi-billion dollar business. How is it? Who's buying it? What is the potential to business and to organizations to enable them to reap the financial rewards from the data? Yeah, so this is actually what we refer to as a new space economy, where we've seen over a 700% increase in the launch of earth observation satellites and data within the data industry itself over the past decade. And to give you an idea, I think there's currently about over 9,000 active satellites orbiting the earth, and about 20% of those are focused on collecting data of the earth, of our land and oceans. And so there's a huge potential here for the public and the private sector to use these to solve the current environmental and climate challenges we're seeing to mitigate risks and to aid economic growth. And I think what's interesting is that a lot of this is on the African continent. Are we only seeing the world from our perspective? Is it every continent of interest or is Africa of particular interest? So every continent, every space is of interest. Africa lags behind in this space in the use of the data. And so through Digital Earth Africa, this is the gap that we're trying to address by making the data freely available and trying to integrate it into more widespread use, more widespread applications across a range of sectors and industry from government, private sectors, public and private sectors. And while several countries around the world have these existing what we refer to as data cubes in place, none of them are quite at the scale of what we're doing across the African continent, where we're making the data available for all African nations. And it's a good thing we're starting off with it being for free, because the idea of costing, before you know it, it is inaccessible and cannot be utilised by those who need it the most. And I see that entrepreneurs are part of your focus of giving it to them. What would it do for the entrepreneurial space were they to absolutely understand how to access it and how to use it for their benefit? Yes, so it's very challenging as a startup, as an entrepreneur working in this space to begin to use the data. The data are challenging to acquire, to scale up, to compute, to analyse. And so by addressing it at a larger scale, we're able to do this much more cost effectively. And by addressing that component, we're enabling the startups, the private sector, the small, medium enterprises to really take that data and leverage it to get to the point that they want to be where they're using it without having to invest themselves in that upstream technology. So we're trying to support the downstream market more effectively. And I think one final question. I still can't believe that we were part of a decade or a lifetime where we saw so many global challenges, including the pandemic at most. And then we're also seeing really very bad climate effects. How prepared are we to perhaps translate data into lifesaving tools should something else of this nature, of this type of pandemic occur? Is it a possibility that there's a key there that's going to be absolutely critical for us as human beings? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And without a doubt, we have the data, we have the ways of analysing it, of interpreting it. If we look back at the Covid pandemic, it was a very clear relationship between changes in our environment and the spread of such diseases. And so going forward, it's more about how we actually integrate these data into decision making, how we ensure that the structures are set up to effectively do that and to integrate it as needed rather than after the event. And how do people access it? I mean, we have a fantastic conversation, but what am I going to type in if I'm in this space and I'm really wanting to get connected to this world? Where do I go? So if you look up Digital Africa, you will find our platforms which enable you to access it depending on your technical capabilities, whether you're a journalist who just wants to visualise the data, we have a platform for that. Whether you're a data scientist and want to actually exploit and write your own algorithms around analysing the data, we have a platform for that. So yeah, just look for Digital Earth Africa. Well, thank you so much. I think it's been a fascinating conversation and I'm glad we're calling it data. I'm constantly being told by my little one that it's data, but I'm going to tell her that you said data with me and we both are on the same page. Thank you for making the time. We'll definitely be exploring this further. That's all we do have time for. That was Dr Lisa Rabello, Lead Scientist at Digital Earth Africa.

CNBC Africa is joined by Dr. Lisa Rebelo, Lead Scientist, at Digital Earth Africa for this discussion. 

Unlocking the power of earth observation data

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