Digital Earth Africa is steadfastly becoming the “connecting-the-dots” part of Africa’s efforts to harness information resources for the society and knowledge-led economy, says Oliver Chinganya, Director, Africa Centre for Statistics at the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).
“The Program has started paving a new way to build a robust data infrastructure that can help us have a better understanding of our changing landscape and provide insights that can enable African governments, NGOs, businesses, and individuals to make more informed decisions,” said Chinganya.
The ECA director who is also a Board Member of Digital Earth Africa was speaking at a side event on Digital Earth Africa: Earth observations for sustainability in Africa organized by the African Centre for Statistics division of ECA and Digital Earth Africa on the margins of the Economic Commission for Africa’s annual Conference of Ministers of Finance, Economic Planning and Development (CoM2022) in Dakar, Senegal.
The objective of the side event is to showcase the development of Digital Earth Africa as a unique information resource for sustainable development across Africa and to explain how Digital Earth Africa is being applied in areas such as national statistics, agriculture and water resources.
In a press release sent to The Ethiopian Herald, Chinganya noted that ECA will continue to use its convening power to foster the dialogue with member States, African sciences and research institutions, existing networks and programs, as well as other sectors to increase awareness in space science and technology insights for economic growth and social development. The Commission remains engaged to promote and support the Digital Earth Africa vision, goals and anticipated activities for the benefit of our continent.
Lisa Hall, managing director Digital Earth Africa Establishment Team said the goal of Digital Earth Africa is to deliver an exceptional fit-for-purpose platform of Earth observation satellite imagery into information and insights on the changing African landscape and coastline, which will open new data frontiers for tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
“Digital Earth Africa catalogues changes across Africa in unprecedented detail and provides spatially enabled data on a vast number of issues, including soil and coastal erosion, agriculture, forest and desert development, water quality and changes to human settlements,” said Hall.
Zviko Mudamu, Head of Operations, Digital Earth Africa said, Digital earth Africa is helping provide the data required which was already a gap before with the various partnerships we engaged with the various governments in Africa.
“Digital Earth is empowering communities with access to satellite information; communities have been empowered and are sharing their impact stories such as conservation of mangroves in Zanzibar, roaming of giraffes at Lake Baringo in Kenya,” said Mudamu
The concept of “Digital Earth” was put forward in 1998 by the then Vice-President of the United States of America, Al Gore. Since then, Digital Earth has evolved to embrace the development and adoption of technologies such as Earth observation, geo-information systems, global positioning systems, geospatial science and technology and space sciences.
According to the International Journal of Digital Earth, the digital transformation of our society coupled with the increasing exploitation of natural resources makes sustainability challenges more complex and dynamic than ever before. These changes will unlikely stop or even decelerate in the near future.
There is an urgent need for a new scientific approach and an advanced form of evidence-based decision-making towards the benefit of society, the economy, and the environment. To understand the impacts and interrelationships between humans as a society and natural Earth system processes, we propose a new engineering discipline, Big Earth Data science.
This science is called to provide the methodologies and tools to generate knowledge from diverse, numerous, and complex data sources necessary to ensure a sustainable human society essential for the preservation of planet Earth. Big Earth Data science aims at utilizing data from Earth observation and social sensing and develops theories for understanding the mechanisms of how such a social-physical system operates and evolves.
The manuscript introduces the universe of discourse characterizing this new science, its foundational paradigms and methodologies, and a possible technological framework to be implemented by applying an ecosystem approach.
Big Earth Data science challenges and collaboration opportunities
Studying the planet’s sustainability using data science must face several challenges belonging to the different domains and technological areas that constitute the context of Big Earth Data science. They deal with diverse research and innovation areas, including, holistic view – the models representing the social, economic and natural spheres of our planet as well as their interactions and integration to form a holistic view of Earth, socio-technological view – ethical and privacy challenges related to data analytics and artificial intelligence, economic-technological (or sustainability) view – there is a clear need for innovative, collaborative governance models for digital ecosystems and Interoperability view – the advent of IoT is requiring the use of new computing architectures to move intelligence from the center to the edge of the network (fog and edge computing); another valuable example is inter-cloud interoperability, the researcher at the international journal of earth science stated..
The transition from Earth data systems and data sharing to Earth data ecosystems and intelligence generation has started but it is not yet complete. To facilitate and accelerate this process, there is a need to introduce a new science: Big Earth Data science. One of its main objectives is to define a reference framework for this new paradigm.
“We have argued that Big Earth Data science is becoming an important new scientific discipline to meet the current and future challenges that are a product of societal evolution, digital transformation, and resource scarcity. This new discipline is tasked with integrating the consolidated knowledge of the world and making it accessible to individuals at different levels of the decision and policy formulation process. Acknowledging challenges such as invisibility and inequality, it thereby pushes the limits of sustainable development by leveraging digital and social transformations, and helps us to prepare for a better future.”
Since the turn of the century, innovations in technology and greater affordability of digital devices have directed the ‘Industrial Revolution of Data,’ characterized by an explosion in quantity and diversity of real-time digital data in our lives. The amount of data being generated by people and machines alike is growing exponentially with development of smart devices and sensors, and our society is ‘entering an unprecedented period in terms of our ability to learn about human behavior.
To complete this digital transition, cover more complex application sectors, and meet the eminent challenges of urgently required international and cross-disciplinary collaborations; we envisage an additional step that improves transparency, reproducibility and knowledge co-creation. This new methodology is yet to be established in a way that connects globally shared and actionable knowledge from databases to local realities and activities.
This approach requires novel insights, working methodologies, and sustainable systems that continuously evolve in order to meet the dynamic needs of modern society. It should aim at the best possible solutions for sustainable development and human wellbeing, including new methodologies for engagement across geographic scales, spearheading the independence of science from political agendas, and evidence-based proposals for democratizing data. At the same time, the application of this new approach has to be adapted to equally evolving constraints and boundary conditions, such as data ownership and control, data security requirements, feasibility of technical implementations and the increasing autonomy of machines.
BY HAFTU GEBREZGABIHER
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 27 MAY 2022
