Inside FAO's new partnership with the European Space Agency

The Food and Agriculture Organization has partnered with the European Space Agency to use satellite data to help countries meet the Sustainable Development Goals and enhance global food security. The two organizations have signed a memorandum of understanding that will give FAO expanded access to ESA’s Earth observation images that can help the United Nations agency better monitor agri-food systems. They will also exchange expertise and develop new applications that use the data. “We want to share as much as possible — data and information — and the agreement will allow us to build capacities in countries but also especially to bring more effective and high-frequency data they can use to make decisions,” said Maximo Torero, chief economist at FAO. “The more information you have available, the better it is if you have the capacity and the technical ability to assess that information and to use it properly.” FAO, which is the custodian of a “significant” number of SDG indicators, will be able to add its analysis to the raw data to make it more digestible to countries, Torero said. The agency will include information on climate change impacts, as well as other indicators that can aid policymaking in agriculture and food systems to improve SDG outcomes. “You can use remote-sensing information to calculate yields, and that type of information is what countries care about. So our job is to do that. You can also use special data to have an idea of what are the levels of rainfall daily, what are the levels of temperatures, so on and so forth,” Torero said. “We basically convert raw data into indicators and statistics that can be used by countries.” This is not the first time FAO and ESA have partnered. Maurice Borgeaud, head of the Earth observation department at ESA, said the two organizations have been collaborating since 2005. ESA can provide FAO with both the more optical data and synthetic aperture radar, which is sensitive to water and can determine soil moisture levels. In this vein, ESA launched eight satellites in 2014 that cover the globe every five to six days. It has over 100 petabytes of data, with more being gathered all the time, Borgeaud said. Each pixel is 10 meters by 10 meters and can capture information that the naked eye cannot see. While some other sources of satellite data require users to pay, ESA’s data is open to anyone because of an agreement with the European Commission. It is stored in the cloud, and users can access a platform to obtain the information they are most interested in. “With satellites at 10-meters special resolution, this is the best tool that you can have. … Satellites will give you full coverage. If you combine the dates, you get complete crop maps of the different areas,” Borgeaud said. “Even better, you will be able to get some information about if an area is prone to be cultured or not, if it has enough water or not, if there [are] things like deforestation or not. You get this not only at regional scale, but you get this at national and continental scale. This is a game changer here because this data [is] now operational.” While some organizations are able to gather similar types of satellite data, no other entity has been able to operationalize it as extensively as ESA, according to Borgeaud. ESA also partners with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and others to help inform development decision-making. “The agreement [with ESA] will allow us to build capacities in countries but also especially to bring more effective and high-frequency data they can use to make decisions.” --— Maximo Torero, chief economist, FAO Translating the data into something that can be easily viewed and understood — such as a map — is a key goal, Borgeaud said. Satellite information is essential to helping countries with the myriad SDG indicators, which require a seemingly overwhelming amount of data points, he added. Having access to satellite data will allow countries to measure progress and be transparent about where they are succeeding and where they are falling short. Satellite data will be particularly useful for regions of the world that are inaccessible on the ground, Torero said, including places where conflict is affecting agriculture and food supply or remote areas that can be difficult to monitor regularly. ESA typically engages in five-year partnerships, but the agreement with FAO is open-ended, Borgeaud said. ESA expects to extend the time frame if both parties remain interested, he added. The partnership will rely on FAO guiding ESA on the types of national- or regional-level information it needs to help countries assess their SDG progress, along with other indicators. “Using this information about what we call user requirements that come from FAO, we can also much better tailor how we bring the data. Ten-meters special resolution is enough for most environmental application, most agricultural application,” Borgeaud said “If you get data every five days, but maybe for some application we’re talking about moisture in the water cycle, it might be good to get data two or three times a day to see the variation of the water ... in the soil,” he added. “That's maybe a bit for the future,” he continued, “but that’s the level of information we are also very much interested to get from the FAO.”