Monthly Archives: May 2012

by Jan Cees Venema

Moving Forward with Forest Governance | ETFRN News 53

It is widely acknowledged that improving forest governance is an important prerequisite for sustainable forest management and reducing deforestation and forest degradation.  Making governance work better for people and forests is not an easy
task. Divergent interests, imbalanced power relations and unequal access to information, decision-making, resources and benefits all contribute to this challenge.

The 29 articles in this issue of ETFRN News showcase a rich diversity of examples of how forest governance has been addressed in various settings. The issue brings together experiences from a wide range of forest governance reform initiatives. Some relate to new lessons from well-established approaches to forest governance reform, such as community forestry; others relate to more recently developed initiatives, such as FLEGT. The articles show that international instruments – such as Voluntary Partnership Agreements, forest certification and more recently, REDD+ – are important drivers to address governance in the forest sector. Experiences described in the articles demonstrate that forest governance challenges do not have “one-size-fits-all” solutions. They also show that regardless of the entry point to initiate forest governance reform, there is always a set of underlying inter-related governance issues. Therefore, an integrated process approach is essential to successfully address forest governance reform. The participatory processes of “good” forest governance create the capacity for continuous learning and enhance the ability to adapt to lessons learned. The articles reveal that transparency, communication and access to information, and multi-stakeholder engagement in deliberative processes, particularly the meaningful participation of disadvantaged groups, are essential ingredients in moving forward with forest governance.

ETFRN News No. 53, produced by Tropenbos International, has been made possible by the financial assistance of the European Union, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the European Forest Institute’s EU FLEGT Facility, the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Switzerland, and the Government of the Netherlands.

The full issue or each article individually can be downloaded from the ETFRN-website, or from the Tropenbos-website.

For more information contact: Herman Savenije, Tropenbos International, tel: +31 317 481423 web: www.tropenbos.org

Making knowledge work for forests and people

by Jan Cees Venema

CLEARSITE Projects from CoE4UNSDI | SDI Magazine

The Centre of Excellence for UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (CoE4UNSDI) is undertaking a set of three projects, collectively called ‘ClearSite’. Find out more.

Geospatial data is any data which has embedded within it a location ‘tag’. Examples of geospatial data are post codes, words which refer to a location (e.g. Sudan), maps, satellite or aerial images, videos, pictures, spreadsheets with location tags and navigation system data logs.

Globally, the UN, partner agencies, member states and other relevant institutions are becoming increasingly involved in a host of vital services from disaster response and peacekeeping to environmental protection and economic development. In doing so, they produce geospatial data they need to share to raise operational effectiveness and coordinate efforts.

The global community of citizens is also becoming an increasingly valuable resource with the emergence of “crowd sourcing” of voluntarily contributed geospatial information.

Currently within the UN there is little capacity to leverage an individual organization’s investment in geospatial data obtained from a variety of sources for the benefit of all stakeholders. The Centre of Excellence for UN Spatial Data Infrastructure first projects will improve on this situation, in close collaboration with stakeholders, by using leading information and communications technology solutions.

The Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) of the UN Secretariat in New York has established the Centre of Excellence for UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (CoE4UNSDI) under the strategic direction of the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) Steering Committee of the United Nations Geographic Information Working Group (UNGIWG). OICT, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Office in Geneva, Information and Communications Technology Service (UNOG/ICTS) have formed an inter-agency partnership to undertake an initial set of three CoE4UNSDI projects, collectively called ClearSite, as a UN System-wide harmonization initiative in reference to the UN ICT Strategy endorsed by the General Assembly in 2010 (Section 29 (A/64/6)).

ClearSite will provide the UN and its partners with a Web-based toolset to retrieve, combine and visualize the information needed to support their operations’ decision-making processes. This will create many new possibilities for the UN to “deliver as one” and to become more efficient and effective. ClearSite will directly benefit work being strategically accomplished in primary areas of operation and interest to the UN and its partners, such as Peace and Security, Social Protection, Food Security, Environment and Sustainable Development, Human Rights and Disaster Management. This harmonization initiative will also support and enhance initiatives in the fields of early intervention, conflict prevention, crisis response and management and strategic planning.

Major Project Stakeholders

Australia and the Federal Republic of Germany are the Founding Members of the CoE4UNSDI as the initial contributors to the CoE4UNSDI Trust Fund.

As a UN System-wide initiative, ClearSite is the result of a consultative process with extensive user input from key UN organizations. To promulgate existing international standards and to ensure broad adoption of its tools and guidelines, ClearSite partners are seeking to align with the activities of global and regional entities such as the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association, the Group on Earth Observation/Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEO/GEOSS), the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE), the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) as well as leading geospatial information technology companies.

The UN Secretary-General’s Global Pulse Project, with its objective of supporting social protection policy formulations at Pulse Labs around the world (such as the ones being established in Indonesia and Uganda), is providing initial use cases. UN Environment Programme (UNEP) is another organization aligning its infrastructure development efforts with ClearSite. The Common and Fundamental Operational Datasets initiative of the humanitarian community lead by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Department of Safety and Security (DSS) of the UN Secretariat are also early beneficiaries.

The ClearSite Projects

ClearSite projects are funded through voluntary contributions of UN Member States, technology companies, international organizations, foundations and industry associations to a Trust Fund established at the UN Secretariat.

The three ClearSite projects to be completed within 3 years are:

• Standards and Best Practices for Provisioning of Core Geospatial Datasets (OICT)
• Geospatial Data Warehouse (FAO)
• Visualization Facility (UNOG/ICTS)

Standards and Best Practices for Provisioning of Core Geospatial Datasets

The UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) Gazetteer Framework will deliver an infrastructure to enable access, management and cross-referencing of gazetteers (directories of place names), a core geospatial dataset of critical importance. The Framework will also establish a method for validating and incorporating crowd-sourced information to enhance authoritative source gazetteers.

Geospatial Data Warehouse

The Geospatial Data Warehouse will establish strong connections between the existing geospatial information systems of UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes. It will also build new connections, using widely available software and common, standardized data-sharing practices. Users will be able to easily locate, access and re-use UN geospatial content such as maps, Geographic Information System data, remote sensing imagery and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data logs.

Visualization Facility

Using the authoritative directory of place names and the aggregated geographic data of various UN organizations, the visualization component of the UNSDI project will provide a holistic, common view of that information in a consumable and visually intuitive manner. The base layer of authoritative maps will include overlays of thematic information so that the various mandated tasks being undertaken by the UN and partner organizations can be viewed through the standard facility, or, if necessary, by the UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes as well as partners through their facilities.

via SDI Magazine (Roger Longhorn)..

by Jan Cees Venema

Data portal aims to help unlock food production bottlenecks

FAO and IIASA launch online Global Agro-ecological Zones Interactive Data Portal

25 May 2012, Rome – A new online data portal developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) aims to help unlock the planet’s potential to feed a rapidly growing population.

The Global Agro-ecological Zones (GAEZ) Portal developed by FAO and IIASA is a planning tool designed to help to identify areas for   increased global food production while maintaining natural resources base and facing the challenge of climate change. According to FAO estimates, world food production needs to increase 60 percent by 2050 to feed a world population expected to surpass 9 billion people.

Much of the necessary growth will need to be achieved by increasing the amount of food produced on existing agricultural land, as most of the world’s best farmland is already being used.

Water scarcity is another limiting factor for area expansion. And intensification of food production will occur within a changing climate, requiring adaptation and mitigation and will have to be sustainable to safeguard future use of the resources.

A critical first step in sustainably intensifying food production is to close the “yield gaps” that continue to plague the farming sector in many parts of the world.

“GAEZ can help identify where there are ‘bridgeable yield gaps’ and what causes them, allowing for the formulation of appropriate investment policies and the provision of appropriate support to farmers to help them produce more food” says Parviz Koohafkan, Director of FAO’s Land and Water Division.

The term “yield gap” refers to the difference between how much food a farm actually produces and how much food it would be capable of producing if appropriate practices, inputs, technologies and knowledge were applied.

Such gaps can be quite wide: for example, a recent FAO study found that in some rural areas of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, crop production by small farmers, especially for cereals, can run as low as low as just 30-40 percent of potential.

The world region with the highest yield gaps is sub-Saharan Africa. Cereal yields in Africa as a whole have long hovered around 1.2 tons per hectare, compared to an average yield of some 3 tons per hectare in the developing world as a whole.

A wellspring of data, online

A new online data portal developed by FAO and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) seeks to enhance planners’ and decision makers’ capacity to estimate agricultural production potentials and variability under different environmental and management scenarios, including climatic conditions, management regimes, water availability and levels of inputs.

The portal — the Global Agro-Ecological Zones Interactive Data Access Facilities — offers access to what IIASA Director/CEO Pavel Kabat calls “the most ambitious global agro-resources assessment ever conducted”. “The objective was to assemble a vast wealth of data information and make this available in a way that is most accessible to land use planners and specialists to help close yield gaps and promote the sustainable intensification of agricultural production,” Kabat says.

At the heart of the GAEZ system is an extensive inventory of the world’s agricultural resources and related data, organized around five thematic areas:

  • Land and water resources, including multiple spatial layers of climate, soil, terrain, land cover, irrigation potentials, protected areas, population density, livestock density and accessibility, etc.
  • Agro-climatic resources,providing major climatic indicators important for assessing crop growth, development and yield formation. GAEZ’s spatial agro-climatic inventories of the prevailing thermal and moisture regimes and growing periods are used for estimating crop suitability and potential yields.
  • Agricultural suitability and potential yields, including information on yield constraints, crop calendars, and production potential estimates for 11 major crop groups, 49 major crops and 92 crop types. Productivity estimates are made for rain-fed farming, rain-fed farming with water conservation and gravity, sprinkler and drip irrigation systems.
  • Actual yields and production, consisting of spatially explicit crop production estimates including crop harvested area, yield and production figures for 23 major commodities.
  • Yield and production gaps, which provide important information on locations with differences between actual achieved and potential attainable yield and production under different management scenarios.

Being geo-referenced, GAEZ allows a user to identify agricultural zones across the globe that share similar ecological conditions and are producing the same crops using the same kinds of production system, but which do not have the same production levels. This means the reasons underlying lower production – inadequate or inappropriate agricultural practices, policies, institutions, support services and access to markets. – can be pinpointed and dealt with. The potential exists to expand food production efficiently while limiting impacts on other ecosystem values.

In particular, given the scarcity of suitable resources in some regions, future demand and expected negative impacts of climate change, GAEZ would allow users to evaluate options for more widespread adoption of sustainable land and water management practices in agricultural systems at risk, recently highlighted in FAO’s report The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.

These systems at risk face the threat of progressive breakdown of their productive capacity. They warrant priority attention for remedial action simply because there are no substitutes.

Alexander Mueller, Assistant Director General of the FAO Natural Resources Management and Environment Department, which developed GAEZ in collaboration with IIASA, concludes: “the new GAEZ data portal will provide a global tool to manage natural resources for food and agriculture in a more sustainable way. Natural resources are the basis for food production. In a world already facing today water scarcity and land degradation in many areas and coping with increasing risks from climate change, this is the only way to achieve food security.”

[from: FAO Media Center]

by Jan Cees Venema

Ghanaian woman receives Geospatial World Leadership Award

Ms Aida Opoku-Mensah, a Ghanaian national has been awarded with the ‘Geospatial World Leadership Award for Making a Difference’.

Ms Opoku-Mensah, who is also the Director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s (ECA) ICT, Science Technology Division, received the award during the 2012 Geospatial World Forum held in Amsterdam April 24, 2012.

According to a statement issued by the ECA, the citation for Ms Opoku-Mensah’s award read; she has “been a great advocate of geospatial technology in Africa and has provided leadership to several very valuable programmes and initiatives leading to capacity development of African countries with reference to geospatial competence and infrastructure, including promoting the UN GGIM initiative in Africa”.

Furthermore, the citation stated “her pro-active engagement with the geospatial community including academic institutions, policy makers, mapping agencies, the geospatial industry and end users has paved way for meaningful collaboration and cooperation amongst them for overall development of the continent”.

An elated Ms Opoku-Mensah accepting the award, said she was humbled by the recognition from the global geospatial community and stressed that she was only implementing the work programme of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, “which happens to be one of the few institutions that sees the strategic importance of geospatial technology for sustainable development, whether it’s in mining, natural resource management, monitoring elections, infrastructure development or measuring and managing the economy”.

The award is given to persons who have made significant contributions towards development of geographic information science, technology, products, applications, capacity development and in turn helped towards the growth of the geospatial industry as well as making geographic information a public commodity.