New special issue in Surveys in Geophysics (partial Open Access) >>
The contribution of Africa to global greenhouse gas emissions is among the least important, yet Africa’s “key development sectors have already experienced widespread losses and damages attributable to anthropogenic climate change, including biodiversity loss, water shortages, reduced food production, loss of lives and reduced economic growth” (IPCC, 2022). Consequently, a prioritized task for Africa is to improve climate resilience in order to achieve sustainable and equitable development and to guarantee the quality of life for its population. In that context, in January 2021 the International Space Science Institute (ISSI, Bern) organized a workshop on “Global Change in Africa”. The main objective of the workshop was to investigate the benefits of using Earth Observation (EO) data to monitor global environmental changes due to natural phenomena and anthropogenic forcing factors over the African continent and to highlight a number of applications of high societal relevance. Another objective was to discuss the opportunities for collaborations between the international transdisciplinary scientific community and local research institutes as well as with African national and intergovernmental agencies. The workshop, in hybrid form due to the COVID-19 epidemic, gathered 31 participants from 11 different countries, including 6 participants from Africa.
This special issue will be reprinted as as the Volume 86 in the Space Science Series of ISSI and is edited by Anny Cazenave, David Baratoux, Teodolina Lopez, Jean Kan Kouamé, Jérôme Benveniste and Lorena Moreira.