Online Reporter
Judith Phiri, Business Hub
THE United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was recently recognised for its ongoing efforts to assist Zimbabwe in using satellite-tracked data to enhance crop production monitoring.
On Wednesday, FAO received the SDG Custodian Agency Prize at the seventh annual GEO SDG Awards, which celebrate productivity, innovation, originality and outstanding contributions in the use of Earth Observations, to support sustainable development.
The awards are organised by Earth Observations for the Sustainable Development Goals (EO4SDG), an initiative under the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) — a global partnership comprising more than 100 national governments and numerous participating organisations, including researchers, data providers and private sector players.
GEO co-ordinates a vast “system of systems”, encompassing more than 400 million open-data resources from sources such as Nasa, the European Space Agency and commercial entities.
In an update, FAO said it had supported the Government of Zimbabwe in establishing an Earth Observation-assisted national crop monitoring system, to produce official national agricultural statistics, covering acreage, yield and modelling for droughts and floods.
“This multi-faceted initiative is a model for sustainable Earth Observation integration into national statistical systems, contributing directly to SDG indicators and to the resilience of Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector,” said Dr Lorenzo de Simone, leader of FAO’s Earth Observation for Statistics (FAO-Eostat) project.
The initiative forms part of the broader FAO-Eostat programme, which was launched in 2019 and has since expanded to more than 21 countries.
It assists FAO Member States in utilising advanced technologies, to generate seasonal crop type maps and annual land cover maps that are standardised, accurate, detailed and validated. The initiative also integrates Earth Observation data and tools into the production of land cover and land use statistics.
The Eosta-Zimbabwe project, launched in 2023 with funding from the African Development Bank (AfDB), aims to operationalise the use of Earth Observation data for agricultural monitoring, food security planning, disaster risk reduction and assessing the impacts of climate-related hazards.
