TUBE-ing with TESEO: Treaty officials assess how space could help

One international treaty official offered to a recent ESA
workshop his motivation to participate in a pilot project
to see how satellite imagery could monitor international
treaties.

There is a perception that the world is losing its quality
wetlands through ecological deterioration,” said Nick
Davidson, Deputy Secretary General for the Ramsar
Convention, a treaty on wetlands conservation. “In
practice, we have little idea of what is really going on.”

The practice and potential of using ESA satellite imagery
in treaty applications was the focus of the third TESEO
Users Brainstorming Event (TUBE 3), held 23 January at
ESA’s ESRIN facility in Frascati, Italy. ESA established
TESEO, for Treaty Enforcement Services using Earth
Observation, two years ago to open a dialogue with the
secretariats and others involved in this international
community to see if, and how, satellite imagery could
be of help.

The international conventions either involved in the
TESEO effort, or exploring the opportunity to work more
closely with ESA in using Earth observation data, cover
a wide range of activities, from monitoring wetlands and
ensuring compliance with Kyoto Protocol emission targets
to combating desertification and preserving World
Heritage sites and protecting gorillas in east and
central Africa. For ESA, TESEO represents a means to
establish a dialogue and determine the requirements
of these important players on the global scene for
practical, useful EO products.

TESEO pilot projects

In the TESEO project, ESA assisted the Ramsar Convention
to see “what’s really going on” by funding a
demonstration project to use radar imagery in creating
maps and studying the changes in test wetlands areas in
Canada, Spain and Senegal. A team of remote sensing
companies headed by Canada’s Atlantis Scientific worked
ecological authorities and research institutes in the
countries in seeing what Earth observation products could
be developed and applied to local user requirements.

For wetlands applications, reported Don Ball, project
manager with Atlantis, satellite data won’t provide
all the answers. “Data must be integrated from several
sources,” he observed. “Including Earth observation,
other geospatial sources, ground observations, chemical
and biological information.”

As a follow-on to the pilot project for the Ramsar
Convention, ESA will fund the Euro 1 million Globwetland
program to produce wetlands inventory maps and digital
elevation models covering both wetlands and surrounding
catchment areas. Users in the project, according to
Olivier Arino, head of the Projects Section within
ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes, will include the
Convention’s national points of contact, wetlands
managers, non-governmental agencies and scientific
researchers engaged in local wetlands studies.

The service definition phase of the program will start
next year, Arino said, with the formulation and
assessment of potential EO products for the effort
scheduled to run through 2005.

Forest inventories for Kyoto

Another project arising from the TESEO initiative is
the Kyoto Inventory, a Euro 1 million commitment to
produce forest inventory and change maps for users
including the Finnish Forest Research Institute, the
Italian Ministry of Environment, the Norwegian Ministry
of Agriculture, and the Swiss Agency for the Environment.

The project will be undertaken to support the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
adopted in 1992 and which, in turn, led to the adoption
five years later of the Kyoto Protocol that broke new
ground with its legally binding restraints on
signatories concerning greenhouse gas emissions.

The UNFCCC secretariat has participated in TESEO for the
past two years to determine whether satellite imagery
could be beneficial to signatories in developing their
Kyoto-mandated national greenhouse inventories, including
details on their forest areas, along with other crop and
agricultural areas, that act as natural “sponges” in
soaking up carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse
gas.

Providing this annual report on national greenhouse
inventories requires accurate data on national and
regional scales concerning changes in land uses and
forest areas, according to Claudio Forner, an official
with the Convention’s methods, inventories and science
programme.

Unfortunately, he added, it’s not an easy requirement
to meet. Of the 41 leading industrialised nations that
comprise the so-called “Annex I” categories of Kyoto
countries, only 27 provided their annual greenhouse
gas inventories in 2001, Forner said.

“Measuring carbon and identifying land-use change on an
annual basis is a very difficult task,” he added. “It’s
simply too costly.”

A lack of information on a supra-national scale, as well
as differences in how land use and forest inventories are
calculated also compound the difficulties in providing a
common national inventory of land use and how it changes.
For instance, only half of Italy’s regions have prepared
estimates on their forest inventories. Of those completed,
said Lucia Perugina from the University of Tuscia, sharp
differences were evident in the datasets and measurements.
“It makes consistency difficult,” she said.

For Forner, addressing these shortcomings in national
and regional reporting makes the use of satellite data
attractive. The benefits to EO data from space include
lower costs, and the prospects of a consistent and
effective standard of reporting the data, the UN
official said.

Despite his optimism, widespread use of satellite
observation to assist in the development, or verify the
accuracy, of national greenhouse inventories will raise
some ticklish political questions concerning the
external monitoring of a country’s sovereign resources
from space.

“The use of satellite data (for monitoring compliance)
has not been considered by my Convention,” he said. “We
still have a long way to go.”

Fighting desertification with better information

While the spread of desertification and the effects
of drought have clear global implications, from
contributing to 50 armed conflicts in 1994 to creating
potentially 50 million environmental refugees by 2010,
Rui Zheng, Programme Officer with the UN Convention to
Combat Desertification (UNCCD), told the workshop.

National and international efforts to combat
desertification have been hampered by the lack of
reliable desert inventories and the capacity in
developing countries to utilise fully the analytical
tools offered by remote sensing technologies, he added.
To help address these shortcomings, Zheng outlined one
of UNCCD’s initiatives to assist countries monitor and
assess desertification and drought, “so as to provide
reliable information to the governments and people, as
well as the international community, for wise solutions.”

Pointing to the China in particular, Zheng noted that
two desertification inventories have been conducted in
the past ten years to identify the dynamic changes of
land and ground vegetation, with a third one currently
underway. Earth observation officials from ESA,
together with representatives from UNCCD, the Chinese
Academy of Forestry and other national research
organisations will meet in Beijing in May to discuss
ways that ESA’s satellite imagery and expertise could
assist in producing desertification maps and other
efforts to combat desertification.

TESEO as a catalyst

TESEO was intended as a catalyst, a way to bring together
separate communities that ordinarily do not talk with
each other. It established a two-year-long forum in
which to define what information shortfalls exists,
define the EO products needed to address them and
establish some short-term study projects to validate
their accuracy.

The effort succeeded at focusing what types of satellite
data are needed and which forms of analysis are useful
in addressing users’ needs for the Conventions that
participated in the process, including Ramsar, UNFCCC,
and UNCCD. Secretariats from other Conventions,
including the World Heritage Convention (WHC) and the
UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), sent
representatives attended the TUBE 3 workshop after
hearing about the program from their colleagues.

Some of the individual pilot projects developed under
TESEO, including the wetlands and the Kyoto inventory,
will continue as independent activities. ESA currently
is assessing whether the TESEO effort will go forward,
according to ESA’s Arino, with a possibility that the
initiative will be folded into the upcoming Global
Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)
initiative sponsored by ESA and the European Commission.

One new project, the €1 TESEO-MATRIX initiative, will
see how the Earth observation requirements from the five
Conventions present at the workshop — UNFCCC, Ramsar,
UNCCD and UNCBD, and WHC — could be pooled to take
advantage of the synergies among the Conventions’
requirements and offer economies of scale for new EO
products and services. For its part, ESA will assist
in the development of common EO products for analysing
land cover and changes, land use and changes, and
digital elevation models.

Representatives from the Conventions are expected to
meet soon to discuss further the MATRIX project and
agree on common test sites suitable for all.

The clear message coming from participants at the TUBE
3 workshop was that the effort to explore how data from
space could help monitor international agreements is
just at the starting point.

“A couple of years ago three or four communities came
together, talking different languages, and we were a
bit baffled how this would all work,” Ramsar’s Davidson
said. “Now we realize we where talking the same thing
and the challenge now is — where does it go from here?”

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