Planet Satellites Bolster FAO's Geospatial Toolkit
PlanetScope image of Cintalapa, Chiapas, Mexico © 2019, Planet Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.
NewsPutting the world's eyes in the skies to work to improve human lives and combat climate change is now easier thanks to an overhaul of the Food and Agriculture Organization's innovative geospatial monitoring system. A new version of SEPAL - System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring - has been developed that enables advanced forest monitoring from mobile phones. It also provides access to high-resolution data updated daily by a fleet of more than 190 satellites run by Planet, an integrated aerospace and data analytics company. The new SEPAL 2.1 platform was launched in New York at the Nature for Climate Hub, an event coinciding with the United Nations Secretary General's Climate Action Summit. The easy-to-use platform offers anyone, anywhere unparalleled access to satellite data and supercomputing power. It paves the way for increasing accuracy and transparency of countries' reporting on national plans to mitigate the effects of climate change and fine-tune land-use policies and their implementation, as well as enhancing collective tenure rights where appropriate. The SEPAL project is funded by Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI). Along with access via mobile phones, the new SEPAL platform also provides access to Planet's daily monitoring data for eight forest countries - Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, and Mozambique. These countries are front-runners to unlock results-based finance for carbon emission reductions through the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility Carbon Fund and BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes. [caption id="attachment_143992" align="aligncenter" width="2442"]
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