NAIROBI, Kenya, Sept 4 – Governments across Eastern and Southern Africa are under pressure to expand conservation while meeting the global goal of protecting at least 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030.

📻 Breaking It Down

The target is part of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted by 196 countries at the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP15, in 2022. Its 23 targets include a requirement for countries to establish well-connected and effectively managed protected areas.

But meeting the target requires more than designating land and water for conservation. Governments need accurate data showing where ecosystems and threatened species are located, how they are changing and whether protected areas are connected and effectively managed.

That data is often scattered across government agencies, research institutions and conservation organisations, making it difficult to build a consistent picture of biodiversity across borders.

📌 What You Need to Know

The Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) is addressing the challenge through its Regional Centre of Excellence (RCoE) for Biodiversity, Forests and Seascape Ecosystems Management.

The initiative covers 24 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa and provides biodiversity maps, geospatial data, policy support and technical training to help governments plan and manage protected and conserved areas.

A central component is the RCoE Geospatial Platform, a cloud-based system that brings together satellite imagery, biodiversity information, forest data, protected-area maps and other environmental datasets.

The platform is designed to give governments a shared view of their ecosystems and help them identify conservation priorities, monitor environmental changes and generate evidence for biodiversity reporting.

AWS provides the cloud infrastructure supporting the initiative, allowing large volumes of geospatial and Earth observation data to be stored, processed and accessed digitally.

The system also supports the global 30-by-30 agenda, particularly Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal framework, which focuses on effectively conserving and managing at least 30% of the world’s terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030.

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya