The Service for Environmental Resource Management in Africa addresses a wide range of users in Africa, in Europe and elsewhere, typically national, regional and international authorities.
These activities can be seen as the forerunner for the development of the initiative which is currently developed under the aegis of the European Union - African Union partnership.
By using advanced satellite telecommunication infrastructures, such as the EUMETCast system deployed by EUMETSAT, it ensures permanent access to high quality pre-processed data for all African countries, thus facilitating the exploitation of Earth Observation derived data by users with limited technical infrastructure. Similar technology is also being deployed to increase circulation of data and information within Africa.
Products of the service comprise advanced environmental parameters (in particular related to vegetation conditions), processed according to standard procedures, as well as maps such as land cover maps, forest maps, etc.
Special attention is given to the standardization of products in order to ensure cross-border and continental-wide comparability of measurements, which is hardly achieved when the development, implementation and/or exploitation of processing chains is done in a distributed manner.
Environmental parameters are sufficiently generic so as to allow the production of environmental indicators for various thematic area such as land degradation, food security, forestry, land cover, water resource or protected areas.
Final interpretation of the products is ensured by duly mandated technical agencies, service companies and NGOs in Europe as well as in Africa. These prepare bulletins and reports which provide information to decision makers along the course of the season as well as syntheses at annual and multi-annual intervals.
