Agreement signed between FAO and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has recently signed an agreement with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that will strengthen the support to countries for improved land-use and land-use change monitoring and decision making.

The three year agreement signed on the 23rd of January 2020 will benefit, among other countries, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and will bolster the scale and scope of FAO’s geospatial monitoring toolkit such as SEPAL – the System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring and the Global Forest Resources Assessment Remote Sensing Survey.

These powerful data, available for the first time, will allow governments to monitor threats to their forests and peatlands more closely with L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (a technology enabling to see the Earth surface through clouds and night sky) and make informed decisions as well as to tap funding to protect ecosystems.

Read more:

• FAO teams up with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency: http://www.fao.org/asiapacific/news/detail-events/ar/c/1258374/
• Agreement on Data Utilization of Earth Observation Satellite with FAO: https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2020/01/20200123-1_e.html
• Forest monitoring gets a boost from Japanese space agency data: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-forests-data-trfn/forest-monitoring-gets-a-boost-from-japanese-space-agency-data-idUSKBN1ZM2WN