Back to COP27: SCO overview

Published on 24/11/2022

Now well established in the fight against climate change, SCO attended COP27, held in Sharm El Sheik (Egypt) from November 7 to 18, 2022. Participating in two round tables, it also strengthened its partnership with UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme.

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As a spokesperson for African countries, which are severely affected by climate change, Egypt hosted COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, seen here by Sentinel-2 satellite. © contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The annual conference that mobilizes world leaders to fight climate change, the 27th COP was hosted by Egypt from November 7 to 18, 2022. It ends with the creation of a fund to compensate for the climate damage that developing countries are already suffering. Let's bet that the SCO, which is particularly mobilized in favor of these vulnerable territories, will find an important echo in this respect, especially for its ability to develop early warning systems.

As it has every year since its inception in 2019, SCO went to the COP to federate new countries to its action and highlight the key role of satellites in observing the impacts of climate change and, more broadly, of anthropogenic changes. But let's start with a key event: SCO's collaboration with UNEP.

UNEP confirms its commitment to SCO and welcomes it in its World Environment Situation Room

On Tuesday, November 15, 2022, the United Nations Environment Programme signed the SCO International Charter, which came into force on September 1st. This signature concretizes the collaboration of the SCO with the WESR, World Environment Situation Room, which gathers environmental studies and data that the SCO will regularly add to.

This translates into a page entirely dedicated to the SCO in WESR, in the Partners section, as well as the integration of the TropiSCO project's tropical deforestation monitoring data into MapX, an online, open source geospatial platform for global environmental data management. This platform is developed by UNEP/GRID-Geneva, which is part of UNEP's Division of Science and the UNEP global group of environmental information centers, known as the Global Resource Information Database (GRID) network. Many thanks to all the teams who, since June 2022, have been working together to achieve these results.

TropiSCO's near real-time deforestation monitoring data in the MapX environment. For now, these data concern the seven territories monitored by TropiSCO, which is working to automate its monitoring over the entire tropical terrestrial zone. ©MapX

SCO Roundtables

In the Mediterranean Pavilion, SCO, along with its partner GEO (Group on Earth Observations), participated in a first round table on the contribution of machine learning. It presented the technological core of SCO, which "shapes" spatial data in order to develop algorithms capable of bringing out indicators, or even combinations of indicators, to reveal certain phenomena. To ensure that the results of this work and analysis are useful and used, SCO projects systematically develop a simple and user-friendly interface. Finally, the Mediterranean Arc being the host of this meeting, SCO took the example of the AIonWetlands project. Indeed, coupling Earth Observation data with AI-based analysis approaches, the latter aims to strengthen the monitoring of Mediterranean wetlands to promote their conservation and restoration.

Then the SCO intervened on the French Pavilion, on the occasion of the second ministerial meeting of the Tropical Forest Conservation Alliance. This was an opportunity to present the TropiSCO platform, the flagship project mentioned above, which contributes to the international effort of deforestation warning systems. Thanks to Sentinel-1 radar images, TropiSCO can monitor deforestation in the tropical zone in "real time" and produce maps and deforestation measurements in less than a week.